Introduction

Curriculum reforms are being introduced in all education systems to replace the fact-based curriculum to develop students’ thinking skills, interpersonal skills, and creativity (Sahlberg 2006). The basic education reform currently underway in earnest in China under the banner of suzhi jiaoyu (‘quality-oriented education’) is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious, radical, wide/far-reaching and complex in the world (Carson 2009; Ryan et al. 2009) for its attempt to make a fundamental change in the underlying philosophy and practices of teaching and learning from the traditional teacher-centred, and grammar-based transmissive pedagogies to more holistic inquiry-oriented approaches with the emphasis placed on meaningful and contextualised collaborative and autonomous learning.

However, what is the likely scenario of the implementation of the reform in English classrooms? The complex, chaotic, painful and unpredictable nature of the change process (Fullan 1999) and paradox of change without change (Priestley 2010) suggest that despite some pedagogical changes the occurrence of challenges and issues will be inevitable in grassroots teachers’ implementation of the new curriculum. There have been numerous reports of implementation gap in carrying out curriculum reforms globally in the ongoing discussions in recent years (e.g. Al Hamzi 2003; Berry 2003; Gahin and Myhill 2001; Nunan 2003; Wedell 2003, 2004; Gitlin and Margonis 1995; Fullan and Miles 1992). For example in China, as Wang and Lam (2009) noted, teachers encountered many difficulties in the process of implementing the new curriculum. Negative and complex emotions of teachers, e.g. uncertainty, anxiety and hesitance to the curriculum reform have been documented in dealing with the cultural, professional, institutional, and resource dilemmas in the reform process in two pioneering provinces, Shandong and Guangdong (Jiang 2004; Yin 2006; and Lee and Yin 2011).

As Sargent et al. (2011) suggests, response to the implementation of the new curriculum reforms varies by regional context. Further research is necessary to delineate a full picture of the realities of curriculum reform in China, a vast country with diverse distinct cultural and educational features. Therefore research on how Chinese teachers respond to the current wave of new curriculum reform in their day-to-day teaching would help to enrich the relevant literature through pinpointing contributing factors to the commonly reported implementation gap in different regional contexts. With this research objective as a framework, this study intended to examine three research questions: (1) What perceptions do Chinese teachers hold about the new curriculum reform? (2) How do Chinese teachers implement it in their daily teaching practice? What are the gaps (if any) that have occurred in their practice? (3) What challenges hinder Chinese teachers from making changes as envisaged if any gaps arise? The answers to these questions would shed some light on the complexity and intricacy of curriculum reforms, and hence generate valuable insights to all stakeholders concerned in other educational and cultural contexts, including macro, meso and micro levels on their practices of managing and enacting educational innovations.

Literature review

Curriculum reform is regarded as a core of the ongoing efforts of educational development and quality improvement to induce changes to the content and organization of what is taught to meet changes in social conditions (Sahlberg 2006; Lo 2005; Rulcker 1991; Lo 2005). Despite its intent of bringing about changes in the education system and in the classroom teaching and learning process, implementation gap occurs as a common feature in the reform process (Argyris and Schon 1974; Ball and Bowe 1992; Cohen and Hill 2001; Fullan 1991; Supovitz and Weinbaum 2008; Bantwini 2010; Gitlin and Margonis 1995; Fullan and Miles 1992), i.e. curriculum reform does not necessarily promise or guarantee significant improvement in the quality of education. As Wedell (2005) pointed out, in all educational settings what actually happens in classrooms is influenced by hugely complex and dynamic, sets of interdependent geo-political and socio-cultural contextual factors in both the immediate and the wider environments. Guthrie and Guthrie (2002) also acknowledged the context-dependent nature of curriculum change and commented that curriculum reform progress had been limited and uneven due to their inappropriateness to the skills of teachers, the conditions under which teachers work, and the resources available. Therefore, educational reform inevitably follows a pattern of piecemeal and compromised transformation (Kennedy 2010).

