Implementation is the process of communication between the curriculum experts who created it and the people responsible for delivering it. As a form of “restructuring” and “replacement” activity as Leslie Bishop stressed, the goal of implementation is to alter people’s attitudes, behaviours, and knowledge (Ornstein and Hunkins, 2016). The term “text” (discourse) relates to the academic language of the document, according to the reconceptualist Pinar et al. (1995). This means that the text refers to a work of writing in its narrow sense and to social reality in its broad sense. However, notwithstanding the large resources spent on curriculum development, majority of the failures appear to be related to the implementation of the curriculum. Ornstein and Hunkins (2016) identify several factors contributing to the curriculum’s failure, including limited understanding of school culture, innovative acts by outside experts, and impatient educators seeking quick fixes. It is important to remember that, as stated by Pinar et al. (1995), “education is context specific.” To ensure successful implementation, curriculum specialists and implementers must understand the type of context in which the curriculum will be delivered. Ornstein and Hunkins (2016) emphasise that successful curriculum implementation requires planning processes, addressing needs, and utilising necessary resources. These factors are intertwined and must be considered for successful implementation, as ignoring one, can lead to failure. Planning is attributed as the milestone including factors of “people,” “programs,” and the “processes” of which Ornstein and Hunkins (2016) emphasise the “people” factor that primarily refers to teachers. Without the “people” component, the program and its procedures lose their quality making the curriculum doomed to fail. However, Ornstein an Hunkins (2016) mention that the majority of teachers lack a solid grasp of curriculum and its creation. Nevertheless, since curriculum is a decision-making process from start to finish, participants in this case the English teachers – should also be involved in understanding the curriculum.

In Türkiye, except for some minor variations, the same top-down curriculum is widely used for every subject regardless of types of contexts. Other than that, within the last two decades, the curriculum was changed for three times of which two were major changes. Yet, at each time the emphasis in the “planning” seemed to be on the “programs” missing the significance of the “people” and “processes” factors. In the frame of the accessed literature and one of the author’s experiences as an insider, despite to the “rudimentary” English competences of public high school students (Özen et al., 2013), any initiatives to understand the curriculum implementation processes and the teachers’ curriculum understandings by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE) were not identified. Therefore, binding the “people” and the “processes” factors at school level, in this study it is aimed to portray how the English teachers’ curriculum conceptualisations comply with the implemented curriculum in two different types of public high schools.

Investigating how teachers’ curriculum conceptualisations and practices at school level were aligned (or not) was significant to uncover and clarify the landscape of curriculum implementation in two distinct contexts. Additionally, at the meso level, the study’s practical findings may assist educators in raising awareness of their understanding of the curriculum, reflecting on their own methods, and devising solutions for new issues that arise during curriculum implementation based on context-specific elements. The study’s findings may also provide information about potential organisational roles for students, colleagues, and administrators in and around school.

In this multi-case design study, a public Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School (VTAHS) and an Anatolian High School (AHS) served as the research sites. Public high schools in Türkiye serve a variety of purposes; VTAHSs train technical staff for varied sectors, while AHSs prepare students for entrance tests to universities. To provide a foundation for context-based variations, criterion sampling method was employed in the identification of the research settings. This was because, according to Patton (1990, p. 169) “a researcher should select a site that is intentionally biased toward information-rich cases.” The research sites were selected based on the following criteria: they had to be classified as either AHS or VTAHS, be situated in the central districts of Sakarya, a city in the northwest of Türkiye, have a positive attitude toward language education, have adequate infrastructure to support language instruction, and use the same 9th-12th Grades English Curriculum. The identification of teachers, on the other hand, was maintained through typical-case sampling method. In naturalistic research, sampling typical cases is “useful to avoid rejecting information on the grounds that it has been gained from special or deviant cases” (as cited in Cohen et al., 2007, p. 176). Accordingly, the study included teachers who had experience teaching English in the current setting and implementing the 2018 English curriculum update to cover all the common scenarios and not overlook information from special or deviant cases. Therefore, nine English teachers who exhibited typical characteristics were included in the study after willingly providing their informed consent. Data were collected through interviews based on the general interview guide (Patton, 1990), non-participant observations (Creswell, 2016), and review of documents which had a complementary role to the non-participant class observation. Semi-structured interview and observation forms prepared by the researchers were utilised as data collection tools. Data sources included interview transcripts, field notes, and still and moving images (Denham & Onwuegbuzie, 2013) including instructional notes on the smartboards and web 2.0 tools games outputs. The data were analysed through content analysis, using a four-step data analysis process: (1) data coding, (2) identification of the themes, (3) organisation of the codes and themes, (4) identification and interpretation of the findings (Yıldırım & Şimşek, 2018). Lincoln and Guba’s (1985) quality criteria were used to assess research integrity, employing methods like prolonged engagement, persistent observation, peer debriefing, member checking, and triangulation for credibility. For transferability, thick description and purposeful sampling methods were used.

The case titles in this study reflected the ultimate state of reality in the contexts. VTAHS was called Case Dissonance due to lack of alignment between the curriculum, audiences, and teacher practices, while AHS was called Case Resonance due to a greater state of alignment. The analysis revealed four different curriculum conceptualisations. In Case Dissonance, the curriculum was conceptualised as “reduced idiosyncratic curriculum.” In line with what defines this conceptualisation, the practices of teachers were found to be fully aligned aiming to reduce the cognitive load, including idiosyncrasies compared to the intended curriculum and school-level implementation practices of teachers. The analysis unfolded three different curriculum conceptualisations in Case Resonance as “transformative curriculum,” “curriculum in transition,” and “disconnected curriculum.” The analysis suggested full congruence of teachers’ practices and how the curriculum was conceptualised. Firstly, the practices of some teachers were found to be aligning with the assets of “transformative curriculum.” The nucleus of the teachers’ practices revolved around nurturing learning experiences that led to or catalysed the outcomes of the intended curriculum in the form of either enhancement or replacement based on a critical perspective. Secondly, the practices of some teachers in “curriculum in transition” were aligned as the curriculum was conceptualised exhibiting a landscape drifting from previously synthesised mindsets toward a new mindset representing a migration into a different conceptual realm. Finally, similarly to a deviant case, one of the teachers’ practices representing the “disconnected curriculum” were observed to be perfectly aligned exhibiting disconnection from the intended curriculum, the participants, and the components of the environment it was implemented in. In sum, it was found out that the curriculum at the school level was implemented as it was conceptualised.

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