Making the instructional curriculum as an interactive, contextualized process: case studies of seven ESOL teachers

This article reports on data from interpretive case studies of seven well-qualified, experienced teachers of adult ESOL, collected through weekly interviews and analysis of documents and materials produced over the duration of a whole course for each teacher. Teachers' knowledge and experience was apparent in their ability to conceptualize and plan globally in the pre-course phase, to establish rapport and diagnose learners' developmental priorities as soon as teaching began, and to weave a coherent instructional curriculum(1) from a variety of components and dimensions of conceptual content according to the developmental needs, wishes and responses of learners, syllabus pre-specifications, constraints of the teaching context and their own personal theories of best practice. The study draws attention to a number of differences between the curriculum making practices of experienced teachers and the content of language teacher education texts with regard to pre-course planning procedures and the separation of syllabus and methodology. Dissonances were also apparent between conventional descriptions of process-product orientations and strong-weak versions of communicative language teaching on the one hand, and the blended, non-standard approaches apparent in the courses in this study. The article identifies curriculum making principles and practices that were common to a number of teachers as a contribution to practice-based disciplinary knowledge and second language teacher education literature.