Teacher sensemaking and adaptive enactment of curriculum reform based on the CEFR in Malaysian secondary ESL classrooms

CEFR implementation in Malaysia remains uneven despite its promise to strengthen proficiency-based, skills-oriented, and communicative English language teaching. Although previous studies have documented teachers’ positive perceptions and implementation challenges, less is known about how teachers interpret, negotiate, and adapt the CEFR-aligned curriculum in everyday classroom practice. Addressing this gap, this qualitative case study examined how secondary school ESL teachers in Petaling Utama, Malaysia, made sense of and adaptively enacted the CEFR-aligned curriculum. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with ten ESL teachers from three government secondary schools, comprising five novice and five senior teachers. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analysed thematically using deductive and inductive coding. Three findings emerged. First, teachers viewed CEFR as a structured framework for organising learning objectives, language skills, and communicative activities, although some understood it mainly as a syllabus guide rather than a proficiency-based framework. Second, teachers negotiated implementation through classroom realities, including low and mixed learner proficiency, limited instructional time, unfamiliar cultural content, examination pressure, and guided learner autonomy. Third, novice and senior teachers reported differences in adaptive enactment. Novice teachers mainly described task selection and difficulty adjustment, whereas senior teachers reported a broader range of strategies such as scaffolding, differentiation, intervention, motivation, and low-anxiety communicative support. The study shows that CEFR enactment is shaped by teacher sense-making, classroom realities, professional experience, and local classroom practice conditions.