key concepts in elt

Innovation in ELT revisited

Martin Wedell

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English language teaching practices in many countries and contexts are
subject to frequent change as innovation is introduced to reform teaching
and learning practices. Although this Key Concept was discussed in 2009
(ELT Journal 63/4), it is revisited here for two main reasons. First, most
ELT professionals worldwide continue to be affected by innovations.
Second, research since 2009 has increasingly highlighted the need for
planners to consider what challenges innovations may pose for those –
like teachers and school leaders—tasked with implementing them. This
entry focuses on large-scale innovations, in particular national English
curriculum reforms. These occur very frequently, affect very large
numbers of people, and (to date) remain extremely difficult to implement
successfully. Most points made are, when adapted to context, also relevant
to innovation at institutional or classroom level.
Educational innovations represent ‘fresh ways of meeting outstanding
challenges’ (OECD 2017: 17). Innovations are planned and entail
adjustments to people’s thinking and behaviour. One ‘outstanding
challenge’ commonly mentioned in English policy documents is the
difficulty of finding ways to develop citizens’ English proficiency in the
current ‘dynamic, fast changing world characterized by globalization,
technologization, mobility and migration’ (Ministry of Education, Israel
2019). The ‘fresh ways’ that state education systems have found to
respond to this challenge have usually involved expanding the quantity
of English taught (often introducing English at primary level), and/or its
quality, through curriculum reform promoting new teaching and learning
approaches and practices, that they hope will help learners achieve higher
proficiency levels.
Early ELT innovation research (Holliday and Cooke 1982; Kennedy 1988)
emerged from experiences of trying to implement British government
sponsored ELT projects in overseas contexts. Research drew on theories
from disciplines including general education, anthropology and business.
It warned against adoption in ELT of top down, ‘hyper-rational’ innovation
theories (Wise 1977), which propose that once innovation aims are agreed,
plans to achieve aims identified, and necessary resources allocated,
successful implementation will be unproblematic. Instead, research

272 ELT Journal Volume 76/2 April 2022; https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccac003

© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
Advance Access publication 11 March 2022
 showed that ELT innovation implementation processes are complicated,
needing planning that is system-wide in scope, and based on a thorough
understanding of the implementation context or ecology.
Further studies in language education (e.g. Waters 2009; Wedell 2009)
have used the above, together with insights from general education
(Fullan 2007), and the concept of secondary innovations (Markee 1997)
to try to develop principles to guide ELT innovation planning. They have
helped expand understanding of the complex, interdependent range
of human, institutional, and system-wide factors which may affect the
outcomes of the implementation process. They particularly highlight
the need for policymakers introducing a primary innovation (e.g. a new

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English curriculum) to understand the changes to organizational thinking
and behaviour that will be needed to provide enabling support—secondary
innovations. These require policymakers to understand both the ideas
underpinning the innovation itself and how the innovation will affect
those whose roles influence implementation success. This implies, for
example, that before planning how to implement a new curriculum,
policymakers would be wise to take time to:
a) develop their own understanding of the pedagogic principles and
classroom practices underpinning the curriculum;
b) identify the educational roles (e.g. teachers, school leaders, teacher
educators) whose work will affect and be affected by implementation of
the new curriculum;
c) provide each with role-relevant information about the key principles and
practices underpinning the innovation;
d) discover how representatives of each role in different parts of the
country understand the personal and professional challenges that the
innovation poses for how they currently work.

This information would provide a basis for developing implementation

plans with timeframes, funding streams, and professional support
mechanisms appropriate for the challenges identified.
Recent research (e.g. Mukherjee 2018; Ong’ondo 2018) suggests, however,
that policymakers’ insufficient consideration of secondary innovations
continues to create barriers to curriculum implementation at three connected
levels. First, system-level barriers may result from policy borrowing (Tan
and Reyes 2016). Policymakers uncritically adopt pedagogic approaches (e.g.
learner-centredness) and ‘best practices’ (e.g. interactive classrooms) that are
apparently successful in one educational context for use in their own. Their
limited understanding of ideas underpinning innovation, and insufficient
consultation with those whose roles will influence implementation, lead
them to develop overly ‘rational’ implementation plans that underestimate
the challenges in context. Such plans may have unrealistic timeframes and
funding streams, and inadequate or inappropriate provision for classroom
resources and/or teacher and educational leader support. In addition,
alignment between the adopted innovation and existing high-stakes
examinations is frequently overlooked.
Where such system-level planning occurs, resulting second-level
barriers at the institutional level may mean school leaders and education

Innovation in ELT revisited 273

 officials have limited understanding of and support for practices that the
innovation recommends, especially where there is parental pressure to
continue to teach to unchanged examinations. At the third, classroom
level, the outcome may be English teachers who, due to insufficient or
inappropriate professional support, and minimal moral support from
leaders, feel little understanding or ownership of the innovation. In such
circumstances they may feel little motivation to make the sustained effort
needed to implement the classroom changes that the innovation hopes to
promote.
A different strand of ELT curriculum innovation research (Grassick and
Wedell 2018; Graves 2021), drawing on general education research into

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the relational and emotional dimension of educational change (Zembylas
2010), has begun to further articulate the complexity of innovation
implementation. Taking a system-wide and experiential approach, it
explores relationships between implementers’ (teachers, school leaders,
teacher educators, educational administrators’) lived experiences of the
implementation process and the extent to which desired changes are
seen in classrooms. It recognizes that the curriculum is only one element
influencing what happens in classrooms. Identification of others,
including the beliefs and behaviours of school leaders, teacher educators,
and parents, and the cultural and physical aspects of the school context,
helps explain the ineffectiveness of one-size-fits-all implementation
planning that hopes to ensure implementation fidelity (Penuel et al. 2014)—
uniform implementation of the curriculum in all classrooms.
Instead, planning that introduces role-relevant innovation principles and
practices to all affected by implementation, and helps them use their
existing personal/professional experience to adapt principles in context-
appropriate ways, is more likely to enable implementation integrity—a
range of different practices broadly consistent with curriculum aims
becoming visible in most classrooms.
Final version received January 2022

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274 Martin Wedell

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Martin Wedell
University of Leeds (retired).
email: martinwed1@outlook.com
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