The issue of curriculum occupies a central position in every education system. At present, China follows the practice of taking the national curriculum as the dominant supplemented by local curriculum and school-based curriculum in basic education. Diverse curriculum resources are scattered everywhere outside and inside school. The development and use of curriculum resources directly influenced the effect of national curriculum implanting, local curriculum and school-based curriculum development. By contrast, each individual school in the Czech Republic must develop its own curricula and create a School Education Programme based on the Framework Educational Programme by itself. Educators need to be mindful of the organizational and practical considerations associated with curriculum development. Alena (2010) notes the growth in the pedagogical autonomy of Czech schools is bringing increased demands on the professionalism of teachers, who are now becoming the creators of school curriculum. But to many educational professionals, curricular development is too hefty a burden to relegate onto the shoulders of school headmasters and teachers, as they are not trained for this purpose and lack of teaching aids and further necessary training to take on this new responsibility (Green, 2008). 

Teacher is the crucial element in all successful curriculum development and implementation. In their daily work teachers engage in the process of curriculum design, drawing upon personal characteristics, curricular features, and contextual resources in creating instructional plans and enacting those plans with students (Clandinin and Connelly, 1992; Remillard, 2005). But few studies have examined how novice teachers think about and engage in curriculum design and how teacher educators can support them in doing so (Beyer and Davis, 2012).

Furthermore, to compel students to learn English is becoming a growing tendency in Europe (EACEA/Eurydice/Eurostat, 2012: 46). Accompany with spreading of English as an international language is widely believed to provide economic, educational, and sociocultural benefits (McKay, 2008), there is consequently increasing demand worldwide for competent English teachers and for more effective approaches to their preparation and professional development (Burns and Richards, 2009).

In the context of Second Language Teacher Education, by conceptualizing a theoretical framework, analyzing English as foreign language (EFL) student teachers and teacher educators’ views of curriculum development, and constructing questionnaire to assess the level and traits of future teachers’ competences in curriculum development, this research is taken by representative samples of future teachers who are in their final year of teacher education before they are eligible to become English teachers in lower secondary schools in China and the Czech Republic. From the cross-cultural perspective, this research aims to analyse the state of future teachers’ competences and seek for influential factors that support or disturb their competences’ development, to provide some potential suggestions for formal education on cultivating prospective teacher competence and enhancing in-service teacher competence, and to reflect these countries’ present language teacher education programmes and in-service teachers training programmes. This research is also aiming to provide information about the curriculum development competence which teachers need in practice that could serve as basis for teacher education curricular development and course design.

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