ABSTRACT
In recent years leading curriculum theorists have been calling upon educators to move away from the dominant technicist understanding of the world, and to reorient themselves to a world grounded in the dwelling place of humans. Efforts to understand these human dwelling places have led to a beginning of awareness that the lived experiences of people are made opaque by a conceptual sheath that allows only a prosaic understanding of life-as-lived. There is now an urgent need to penetrate this sheath in an effort to disclose the “lebenswelt.” Guided by a phenomenological interest, curriculum theorists have begun to consider language as the ground that makes possible the revelation of the life experiences of humans. It is an opportune moment, therefore, to explore language as a way of understanding curriculum orientations, using second-language school programs as the paradigm.