There have been a series of empirical reports on implementation gaps in Asian and African countries in recent years, which highlight policy-practice gap as a main cause for the implementation gap. In China, Halstead and Zhu (2009) found that learner autonomy was hardly a reality in the English classroom in senior high schools. Yu and Wang (2009) reported that the current classroom practice and assessment methods employed in Chinese secondary school did not help the learners develop communicative competence and autonomous learning. Tong (2010) argued that school leaders’ poor management of change, teachers’ lack of understanding of the changes, and weak teacher collaboration had hindered teachers’ pedagogical transformations. Dello-Iacovo (2009) pointed out that insufficient resources, conceptual ambiguity and conservative resistance in the exam-oriented education system had hampered the implementation of the reforms. Similarly, Adamson and Yin (2008) found significant divergence in Hong Kong teachers’ implementation of task-based learning from the intended curriculum due to such factors as unclear conceptions of the reform, the lack of teacher enthusiasm, weak collaborative cultures, and the lack of effective school leadership. Ng (2009) pinpointed disparities between perceptions of principals and teachers as a main barrier to school curriculum development initiated by the Education Bureau of Hong Kong from 2001 and 2006. Yeung and Lam (2006) and Yeung (2009) echoed that the student-centred approach was a mere rhetoric in Hong Kong schools. Su (2007) found that most Taiwanese teachers still preferred skills-oriented instruction and practice in the test-oriented education system. Likewise, Liu (2009) observed Taiwanese teachers’ uncertainty and perplexity about their instruction practices and their adherence to traditional approaches (e.g. recitation and translation) in their implementation of communication-oriented curriculum guidelines.

This scenario is echoed in some other Asian countries. In Thailand, Prapaisit de Segovia and Hardison (2009) found minimal effect of the national initiative to promote learner-centred instruction caused by teachers’ confusion about the reform’s principles and their application, teachers’ inadequate English proficiency, insufficient training, and inadequate resources. In the Philippines, Waters and Vilches (2008) found the existence of ‘intercultural’ tensions between government curriculum policy and school-system implementation levels. In Vietnam, Canh and Barnard (2009) reported a wide gap between curricular rhetoric and classroom reality due to teachers’ failure to implement the curricular requirements caused by a series of factors: time pressure to finish prescribed syllabus, use of the first language for students’ understanding and self-esteem, students’ lack of motivation to communicate in English, washback effect of examinations, lack of appropriate resources, and teachers’ yet-to-develop professional competence. In Turkey, Kırkgöz (2008a, b) observed a gap between curriculum objectives and primary teachers’ implementation of the innovation resulting from a range of hindering factors, including teachers’ limited understanding of the curriculum innovation, their previous beliefs, insufficient instructional support, limited instructional time, large class size and lack of resources.

Accounts of gaps between the curricular innovation and classroom reality also occurred in Africa. In South Africa, Bantwini (2010) reported considerable mismatch between goals of the new curriculum reform and teachers’ perceptions of the reform. In Uganda, Altinyelken (2010) reported a multitude of challenges teachers encountered despite their high level of enthusiasm about the new curriculum. In Libya, Orafi and Borg (2009) noted a considerable gap between the intentions of the curriculum and classrooms instructions, and attributed the gap to the incongruence between the educational innovation and the cognitive and contextual realities of teachers’ work. In Botswana, Prophet (1995) observed little or no change in the nature of the teaching–learning situation in junior secondary English classrooms due to the lack of acceptance of the curriculum intervention in those schools.

The preceding review of the literature shows that much research has been undertaken on curriculum reform, which has arisen as a common issue and concern in educational change in various countries. The existing research is valuable and insightful with its contributions on implementing curriculum reform, however, the literature is limited in terms of its geographical and cultural lenses, i.e. the focus of the studies on China’s curriculum reform has been exclusively placed on pioneering provinces and well-resourced regions, such as Shanghai, Shandong, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Less developed and more conservative regions warrant equal, if not more attention to generate valuable insight on the complexity of curriculum reform in those contexts to address the challenges and difficulties teachers are faced with. Therefore, this present study was intended to provide nuanced delineations of teachers’ dilemmatic situations and emotional struggles from the perspectives of teachers in Hubei Province in Central China, one of the last implementing provinces of the curriculum reform. It is hoped that this study will help enrich the literature with its findings and implications to all people concerned, including researchers, teacher educators, policy makers and immediate change implementers at the school level.

