SLTC Lecture 4 (2025)

Week 4

Who enacts the TESOL curriculum?

Dr. Dario Luis banegas

Index

teachers

Learners

Teacher PREPARATION

On learners' age learner agency

teacher AGENCY

The learner-centred curriculum (Nunan, 1988)

• Spiralling curriculum (Dewey, 2008)
• Education: learners expanding their experiences and family cultures at school
• Your visualisation (time to show!)

• Learners, motivation & the spiralling curriculum (Banegas & Lowe, 2021)

Translating the spiralling curriculum into practice

• Design a curriculum which is based on current theories and understanding of how learners learn.

• Develop a curriculum or syllabus which is topic-based; the topics should ideally come from a needs analysis exercise about learners’ interests.

• Design activities which are learning- as well as learner-centred, i.e. give learners agency and participation about how the activities could be completed.

• Include end-of-unit or end-of-course student-led projects in which they set out what they would like to investigate (e.g. local activists in their town, water preservation) using English.

(Banegas, forthcoming)

Why do education systems seem to be fixated with ...?

On learners' age

Organisation of schooling according to the age-class tandem linked to development psychology and stages of cognitive development (e.g., Ludlow & Gutierrez, 2014; Pillemer & White, 2005).

+info

Is earlier the better?

Critical Period Hypothesis

Spada (2015)

Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: naturalistic > formal ed sets

Younger learners may not outperform older ones

On teachers

Who are you?

Teacher preparation & PD

Initial/pre-service language teacher education programme

Master's in TESOL

Short courses (CPD)

PD & curriculum

'Course on language curriculum development & student-teachers' identity

(Banegas, 2023)

Teacher agency

Teacher agency: perspectives (Kayi-Aydar, 2019)

social-cognitive perspective: agency as a result of internal cognitive processes that influence a person’s ability to act intentionally

ecological perspective: agency as a phenomenon transactionally negotiated between individual capacities and contextual, historical, & material conditions.

sociocultural perspective: agency as mediated capacity to act

"agency refers to what teachers decide to do or not do, and these agentic moves are informed by past (iterational) experiences, future-oriented actions and selves (projective)."

(Banegas et al., 2024, p. 275)

Agency & curriculum

'Student-teachers' understanding of teacher agency through SLTC

(Banegas et al., 2024)

Agencies in synergy

see

see

Thank you!

Banegas, D. L. (forthcoming). Designing curriculum for TESOL: Key concepts and international practices. Bloomsbury.Banegas, D. L. (2022). Four spheres of student-teachers’ professional identity formation through learning about curriculum development. Journal of Education for Teaching, 49(3), 370–383. https://doi.org/10.1080/02607476.2022.2105644 Banegas, D. L., Budzenski, M., & Yang, F. (2024). Enhancing pre-service teachers’ projective agency for diverse and multilingual classrooms through a course on curriculum development. International Multilingual Research Journal, 18(3), 274–289. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2024.2318967 Banegas, D. L., & Lowe, R. (2021). Creative writing for publication: An action research study of motivation, engagement, and language development in Argentinian secondary schools. Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 11(3), 401–421. https://doi.org/10.14746/ssllt.2021.11.3.5 Caruso, M. (2023). The coming of ‘age’: Educational and bureaucratic dimensions of the classification of children in elementary schools (Western Europe, 19th century). European Educational Research Journal, 22(3), 394-412. https://doi.org/10.1177/14749041211062017 Dewey, J. (2008/1902). The child and the curriculum. In J. A. Boydston (Ed.), The middle works of John Dewey, Vol. 2 (pp. 271–292). Southern Illinois University Press. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2019a). Language teacher agency: Major theoretical considerations, conceptualizations and methodological choices. In H. X. G. Kayi-Aydar, E. R. Miller, M. Varghese, & G. Vitanova (Eds.), Theorizing and analyzing language teacher agency (pp. 10–21). Multilingual Matters. Ludlow, A., & Gutierrez, R. (2014). Developmental psychology. Bloomsbury. Pillemer, D. B., & White, S. H. (Eds.). (2005). Developmental psychology and social change: Research, history, and policy. Cambridge University Press. Spada, N. (2015). SLA research and L2 pedagogy: Misapplications and questions of relevance. Language Teaching, 48(1), 69–81. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026144481200050X Tao, J., & Gao, X. (2021). Language teacher agency. Cambridge University Press.

References

Students' & teachers' agentic moves in harmony

- Age grading or grouping > governments’ and bureaucrats’ understanding of schooling as a social system through which governmentality must be exercised.- Governing of entire social groups > social promotion (Caruso, 2023)

(Tao & Gao, 2021)

"Your child must start full-time education once they reach compulsory school age. This is on 31 December, 31 March or 31 August following their fifth birthday - whichever comes first. If your child’s fifth birthday is on one of those dates then they reach compulsory school age on that date. For example, if your child reaches compulsory school age on 31 March, they must start full-time education at the beginning of the next term (summer term that year)." (UK Government, 2024)