Article: "Between Theory and Practice: Unpacking Turkey’s 4th Grade English Curriculum"

Between Theory and Practice: Unpacking Turkey’s 4th Grade English Curriculum

Department of English Language Teaching, Hasan Ali Yücel Faculty of Education, Istanbul University - Cerrahpaşa

Ali Vehbi Yalınç

Ünal Parlak

31.05.2021

Abstract:

This report examines the last update (2018) of 4th grade curriculum of the Republic of Turkey. The components of the aforementioned curriculum that were taken into consideration are goals, curriculum model and design, wave of language curriculum, guiding principles, objectives, outcomes, content selection, format and presentation, assessment and monitoring, teaching techniques, the factors that are considered in the examination of this curriculum include environmental factors, students’ needs, teacher qualifications and the compatibility of the curriculum and Common European Framework (CEFR).

Keywords:

4th Grade Curriculum, Layers of Necessity Model, Communicative Wave, Constructivist Approach, CEFR, 4 Main Skills of Language, Total Physical Response (TPR), Top-Down Process.

Overview of the 4th Grade English Curriculum:

Elementary school English curriculum is designed by a group of people which includes Dr. Hüseyin Korkut, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Erkan Dinç, Dr. Hasan Kavgacı, Dr. Mehmet Sürmeli, Dr. Hüseyin Şirin, Kamil Yeşil, as normal council members and Alpaslan Durmuş as council president. A curriculum needs to be changed and developed according to the needs of skills that students need in the specific era, which includes technological and educational knowledge and it is changed according to the feedback that is given by students, their parents and teachers. One more rational idea is the implementing of English to 2nd and 3rd grade curriculum to enlarge the English learning duration to 7 years in elementary schools. Each curriculum can be designed in different design methods, for instance, The Republic of Turkey follows the method of “Layers of Necessity Model.” This method sees education as a layered model, in which the later step follows and reinforces the prior step. Until the students are good enough for the current teaching period and needs are fulfilled, students continuously take input from their teachers according to curriculum. Turkish curriculum is also a linear curriculum, which is a modal following its old steps and build a solid foundation in order to be more consistent. A curriculum must be designed considering some external factors, for instance, elementary school curriculum addressed the factors of crowded class population and performance of teachers by creating time efficient and less effort consuming activities which will ease the processes of teaching, evaluation and monitoring for teachers. These activities will require much less budget than the other extravagant and flashy activities, so the budget factor of the country is also addressed.

The curriculum we are analysing is 4th grade English and it differs from the other English curriculums in different ways. One example can be curriculum waves. Communicative Wave (functionalism) seems to have been followed out. Because of the students’ inadequacy in communication, 4th grade curriculum follows the Communicative Wave which emphasizes on four main skills of language and development of communicative competence. English curriculum is designed according to CEFR and 4th grade is a continuation of A1 in it. 4th grade students are exposed to making their own dictionaries, posters, puppets, etc. because of the main principle “Constructivist Approach” that influences the curriculum, which is a student-based approach to help students learn by experiencing different tasks. Total Physical Response (TPR) method, which is a method built around the coordination of speech and action which uses physical activities in teaching, is the general teaching technique that is used because of the age range and English level of the students. Lastly, top-down process is followed to make students combine their past and new experiences to create new forms.

4th grade curriculum follows an activation task based approach to help students facilitate a better learning process, which goes parallel with constructivist approach. The guiding values that must be planted in the students are justice, friendship, honesty, responsibility, self-control, patience, respect, love, patriotism and altruism. Ministry of Education contacts with students and also their parents via questionnaires, interviews and previous test performances. By using these means of communication, government can identify the students’ needs. These needs include knowledge of everyday life in English, basic communication skills and real-world usage of them. For the teacher qualification part, the curriculum does not state them explicitly but when you read between the lines, the hidden teacher qualifications are: teachers should be attentive of its students’ age, field of interests, needs, etc. / teachers should incorporate real life events into class tasks / teachers should be able to design in-class materials according to what curriculum suggests / teachers should be able to adapt creative outputs such as songs, pictures and paintings into classroom activities / teachers should have a broad array of different teaching styles and strategies / teachers should not immediately correct their students’ errors.

By the end of this curriculum, it guarantees the learners to achieve specific goals such as beneficial speaking and listening skills, the ability to cope with everyday life, and to learn the pronunciation correctly as they finish. 4th grade curriculum offers a really beneficial sum of skills, the students who finished this grade can ask for permission, make simple requests, give orders, learn numbers from 1 to 50, identify the country and nationality of a person, give locations and directions, express abilities, talk about possessions, express what they like and what they do not, ask simple questions, ask for clarification, talk about daily routine, identify what time and day is it, give simple instructions, describe the physical appearance, likes and abilities of a person, describe natural phenomenon, make offers. These are some of the skills that A1 level of English suggests in CEFR scale but not all are presented in this grade because of 4th grade being a transitional class and curriculum suggests that A1 ends with 5th grade, the last elementary school grade. Even though CEFR suggests the using of 4 main skills of language, 4th grade curriculum overwhelmingly emphasizes on speaking and listening skills. Because of the inadequacy of Turkish students in English stemming from the environment and language distribution of Turkey, curriculum teaches English in the beginning with speaking and listening skills which are easier compared to reading and writing skills, which will be more emphasized in the future grades.