The study

Background to senior English curriculum reform in China

Since 1993 the Chinese Ministry of Education (MoE) has been making enormous endeavours to reform the basic education system. In 2003 it issued the new senior secondary school curriculum guidelines (experimental draft) and curriculum standards for 15 subjects to achieve six educational objectives: (1) replacing the existing subject-based curriculum structure with a three-level structure consisting of learning fields, subjects, and modules; (2) adopting an elective course and credit system; (3) granting students the opportunity to choose courses; (4) improving students’ generic skills of independent inquiry, cooperation, communication, and problem solving; (5) establishing a formative student evaluation system via connecting students’ academic performance to their growth portfolio; and (6) decentralizing the educational system and encouraging school-based curriculum development (Chinese MoE 2003, cited in Lee and Yin 2011, 29). This nationwide curriculum reform was implemented in two phases, i.e. initial piloting in September 2004 in four selected provinces (Guangdong, Shandong, Hainan, and Ningxia), and subsequent extending to other provinces, including Jiangsu, Fujian, Liaoning, and Zhejiang. By September 2008, 19 provinces were participating in the reform.

The new curriculum for the English subject aimed to promote a blend of constructivist and communicative task-based teaching to cultivate students’ communicative competence. It emphasized fostering students’ cognitive and personal growth as individuals beyond its instrumental value to access scientific knowledge in the world to enable them to discover their full potential as learners, and as members of society and the world (Yeung 2009; Wang and Lam 2009). The English courses developed according to this curriculum incorporated five components: linguistic knowledge, linguistic skills, affect, learning strategies and intercultural awareness. These five components were graded with a four-band system to make the curriculum more flexible and feasible. A new set of textbooks was designed containing 11 volumes.

To help teachers implement the new curriculum, nation-wide in-service teacher training was delivered through a cascade model. Initially, the curriculum developers led two-to-three-week-long workshops with key participants nominated by provincial educational authorities. During the workshops, the participants were introduced to the goals of the curricular reform, the structure of the accompanying textbooks, the underlying methodology, instructional methods and techniques that teachers were expected to employ in carrying out the new curriculum. The workshop participants then returned to their provinces and delivered in-service workshops to other teachers in the local districts, usually over 10 days during the summer break. Additionally, research and teaching activities were organized on a monthly basis to facilitate teachers’ knowledge and application of the new curriculum, which were generally delivered by a local expert. At the district and school levels, workshops and seminars were organized.

Research methodology

The study was undertaken iteratively in multiple research locales in Hubei Province of China, one of the last implementing provinces of the new curriculum. The investigation was carried out in two phases. The first phase was undertaken intensively in a municipal key secondary school in Central China over a seven-week period of 10 student teachers’ teaching practicum supervised by the researcher. Three female senior English teachers named Bai Xue, He Ming and Li Yang participated in the investigation. They were chosen as they represented teachers at three career stages—beginning, middle and senior stages (their ages were 29, 38 and 48 respectively), and compared with their colleagues, they displayed more enthusiasm and commitment to their teaching, and an open disposition to new ideas. Bai Xue and He Ming obtained a master’s degree in English education from a part-time programme for practicing teachers, and Li Yang actively pursued her professional development despite her humble academic background. An in-depth and detailed study of the three teachers’ perceptions and practices would epitomize the overall features of the majority of teachers’ beliefs and behaviour in response to the reform, who tended to be more conservative and resistant to change.

Triangulation of methods was utilized to collect data concerning the three teachers’ perceptions and practice, including intensive participant observations, extensive field-notes and reflections, classroom observation of 10 lessons delivered by the three teachers, informal post-lesson discussions, observations of weekly staff meeting on lesson planning, informal conversations and individual semi-structured interviews to capture a realistic picture of the overall as well as idiosyncratic features of the teachers’ perceptions of and responses to the initiative.

