Abstract

Unit-based curriculum reform seeks to align learning objectives, classroom activities, differentiated support, and assessment across a sequence of lessons. Yet designs that appear coherent in demonstration lessons may become fragmented in everyday primary English classrooms. This qualitative multiple-case study examined how 16 Grade 3 English teachers from 12 primary schools in one prefecture-level city in Henan Province, China, translated unit-based reform requirements into routine practice. Data comprised 646 minutes of semi-structured interviews, contemporaneous teacher-generated records, routine lesson plans, and anonymized institutional documents. Participants generally endorsed the reform and reported proactive experimentation with digital resources, differentiated instruction, formative assessment, and locally familiar learning contexts. Codebook-assisted thematic analysis, chronological case reconstruction, and cross-case comparison identified four interconnected forms of curricular translation work: prioritizing competing goals, reorganizing textbook content into cross-lesson task sequences, converting learner differences into workable scaffolds, and transforming classroom performance into credible assessment evidence. Accounts indicated that these forms of work often accumulated when written-test accountability, single-lesson pacing, unrecognized preparation time, and limited access to reusable design tools coincided. Under such conditions, comprehensive goals were more likely to be compressed, task sequences required repair, differentiated support narrowed, and formative assessment had weaker institutional legitimacy. The study derives an evidence-informed framework of low-burden organizational support proposals, including one-page unit maps, shared tasks with adjustable scaffolds, activity-pacing protocols, and dual-evidence assessment rules. The framework is analytically derived from the qualitative evidence and is not presented as an experimentally validated intervention model. Curricular translation work offers an explanation of why reform may contract in ordinary classrooms even when teachers endorse its principles and actively attempt implementation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.