Analysis On Text Of Full-time Master Of Education Program In Teaching English As Foreign Language-Based On Tyler Rationale

Along with the 21st century in which China’s basic education has rapidly developed, the demand for high-qualified professional primary and secondary teachers is ballooning. Against this backdrop, the full-time M.Ed in TEFL was given birth.As a new born educational program in university, M.Ed in TEFL has attracted a lot of interest from an increasing number of researchers. However, at present, the number of studies on M.Ed in TEFL is limited at home and abroad, let alone the significant ones. What’s more, studies on the texture or documentary form of such program mainly focus on superficial comparisons or analyses of items in program documents, which lack the support of an authoritative curriculum theory or a scientific standard. Therefore, this paper is trying to set the classic Tyler Rationale as the theoretical basis or standard to analyze the rationality of M.Ed in TEFL program texts of six normal universities that are affiliated to the Ministry of Education. Since the curriculum design model proposed in Tyler Rationale consists of four processes: the identification of educational objectives, the selection and organization of learning experiences and the development of evaluative tools; this paper analyzes the program documents from these four aspects and answers four research questions as follows:According to Tyler Rational,(1) Is the identification of these six universities’ educational objectives proper?(2) Can the selected experiences or courses of these six universities fulfill the objectives?(3) Dose the organization of these experiences or courses follow the three criteria in Tyler Rationale?(4) Are the evaluation methods proper to reflect the desirable changes in the student’s behavior?After analysis, results are found as follows:(1) The identification of educational objectives is of certain rationality which reflects to a certain degree the two sources for objective identification in Tyler Rationale:society and subject matter. However, another source learners themselves is not paid much attention.(2) The course selection of these six universities more or less violates the five principles for experiences selection in Tyler Rationale, which is not conducive to the fulfillment of the educational objectives.(3) Little attention is paid to the organization of learning experience in the six program documents.(4) The evaluation of each course and the teaching practice is irrational, and the evaluation method through graduation thesis is not enough to reflect changes in students’ behaviors especially in their practical teaching ability.At last, to solve these problems, some suggestions are proposed in this paper, which can be also referred to by other colleges that will set similar M.Ed programs such as conducting an investigation about students’ interest and needs, about local society outside the college to design a program with school characteristics; selecting learning experiences strictly according to the educational objectives; constructing a systematic and effective mechanism of teaching practice; improving the construction of optional courses and courses of case study and topic study; paying attention to the continuity, sequence, and integration of the content of the selected courses; and enriching the evaluation methods.