The second phase was conducted on some other occasions where the researcher’s encounters with senior English teachers were possible as a teacher trainer, such as in the researcher’s own institution that delivered a series of non-award-bearing INSET programmes in response to the nationwide “all teachers’ professional development project” (quanyuan peixun jihua) and the master of education (M.Ed) programme for English teachers, in the provincial education commission that organized a range of INSET workshops. Theoretical sampling (Strauss and Corbin 1994) was followed to increase the diversity of the sample. Informal conversations and focus groups were employed to further probe into the teachers’ experiences and underlying reasons for their practices.

The various types of data, including interview transcripts, classroom observation notes, and field-notes were analyzed by three levels of coding: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. The data was organized stage by stage by clustering the units and generating conceptual categories representing teachers’ perceptions of and responses to the new curriculum. In addition, connections between units were noted. As a result of this data-reduction process, the meaningful units were crystallized into themes and subthemes (Crabtree and Miller 1992; Miles and Huberman 1994; Marshall and Rossman 1995). For the purpose of confidentiality, pseudonyms were used for the extracts in the findings.

Findings

It was found that a high level of endorsement of the new curriculum was prevalent among the teachers. New goals oriented towards transformation of students’ learning were perceived to be necessary and beneficial to students. However, in reality in contrast with the teachers’ positive perception of the new ideas, limited pedagogical changes occurred in the teachers’ teaching due to a range of contextual factors: the teachers’ inadequate professional expertise, student resistance, the lack of school support, and most importantly, the examination culture that preyed on the whole education system and society. Despite the occurrence of limited change, a positive attitude arose that the teachers’ implementation of the reform would be carried through in an incremental and gradual fashion with the transformation of the current assessment system, including the non-communicative textbook-based college entry examinations in particular.

Teacher endorsement of the new curriculum reform

There emerged a high level of endorsement of the new curriculum goals, particularly the three added dimensions (learning strategies, affect and cultural awareness), and the proposed philosophy of developing students’ autonomy, collaboration and inquiry learning. As Bai Xue stated, the new curriculum was intended to develop students’ basic language knowledge as well as some other abilities such as appreciating newspapers and films. A general willingness was expressed to experiment with them. For example, He Ming, a head teacher emphasized that she would exploit the textbook creatively instead of slavishly. She also stressed that she would try to employ more student activities in class, e.g. the multi-media equipment more frequently in her classroom, from once for two units to twice or three times for each unit. Li Yang acknowledged the necessity of ‘transforming passive students into active learners responsible for their own learning’, which could ‘alleviate teachers’ burden in an effective way’. There emerged a consensus that the promoted pedagogical changes would be realized eventually in classrooms in an incremental manner, albeit a long process it might be.

Limited pedagogical change in implementing the new curriculum

However, classroom observation data shows a significant mismatch between the teachers’ positive attitude towards the reform and their teaching practice. The teachers’ classrooms displayed major features of ‘three Ts’: teacher-centred, textbook-centred, and test-centred (Adamson et al. 2000) supplemented by some minor features of communicative elements. The blend of Chinese and English was used as the medium of instruction. Chinese was mostly used and mainly for explanation of grammar rules and vocabulary, whilst English was used occasionally, and when it was used, Chinese equivalents were spoken again to ensure students’ understanding of the meaning. The classes were characterized by lockstep type of teacher-student interactions with minimal use of pair/group work. The teacher talked to the whole class, and if any interactions occurred, they were generally between the teacher and one student. The class was generally quiet. Most of the time students kept on looking at their textbooks with little eye contact with the teacher and with each other. When a student answered a question, the voice was almost inaudible for the whole class. The teacher’s movement space was confined to the front of the classroom.

