This article focuses on the learning affordances of different language and communication curricula in the world. For reasons of space, only two national education systems (Finland and Singapore) and their language and communication curricula are referred to. The accounts of national education systems consist of the identification of mechanisms operating in real-life contexts. A curriculum is a set of ideas, which is then subsequently transformed into an arrangement of teaching and learning practices. These transformations constitute marked changes in the form, nature or appearance of the curriculum between different time points; and they can be expressed as a series of stages, such as exploration and development, re-contextualisation, implementation, re-implementation and institutionalisation. What this also implies is that school curricula round the world are different in content, form, relations between their different parts, intended effects, prescriptive capacity and internal coherence. If we take one issue, that of language and communication standards, we can see that there are different models and we can conjecture that they will have different effects.