This study investigated how English teachers in Vietnam exercise their agency in the implementation of the new multiple textbooks policy, introduced under the 2018 curriculum, from the ecological perspective. The study employed a case study methodology to gain in-depth insights into the perceptions and practices of two upper secondary school…

Framed in teacher research, this article examines on how a group of 220 preservice language teachers' understandings of teacher agency evolved in a course on second language teaching curriculum. The participants were enrolled on a master's program on teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL), and data were gathered through course…

Teacher agency in Vietnam is an under-researched area, to the cost of recognising teacher professionalism, the role of teachers in curriculum reform and, consequently, the success of important curriculum improvements. This paper reports on a multiple-case study investigating teacher agency in primary schools implementing the national EFL…

Teachers receive increasing attention as change agents within education reform policy discourses positioning their professionalism, identity, and agency as critical to implementation of reforms. However, identities either claimed by teachers or assigned by reform policies involve serious (re)negotiations on the part of teachers as they make…

This case study reports how three high-school teachers from two state schools in Colombia enacted the National English Suggested Curriculum by the Ministry of Education. The teachers' trajectories of action were analyzed through semi-structured interviews, teachers' narratives, and lesson observations. Using the ecological model of agency as a…

Teachers' professional identity is multifaceted and fluctuating, and while it is formally developed during initial teacher preparation, it is influenced by experiences before and beyond teaching programmes. The aim of this paper is to investigate the extent to which a module on language curriculum development may influence the professional…

Curriculum material use is an agentive, reciprocal and innovative practice, involving multiple stakeholders such as teacher, students and assessments that mutually shape one another. While it is generally acknowledged that teachers' knowledge and skills deeply shape the way they use materials, little is known about how material use can possibly…

This study examined the understandings and exercise of teacher autonomy and aimed to uncover the deep structure that might shape these in the EFL context in Turkey. The study relied on a range of data sources including documents, a questionnaire, observations and interviews with Turkish teachers of English, headteachers and educational…

Reported in this paper is an ethnographic study in a Beijing senior high school that aims to examine the pedagogical lived experiences of Chinese EFL teachers against the backdrop of the nation's mandated curriculum change. The lived experiences of teachers gleaned from this study speak to the complexity and difficulty of pedagogical change at the…

In 2015, then-Higher Education Minister Rodolfo Alarcon said in response to many Cubans' inability to communicate in the international language, English fluency would be required by students as a university exit requirement ("Mastering English," 2015).The purpose of this interpretive qualitative study was to understand the experiences of…

This article reflects on the epistemological steamrolling that the 2021 Ofsted Curriculum Research Review (OCRR) accomplishes: in part, by the positioning of the problem and solution through highly selective cherry-picking (omitting key causal factors); in part, through the discursive move of acknowledging complexity before offering simple and…

This paper seeks to recommend a democratic model to curriculum development in Algeria that involves teachers by combining top-down government directives with bottom-up teachers-based creativities. More explicitly, the paper aims at exploring and identifying perceptions of secondary school EFL teachers' on their implementation of 2003 curriculum…

Recent scholarship in professional development (PD) has advocated for solid conceptual frameworks and understanding of the complex process involved in how language educators may continue to develop and fulfil the current challenging teaching demands. However, specific relationships underlying departmental cultures and how language educators relate…

The #RhodesMustFall (RMF) protests at South African universities (2015--2018) were the publicly visible manifestation of deep epistemic problems in the higher education (HE) sector, particularly around questions of whose knowledges are validated and whether these are reflective of students' lived realities. This exploratory research attempted a…

This article describes part of a larger action research study carried out in 2018 with secondary school learners and teachers of English in southern Argentina. The study was guided by two aims: (1) improving English language learner motivation, and (2) transforming the English as a foreign language (EFL) curriculum through teacher and learner…