The lack of clarity and structure of teaching was noticeable. Absence of introduction to lesson objectives at the start of a lesson was common. However, the start, which appeared to be abrupt and lacking in structure to the researcher, seemed to be quite natural to the students. There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the teacher and their students. Students seemed to know what to learn without the aims being introduced. The teacher’s appearance in the class meant the beginning of the lesson and they were able to follow the teacher. Within a 40-minute session, the teachers generally covered a large quantity of contents. Consequently listening and speaking were gone through briefly and quickly, or omitted in some classes. Listening activity was thus more like a listening test, and speaking like the teacher’s monologue. Very limited student output either orally or in writing was observed. ‘Spontaneous discourse was rare’ (Tomlinson and Bao 2004: 99), let alone negotiation of meaning among the students. Evening classes (from 5.40 p.m. to 9.00 p.m.) and Saturday classes were also fully used as normal teaching time to complete all the contents in the textbook.

Excessive attention was found to be paid to the reading part of the textbook, particularly the language points, while little attention to listening, speaking and writing. The teaching of a reading passage generally started with students’ listening to the audiotape of the passage or reading it aloud. It was then followed by the teacher’s explanation of difficult sentences. Then the teacher asked the students to give the main idea of each paragraph and detailed information. The sequence of these two activities seemed to be a random choice—sometimes a main idea activity came first, and sometimes detailed information activity first. Explanation of grammar rules/usages of words and translation of decontextualised sentences occupied a substantial part of a lesson, allowing little time for the students to produce their own utterances with words and grammar rules. Dictation was invariably conducted for each unit to ensure the students’ memorization of words and expressions, and recitation was required for the students to acquire a good stock of language expressions needed for their speaking and writing.

High frequency of tests emerged as a salient feature. School-based tests were administered on a monthly basis apart from mid-term and final uniform tests administered by the district Education Bureau. The school-based test papers originally consisted of listening (30 %), vocabulary in the forms of multiple choice and cloze (40 %), reading comprehension (40 %), and writing in the forms of sentence completion and short composition writing (40 %), however, listening and writing parts were generally omitted due to their perceived lower level of importance than language knowledge. Test results were made public, and students were ranked after each test. Teachers’ favoritism was openly displayed to high-achieving students, and minimal attention given to low-performing students, who were highly noticeable assigned to sit at the back of the classroom. The teachers did not seem to care much about what they were doing in the class unless they caused disruption to the class.

Attributing factors to the limited pedagogical change

The teachers’ lack of substantial pedagogical change seemed to have resulted from a range of factors: the considerable professional and psychological challenges to teachers, the students’ resistance, and the lack of support from school administrators. All these factors pointed to one fundamental factor: the backwash effect of the examination culture which permeated the society at large and schools.

Professional and psychological challenges to teachers

A range of challenges appeared to have undermined the teachers’ implementation of the reform, especially those veteran teachers who had been accustomed to the traditional teacher-centred approach. As Xiao Li stated, ‘The new curriculum has posed substantial challenge to us. We have to change our previous beliefs. We have to replace the teacher-centred approach with the student-centred approach. It has set a high demand on us’. Despite the training workshops provided to them, the teachers’ implementation of task-based teaching and inquiry learning was felt to be difficult due to a common lack of hands-on experience, leading to confusion and puzzles about how to integrate inquiry learning in their daily teaching and different versions of versions of inquired learning. In some schools inquiry learning was conducted as an extra burden separated from normal classroom teaching. For the purposes of external evaluation, forging reports on outcomes of inquiry learning was performed in some schools.

The teachers’ general lack of pedagogical competence and yet-to-improve English proficiency further aggravated their difficulty of applying teacher-centred approaches. A common lack of pedagogical competence was expressed due to limited formal training prior to and in their teaching career. As Zhou Hui said, ‘I graduated from a teacher training university, but I had little pedagogical training except for the teaching methodology course. But it was very theoretical’. Handling the new textbook appeared to be challenging, which contained much more useful information and resources to choose from. The teachers oscillated between ‘using the textbook creatively for learning purposes or slavishly for exam purposes’. Their final decision was to cram their students with almost all the contents except for the speaking part, which was not tested in the national college entrance exam. Furthermore, the heavy workload (e.g. strenuous daily schedule, onerous daily assignment marking, student discipline), the large classes of 60–65 students in each class and the lack of equipment hindered them from implementing the promoted ideas, which entailed substantial investment of time and effort to adapt to the new beliefs and methods. However, there emerged a general feeling of dissatisfaction with this pedagogical decision.

