Investigation of the relationship between middle school English language teachers' curriculum awareness and fidelity

The requirement that teachers, who are at the center of curriculum implementation, have the competence to implement the curricula imposes duties and responsibilities on teachers in the implementation of the curricula. This charge reveals the importance of teachers' awareness of and fidelity to the curriculum. Based on this, the present research examines the relationship between middle school English language teachers' curriculum awareness and fidelity. In line with this purpose, the correlational screening model is used in the research. The universe of the research consists of 550 middle school English language teachers working in public and private schools in the central districts (Bağlar, Kayapınar, Yenişehir and Sur) of Diyarbakır province in the fall semester of the 2023-2024 academic year. The sample of the research consists of 323 middle school English language teachers determined through simple random sampling. The Curriculum Awareness Scale (CAS) and the Curriculum Fidelity Scale (CFS) are used as data collection tools. In addition to descriptive statistics, the Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal Wallis test and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient are used in the analysis of the data. The results of the research show that middle school English language teachers' levels of psychomotor awareness, cognitive awareness and affective awareness, which are sub-dimensions of curriculum awareness, and fidelity to the curriculum are high. It is concluded that gender, age, professional seniority, faculty of graduation, level of education and weekly course hours have no effect on psychomotor awareness, cognitive awareness and affective awareness. It is found that the school type has no effect on psychomotor awareness and affective awareness, but middle school English language teachers working in private schools have higher cognitive awareness than teachers working in public schools. It is noticed that gender, age, professional seniority, faculty of graduation and level of education do not have an effect on fidelity to the curriculum. However, it is determined that middle school English language teachers working in public schools have higher levels of fidelity to the curriculum than teachers working in private schools, and that teachers working for 20 hours or less have higher level of fidelity to the curriculum than teachers working for 21 hours or more. A moderately positive and significant relationship is found between sub-dimensions of curriculum awareness and curriculum fidelity. At the end of the research, there are suggestions such as obtaining teachers' opinions about the curriculum, conducting experimental studies with school type and weekly course hours as dependent variables, and conducting qualitative or mixed method studies on curriculum awareness and fidelity.