| As part of national education reform efforts, the Standards for Foreign Language Learning (SFLL) were developed through the collaborative efforts of four foreign language professional organizations. While the SFLL present a new vision of foreign language learning, they were distributed without theoretical context or methodological framework and therefore, it was unclear how foreign language teachers would interpret and implement the SFLL. The purpose of this study was to examine existing foreign language teachers' epistemic beliefs and curricular activity, to determine their congruence with a proposed theory of shared paradigms in subject matter content knowledge using the work of Kuhn and Shulman, and to examine the extent to which paradigmatic orientation may influence the implementation of the SFLL in secondary classrooms.; A multidimensional profile, consisting of a Beliefs Inventory, a Lesson Plan Analysis, a Belief Statement Analysis, and an in-depth interview was developed to assess the subject matter beliefs and curricular activity of 14 foreign language teachers tasked with developing a curriculum guide intended to implement the SFLL. Analyses were conducted to determine the extent to which their beliefs and activity were influenced by the identified behavioral, biological, and communicative paradigmatic orientations. The results show that paradigms influenced these teachers' conceptions of subject matter content knowledge and curricular activity in three distinct manners. In order to determine the extent to which existing beliefs and curricular activity might be related to the SFLL, data gathered suggested that the majority of these teachers interpreted the SFLL as being aligned with a single paradigm. |