In addition, the teachers’ English proficiency arose as a liability in their daily teaching, which was declining continuously on account of limited opportunity for further development. Long Gao, a male 30-year-old teacher who transferred from mathematics to English teaching felt pedagogically and psychologically handicapped due to his limited professional training for teaching and inadequate English proficiency. He said, ‘I have just received junior secondary education. I had no formal education in English, so I feel inferior to my colleagues. I find it very hard to use English in my teaching.’ Zhao Chang, a 38-year-old head teacher with an M.Ed qualification in English education also encountered difficulties in expressing herself freely in English. Qian Li, a 48-year-old highly committed teacher felt rather self-debased when teaching in English.

Student resistance

Apart from the great challenges to the teachers, enormous obstacles also arose from the students, who were more accustomed to spoon-feeding approaches. Sun Feng, a young male teacher felt that the new curriculum, with more comprehensive and integrative demands on students required students to go deep into a topic entailed good English proficiency and effective learning strategies to understand the text, which his students lacked. Similarly, Ming Li suggested that the new curriculum emphasized students’ autonomous learning and student-centred pedagogy, which required students’ active thinking, a quality that was generally absent in many students in English learning. These demands on students were felt to be unrealistic for low-achieving students. As Xie Qun, a middle-aged teacher commented, the requirement of developing students’ problem-solving abilities, such as collecting information, applying the language in communication was only suitable for high achievers who could further develop their language competence on the basis of acquiring the language knowledge. The student-centred approach would be impossible to those underperforming students who even struggled to obtain basic knowledge, let alone develop their competence.

The lack of school support

The lack of support from school administrators arose as a fundamental reason for the teachers’ lack of commitment to make pedagogical changes. Its impact was found to have overpowered the teacher training provided by the educational management at various levels, and thus created a strong exam-oriented school atmosphere. The teacher evaluation based on exam results pressured the teachers to teach for exam purposes, and the teachers’ weekly collegial lesson planning revolved around tests. As a teacher said,

We are ranked according to our monthly test results. Low-ranked teachers will be severely criticized by our headmaster at all staff meetings. It is humiliating and stressful. (Li Mi)

The teachers’ obsession with tests was found to have led to the common mundane practice in all schools of devoting the last whole year to revising all the contents to prepare for the national college entry examination. The revision was exclusively focused on language points, grammar and integrated language training. A large amount of repetitive and decontextualized language points training was undertaken in many sets of workbooks and exam papers. The teaching and learning was not felt enjoyable, but effective for exam purposes. A convergence emerged that the traditional teaching methods would persist unless the examination culture was changed. As two teachers said,

There is no match at all between the new curriculum and the national university entry examination. The new curriculum has changed the textbook and lays the emphasis on competence, but the examination is still traditional. Even if the textbook has given more weighting to speaking and listening, the examination does not test them. So teachers and students won’t regard them as a priority although we have them in our teaching. There is no fundamental change indeed. The new curriculum can’t be implemented unless the exam is changed, but reforming the exam is faraway. (Tian Li)

Exams will always be the most important although we also need to develop the students’ practical abilities of applying the language in communication contexts (Liu Hong).

Discussion

The study looks at senior English teachers’ perceptions of and reactions to the new curriculum currently under way in China. Teacher ambivalence arose as a prevalent feature. The reform ideas were highly endorsed as progressive and beneficial, but on the other hand, they were also perceived as idealistic due to a variety of contextual constraints, especially the mainstream examination-oriented education system. There emerged a high level of inconsistency between the teaching perceptions and behaviour as a result of the backwash effect of the examination culture. As a corollary, implementation gap emerged as a central issue in the study.

