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

Abstract

The main objective of the study is to determine whether meeting the goal of developing the 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 II- Quarter 3. Strategic competence is also not reflected in the tasks and performance standards of English II-Quarter 4.

Considering that not all aspects of communicative competence are reflected in the tasks and performance standards of the 2010 SEC intended curriculum for English I and II, the program and general standards of the curriculum are inconsistent with communicative competence.

The conclusions drawn from these findings were: (1) with only one content standard for both the language and literary area, the teachers who are tasked to implement the curriculum might have difficulty balancing the two areas of different disciplines; (2) using only the prescribed tasks of the 2010 SEC, the teachers might not address the learners’ needs for the development of all the four competencies; and (3) if the teachers would not consider using other activities to compensate for the inadequacy of the prescribed task, the implemented curriculum might not achieve the goal of honing learners who exhibit communicative competence.

Based on these findings and conclusions, it is recommended that curriculum developers consider including benchmarks to the content standard in order to specify the communicative function of the language items in the different genres of literature and that teachers develop and use other tasks and classroom activities that can compensate for the inadequacy of the tasks in the intended curriculum.