Analysing the technical form of the curriculum: Presentation and demonstration of an SFL-based analytic toolkit

Abstract Changes to the technical form of curriculum documents are central to contemporary accountability practices and reform agendas in education. Allan Luke and colleagues specifically identify formal design and the level of definition in curriculum documents as crucial factors in determining whether teachers have control over classroom curriculum or are de-professionalised and constrained by central prescription. However, although their theoretical account of technical form and definition is substantive, it offers limited guidance on how it can be applied in education research. This paper presents a toolkit for analysing the technical form of curriculum documents that draws upon Systemic Functional Linguistics. That toolkit is then applied to an analysis of the senior secondary Japanese language curriculum in Queensland, where language teachers have raised concerns about the constraining impact of new syllabuses introduced as part of a major reform to the senior phase of learning in the state. We present findings about how formal elements of curriculum documents such as compositional and classificatory taxonomies, activity sequences, modal language choices and lexical chains are connected to purported issues relating to the prominence of certain curriculum content, affordances for composite classes and differentiation across subjects. This paper contributes to research on the impact of the formal design of curriculum documents for teacher professionalism and educational governance. Additionally, it provides an analytic approach that can be used in research on the technical form of curriculum documents in other educational contexts.