Implementation gap in the curriculum reform

The study highlights the occurrence of superficial teacher change despite the provision of teacher training. The teachers endorsed certain curriculum goals, used the new materials and prescribed approaches, and even initiated the behaviour compatible with an altered attitude, however, their teaching diverged significantly from what was envisioned. They were found to be unable to ‘spread and embed’ the pedagogical changes and integrate the student-centred approach as an active part of their pedagogical repertoire (Hovhannisyan and Sahlberg 2010): their instruction was still predominantly authoritative and textbook-based; student learning was recipient and reproductive; and assessment was more focused on judging rather than improving performance. The findings are consistent with some previous research findings (e.g. Hu 2005; Yu and Wang 2009; Wedell 2005) on the lack of success in teachers’ implementation of curriculum reform constrained by various practical hindrances. The implementation gap seemed to have resulted from the ‘intercultural’ tensions between idealised, utopian innovative prescriptions of government curriculum policy and realized version at school-system implementation levels (Johnson1989; Waters and Vilches2005; 2008; Sakui 2004; Nunan 2003), and the failure to address social, contextual and cultural issues that surround each school district (Anley 1993; Klein 1994; Yeung and Lam 2006).

Attributing factors to the implementation gap

There seemed to be a variety of interrelated contextual factors at play simultaneously hindering the teachers’ implementation of the reform at the school level, including factors related to teachers, students and administrators. The overriding factor was the examination-oriented culture permeating the school education system and the society at large.

As the study shows, the teachers’ lack of substantial change seemed to have partly resulted from their professional orientations, i.e. their ‘quantitative’ conception of learning and focus on transmitting declarative knowledge to students (Biggs and Watkins 1995; van Veen and Sleegers 2006), their inclination to dominate the learning process in accordance with traditional Chinese expectations of a teacher, and the lack of professional competence and expertise (e.g. pedagogical competence and English proficiency) to experiment with new ideas. As Kennedy (1987) pointed out, accepting change may require changes to deep-seated beliefs and behaviour. The threat to existing routines can make many teachers reject innovation out of hand as an act of self-protection. The teachers employed the old style overtly or covertly to utilize their past skills, economize on time and effort, and remain with activities that have brought them comfort and reward in the past (Adams and Chen 1981). In addition, the teachers’ lack of change seemed to have also resulted from the perpetuating examination-oriented culture and examinations which test detailed factual knowledge of the syllabus (Biggs 1996; Yeung 2009; Su 2007; Halstead and Zhu 2009). Despite their deprecation of the examination culture they still employed the didactic approach under the school pressure to guarantee success in examinations because it is test results on which teachers’ performances are judged (Wedell 2005).

Student resistance emerged as a further attributing factor to the lack of change in the teachers’ implementation. Student characteristics (e.g. limited English proficiency, large classes, dependence, reticence, and lack of enthusiasm for class activities) seemed to have contributed to the teachers’ pedagogical decisions to cater for their students’ needs and preferences. The Chinese students have been accustomed to inflexible and formal classroom atmosphere, where the teacher plays an authoritative, commanding, stern, strict, controlling and dominant role and discourages students from openly questioning or criticizing (Tsui 1996). Hence, students pay attention, obey rules and do not ask questions without teacher prompting to avoid losing face (Li 1994). Students’ inadequate English proficiency and lack of autonomous learning strategies aggravated the difficulty of conducting student-centred approaches. Additionally, teachers’ workload and the high teacher: learner ratio made it difficult for teachers to give proper attention to students from disadvantaged backgrounds and ensure that thorough learning takes place.

