Secondary school writing in Uzbekistan

Ch. 6. P. 101–122.

Akhmedjanova D., Jeffery J.

This chapter presents a case study of writing curricula in Uzbekistan, a former Soviet republic with a turbulent history of language planning and educational restructuring. Our analysis is framed by the State Education Standards, the document that the Uzbek government introduced in the late 1990s to codify curriculum reforms after the country declared independence from Russia. Reflecting Uzbekistan’s multilingual context, the Standards for writing are distributed across Uzbek and Russian language arts and foreign language requirements. To investigate how the teaching and learning of writing is conceptualised in official Uzbek primary and secondary curricula, we apply Ivanič’s Discourses of Writing framework (2004, 2017) to a content analysis of the Standards and textbooks published by the Uzbek government. Results show variation in the extent to which L1, L2, and L3 writing standards emphasise skills and genre discourses. In addition, we found evidence of a persistent influence of Soviet practices on pedagogy for L1 and L2 writing, and growing influence of external stakeholders on teaching of foreign language (L3) writing. We conclude with a discussion of how a new wave of reforms might affect future writing curricula in Uzbekistan and what research is needed to understand relationships between policy and pedagogy in Uzbek schools.

 

Keywords: secondary school, education standards, writing curriculum

In book

International Perspectives on Writing Curricula and Development: A Cross-case Comparison

Routledge, 2021.