4th grade students are generally 10 years old, so the contents chosen for them are generally the sub-topics of real life. The topics of the curriculum update that we are analysing includes: classroom environment, nationality of people, fictional characters, free time activities, daily routine, basic scientific knowledge and chemical reactions, vocation of a person, clothing, social relations of a person, foods and beverages. Contents start with daily life and continues the trend but there is no chronological continuation because of daily life being cyclical. These topics designate the vocabulary pool of the curriculum and give specific lexical items about them, some fixes are also given such as –s, -ed, -es, -ies. The aforementioned contents are designed fairly well considering the abilities that CEFR suggests for A1 including introducing oneself, asking and answering personal questions, interaction with people in spoken way (given that the interacted people talk slowly), etc.

This curriculum contains special materials for 4th graders due to their age range regarding the format of lessons. Considering the age of students, cartoons, maps, posters and illustrations are used for education because students are familiar with them and cartoons draw forth their visual memory. Songs, conversations and videos are also used in lessons to reinforce their auditory skills and one of the goals of this curriculum is to provide students correct phonetical forms and correct pronunciations, which they can learn from those formats. In each lesson, teacher gives students visual and auditory contents related to the corresponding lesson. The word usage and topics in this curriculum is based on real life, it includes more everyday life vocabulary and less topic specific vocabulary. Although most of the language content items are given, close to no grammatical input is given in this curriculum, so grammar is excluded.

In classrooms, teacher assumes the role of a delegate who is someone with balanced amount of involvement with students and generally is in a passive overseeing state. When the time comes for group, and sometimes individual, activities, teacher comes out of its shell and helps students complete their activities. Curriculum assesses the students according to what curriculum specified as goals. Because of this curriculum’s goals being more focused on speaking and listening activities, auditory exams are more common than written exams. 4th grade follows a task-based student oriented approach and teacher is in the more passive and observant side, so assessment and monitoring is compatible with the curriculum.

The assessment of students must be in tune with the CEFR in which various types of assessment and evaluation techniques are used and real world usage of language is valued. Assessment should be in line with the characteristics of students and should come in different forms dedicated to them. It should be beneficial to students in seeing their strengths and weaknesses and should encourage them to strengthen their weak points.

Evaluation:

We have pointed out so many facts about the speaking and listening activities in 4th grade curriculum but there are not much reading and writing activities stated, this stems from these activities being taken for granted. CEFR suggests the usage of 4 main skills of language should be distributed equally but as we can see that reading and writing activities are heavily overlooked, this problem will give rise to many other future issues. Another concept that is taken for granted is the idea of “Speaking as much English as possible in classrooms.” Ministry of Education that designed this curriculum cannot know whether English is used in a class or not until they send inspectors to that class. The last concept that is taken for granted is the specific teacher qualifications. The curriculum implicitly states teacher qualifications but teachers play the second most important role when executing the curriculum, this treatment is not what they deserved.

Sometimes, even the most perfect concepts have flaws, so does the curriculum. There is one choke-point in this curriculum that is completely ignored and that is the decisions made for the education of disabled students being non-existent. There are different types of disabilities among students such as vision impairment, being deaf, intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, paralysis. The curriculum should deal with the students’ disabilities, should design and execute ways of reintegrating them into society.

Considering the linguistic competence of Turkish citizens, this curriculum do not rush the English education and executes it gradually with patience being in accordance with Linear approach and Layers of Necessity model. The approach and model aforementioned are one of the most suitable combinations for a country that has less linguistic competence than most of the European countries.

The activities and tasks that curriculum suggests such as creating posters, compose dictionaries, making puppets, doing drama, drawing pictures, etc. are suitable for 4th grade age gap. The activities aforementioned are chosen wisely to reinforce the visual and auditory learning of students in the learning process. There is one issue that is unsettling to us and that is the frequent use of finger puppets suggested in the assignment parts of most of the themes in the curriculum, our opinion is on the reduction of finger puppet usage in lessons to a much lesser amount because just sticking to one creative task type will diminish the creativity.

Even though this curriculum will work in Turkey, it will cause many problems in other countries because of the imbalance between the usage of 4 main skills of language. Most of the other countries’ curriculums deal with the skills equally while Turkey carries out their process gradually, starting from listening and speaking, after a while, emphasizing on reading and writing later.

When we turn the scope on the topic and vocabulary choices and management, they are suited for the students’ age, field of interest and their needs in everyday life. One of the activities that is given by curriculum is making a dictionary from the words that students see in lessons and outside of the school, which is basically a glossary project, complements the vocabulary of students, so the activity choice fits the curriculum.

For the last words, this curriculum is a well-designed framework albeit its minor flaws. In its last update, Ministry of Education upgraded it so that 2nd and 3rd graders can also take English lessons, this is a breakthrough in the history of English teaching in Turkey. We strongly believe that the curriculum will evolve further in the future with the help of adept and latitudinarian lecturers.

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