The lack of support to teachers from the education system and schools appeared as a main obstacle to the teachers’ use of progressive teaching methods required by the new curriculum. Teachers faced great challenges in the context where the education system is still dominated by transmission model, chalk-talk and rote learning rather than the communicative approach (Harris et al. 2009). They must ensure that students master a certain body of knowledge bits by repeating discrete incremental chunks of material before they are able to think correctly for themselves (Tang and Absalom 1998; Maley 1990). Additionally, school administrators’ resistance to the curriculum reform seemed to have largely influenced the teachers’ attitude and behaviour. The higher power distance (Hofstede 1991) and collectivistic culture in Chinese schools are characterized by teachers’ subordination and obedience to their principals without challenge at least at a surface level (Walker and Dimmock 2000). School administrators’ concern about examination results arising from the pressure of the prevalent exam culture in the society at large appeared to have created an exam-oriented atmosphere, which yielded an immediate strong impact on the teachers’ day-to-day teaching. Besides, the lack of facilities and equipment further aggravated the difficulty in applying communicative approaches. Without support from the central administration, teachers would be unwilling to devote the time, effort and ‘emotional investment’ necessary for successful implementation of a particular innovation (McLaughlin 1987).

Conclusion

This study has brought to the fore challenges and difficulties in school teachers’ implementation of curriculum reforms. It shows the existence of a considerable gap between reform ideas and their enactment at the classroom level. It reveals the lack of confidence, knowledge and skills of some teachers, and the lack of support mechanisms to help teachers adapt to the new requirements despite the training provided.

The study indicates that top-down cascade strategies of curriculum reform had the drawback of limited communication between the educational authority and the grassroots level. It confirms that effectiveness of curriculum reform relies on actual implementation in school context, and suggests the need for curriculum developers to take into account key factors in the local contexts in which the innovations are to be operationalised in order to establish harmony between the policies and the realities concerned with teachers’ teaching, such as class size, time available, learning materials, assessment practices, and teacher expertise (Gamoran 1997; Yeung 2009; McDonald 1991). It suggests that curriculum development is an ongoing process, which entails ‘process thinking’ instead of ‘project thinking’ in curriculum reforms (Sahlberg 2006). A gradualist temperate, unofficial democratic approach to leading and managing change, which emphasizes reduction of managerial activity, increase of support to teachers and incremental local improvement may be more effective (Thomson and Sanders 2010; Hoyle and Wallace 2007).

Two implications are drawn from this study. First, to address the backwash effect of the examination culture, an overhaul of the assessment system appeared to be imperative, which entails establishing the alignment/connection between the curriculum and all levels of examinations, especially the national entrance examination to generated a change towards teaching for understanding, not grades (Rhem 1995). The textbook-based non-communicative knowledge-focused exams should be geared towards the objectives of assessing students’ personal understanding of knowledge and promoting student-focused and learning-oriented teaching approaches, and deep strategic approaches to learning.

Second, teacher support and development should be strengthened continuously to enhance teachers’ enthusiasm and abilities to take up the new curriculum as executive decision makers. As Moreno (2007) argued, the implementation of curriculum reforms is fundamentally a problem of in-service teacher training. The existing transmissive, theory-driven, and authority-centred teacher training methodology was found to be less effective than reinterpretation, practical, collaborative approach due to its little emphasis on hands-on, experiential learning (Canh and Barnard 2009), leading to the teachers’ falling back on traditional mode because of their marginal, inferior and passive roles (Troudi and Alwan 2010). Onsite training should be provided throughout the implementation process, especially at the initial stage such as offering instruction in models of teaching to teachers (Penunel et al. 2011). Additionally, voluntary school-based and inter-school teacher collaboration should be cultivated along with the provision of well-resourced and adequately equipped research structure and systematic follow-up and analysis on the implementation of the curriculum in schools to help identify potential directions and curriculum models (Meirink et al. 2010; Leithwood 2002; Harris et al. 2009; Sahlberg 2006).

Finally, limitations of the study need to be acknowledged. Constrained by the scale of the study, no firm generalizations can be drawn from the study. Given the diversity of China, painting a full picture of all teachers’ implementation of the curriculum reform is an impossibility, which otherwise may lead to oversimplification of the Chinese context. However, despite this limitation, this in-depth investigation has hopefully provided some valuable insights into the complex process of implementing curricular innovation at the grassroots level. It highlights the need to be wary of the implementation gap between the idealized world of curriculum developers and the realistic world of teachers, who are decisive change agents in the reform.