Formulating ‘principles of procedure’ for the foreign language classroom: a framework for process model language curricula

Abstract

This article aims to apply Stenhouse’s process model of curriculum to foreign language (FL) education, a model which is characterized by enacting principles of procedure which are specific to the discipline which the school subject belongs to. Rather than to replace or dissolve current approaches to FL teaching and curriculum development, this article seeks to improve and enrich communicative and task-based orientations with an additional criterion for assessing the educational worth of the tasks through which these orientations are developed. Unlike the objectives and competences models, principles of procedure provide an intrinsic justification of school curriculum by enacting the epistemological structure of any given area of knowledge in the educational process. Accordingly, the article will first justify the need to come up with a process model of curriculum for FL education which is built around such principles; then, it will formulate a basic framework that reflects the logical structure, concepts and epistemological perspectives of the language studies, as a first step to allowing these to enter the FL classroom and orient the teaching conducted in it; finally, it will present three tasks whose design was inspired by the abovementioned framework, and which were put into practice with Primary education English as a Foreign Language learners during the 2013–2014 and 2014–2015 academic years.

Keywords:

• Process model curriculum
• principles of procedure
• foreign language education
• epistemology
• pedagogy

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Editor and the anonymous reviewers of Journal of Curriculum Studies for helpful suggestions concerning the early versions of the manuscript.

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport of the Generalitat Valenciana (Spain) [grant number GV/2015/050]; Vicerrectorat de Polítiques de Formació i Qualitat Educativa of the Universitat de València (Spain)[grant number UV-SFPIE_RMD15–314975].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Conselleria d’Educació, Cultura i Esport of the Generalitat Valenciana (Spain) [grant number GV/2015/050]; Vicerrectorat de Polítiques de Formació i Qualitat Educativa of the Universitat de València (Spain)[grant number UV-SFPIE_RMD15–314975].