Teaching materials and learning objectives

After the school picnic with my energetic and mischievous students, I came to Paul's third session to learn about second language curriculum. As I worked on a curriculum development project on English language learning before, I am quite familiar with the official curriculum documents, including the three strands, nine generic skills and the many values and attitudes in the English language education curriculum framework.

However, I know very well that these gorgeous concepts and well-structured frameworks do not necessarily translate into effective learning in the actual classroom. Most of the time, teachers (*in my school*) rely heavily on the textbooks in planning what students should learn. I was quite shocked when the English panel head suggested in a meeting that the single most important criterion in choosing the textbook publisher is the amount of teaching resources it provides. She doesn't think that it is our job to develop materials for our students; our main responsibility is to deliver lessons. From my experience, teachers do not teach to address the aims and objectives as stated in the curriculum guide, but teach for the sake of convenience or efficiency. Well, after all, teachers nowadays have a lot of administrative work (often meaningless) to do, in addition to their teaching duties.