The unbearable lightness of the curriculum: what drives the assessment practices of a teacher of English as a Foreign Language in a Chinese secondary school?

Abstract

The Chinese authorities have spelt out their educational vision in a series of documents and provided explicit guidelines in terms of curriculum and assessment. How are these policy visions and curriculum standards translated into the classroom practices of the teacher? This paper tries to answer this question by looking into one teacher’s instruction and assessment practices in one unit of teaching. Interviews of an experienced teacher and video recordings of one unit of her teaching at a school in Beijing provide insights into the dynamics of classroom teaching and assessment in relation to curriculum and textbooks in the Chinese context. Findings suggest that textbooks provide the backbone of the what; teaching experience guides the how; high-stakes examinations define the what and the how; and curriculum standards become the garnish only. Discussion emphasises the importance of communication in curriculum implementation. Teacher assessment literacy is seen as another crucial factor in assessment reform.

Keywords:

• assessment practices
• curriculum implementation
• China

Notes

1. The original version is in Chinese. These eight points are the author’s translations.

2. Since this version of the curriculum grew out of the 2001 version for both compulsory education and senior secondary schools (Ministry of Education China, 2001), Point 6 focuses on primary schools. The most recent curriculum for compulsory education (excluding senior secondary schools) has just been released (Ministry of Education China, 2011). This article still takes the 2003 version as the latest document, because this is the most recent version for senior secondary schools.

3. Since 2004, a number of provinces and municipal cities (including Beijing) have been administering their own versions of a test for university entry, in addition to the NMET that is still used in the majority of provinces. They are all referred to as ‘gao kao’ in Chinese, but I will call them ‘university entrance examinations’, UEE for short, throughout this article.

4. Transcription legends for this article: I = Interviewer; T = Teacher; S = Student.

5. I am hopeful more than at any other time before that some substantial changes are in the pipeline for reconfiguring the Chinese assessment system. For the first time, a Steering Committee for National Educational Assessment of 26 experts was formally set- up on 19 July 2012, with the Minister of Education, Yuan Guiren himself heading the committee, and State Councillor Liu Yandong overseeing its work (Liu, 2012).