The Secondary English Curriculum of the Department of Education: A Content Analysis

Abstract

learners’ communicative competence is possible with the content standards. Task and performance standards of the 2010 Secondary English Curriculum (SEC). Of corollary interest to the study is determining the aspects of communicative competence that are and are not reflected in the curriculum contents.

Qualitative analysis of the contents of the 2010 SEC was conducted using the criteria for communicative competence by Canale and Swain (1980) as categories in the a priori coding. Stability or intra-rater reliability test was utilized to establish the validity of the analysis, which was further reinforced by the correlative validity test using Hsu’s (2011) indicators of communicative competence as the external criteria for the content analysis.

Results of the study showed that content standard focuses more on literary than on language standards. Moreover, the tasks and performance standards of the 2010 SEC intended curriculum fail to reflect all the aspects of communicative competence. The syntactic component of grammatical competence and discourse and sociolinguistic competencies are not reflected in English I-Quarters 2 and 3. English I-Quarter 2 also fails to reflect the morphological and lexical components of grammatical competence while the syntactic component of grammatical competence and the sociolinguistic and strategic competencies are not reflected in English IIQuarter 3. Strategic competence is also not reflected in the tasks and performance standards of English II-Quarter 4.