Situating Practice in a Limited-Exposure, Foreign Languages School Curriculum

Abstract

for the publisher's websiteThis chapter describes the design of a language-driven curriculum and how it was informed by some of the theoretical and empirical research on practice. This largescale, state-funded project aimed to situate effective practice within an engaging curriculum for 11-16-year-olds in England with approximately 400-450 hours of instruction over five years in French, German, and Spanish. In Part 1, we describe the foreign language context and outline the curriculum and pedagogy design tasks we undertook. In Part 2, we describe the extent to which we embedded principles of practice into class materials and professional development. We highlight the affordances that research offered our decision-making and acknowledge some challenges faced in working at the interface between research, policy, and practice. In our Concluding Remarks, we expose and discuss in detail some areas in which we found our research knowledge-base to be severely lacking for informing real-world problems of this nature.