Analysis of Pakistan’s National Curriculum for English: A Learner-Centered Ideology Perspective

Abstract

Curriculum is said to be the blueprint that lays down not only educational goals but also the ways to attain those goals. The blueprint is highly ideologically influenced and this is reflected in the goals set by the developers of the curriculum. The National Curriculum for English published in Pakistan in 2006 is considered an updated document with contribution from all key stakeholders; however, the literature on curriculum studies lacks any study that has been carried out to understand its ideological nature. Hence, the purpose of this study is to analyze the National English Curriculum from a learner-centered ideological perspective. Use qualitative methods to close reading of the document was done to carefully find useful excerpts of the text and label according to the purpose of the study. The results show that the curriculum follows the learner-centered ideology in terms of subject matter, content knowledge, teaching process and the role of students and teachers. However, in terms of assessment, it follows a traditional approach. The study concluded that the assessment part of the curriculum needs to follow a more formative and innovative assessment approach to make the document more learner-centric in nature. Moreover, the study puts forward a few recommendations with respect to the training of teachers, the provision of guidance strategies for teachers, and the allocation of more proportions for formative assessments.

Content Analysis of National Curriculum Development Approach of Chemistry Grade Ix- X in Pakistan

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Discourse-Based Teaching in English Language Teaching at Islamic Universities in Borneo: A Critical Discourse Analysis Perspective

“…Some studies include:: rhetoric and ideology in the writing class (Berlin, 1988;Cabalin et al, 2019;Kim, 2017), native speaker ideology (Kim, 2017), and ideology in language learning (De Costa, 2016). Meanwhile, there are also studies related to the theme of ideology in English language learning classrooms (Bhowmik, 2016;Chvala, 2020;Habib et al, 2017;Hairston, 1992 Some researchers specifically study the issue of ideology in English language learning classrooms related to certain themes, including ELT and policy (Hahn, 2018;Iipinge, 2018;Miranda & Valencia Giraldo, 2019;Thomas, 2017;Windle, 2017), ELT and curriculum (Harb, 2017;Siddiqui, 2020), ELT and gender (Brodin, 2017;Emilia et al, 2017;Hass, 2017;Rahayu, 2017), ELT and multiculturalism (Garza & Crawford, 2005), and ELT and race (Grinage, 2019).…”