Starting points : paradigms in mother-tongue education

Mother-tongue education curriculum is in a constant state of debate. Indeed, the field may be accurately characterised as polyparadigmatic. We use three specific sets of analyses to discuss the curriculum variety of the field: ten Brinke’s classification of dimensions, Matthijssen’s rationality theory and Englund’s concept of competing meta-discourses. We then conceptualise the field in terms of paradigm competition, specifically discussing academic, developmental, communicative and utilitarian paradigms. We finish with a case study of the historiography of curriculum paradigms in English.