Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Curriculum Perspectives, 2026 (Scopus)
Understanding how curriculum materials are selected, adapted, and utilized is fundamental to delivering engaging, age-appropriate, and effective English language instruction. This study investigates how K–12 English teachers in Türkiye determine which curriculum materials to use, identifies the factors shaping their selection decisions, and examines the ways in which teachers incorporate both printed and digital resources in their instructional practices. Employing a qualitative holistic multiple case study design, the study draws on classroom observations, post-lesson stimulated recall interviews with twelve English teachers, and curriculum document analysis, interpreted through the ecological lens. The findings reveal that teachers exercise meaningful but bounded agency. While the state-approved coursebook functions as a non-negotiable instructional core, teachers actively supplement, substitute, and re-author curriculum content in the spaces the mandated curriculum leaves open. This agency takes varied forms, from vocational curriculum contextualization and care-driven content replacement to digitally mediated improvisation, and is shaped by factors including learner diversity, institutional setting, time constraints, technological access, and professional beliefs. Variation across participants, from principled offloading to sophisticated curriculum re-authoring, points to pedagogical design capacity as an unevenly distributed but emergent professional competence. The study contributes a theoretically grounded, empirically detailed account of teacher agency in curriculum materials use to the literature, and offers implications for curriculum policy, materials development, and teacher education in Türkiye and comparable centralized educational contexts.