The Study On The Reform Of College Foreign Language Curriculum In General Education In China

In the age of globalization, foreign languages have become the communication bridge between the countries in the world. Our graduates have higher foreign language integrated applied abilities, the ability to understand and tolerate alien cultures and broad international vision, which could not only strengthen our international competitiveness and influence, but help improve the understanding and communication between China and the world and consolidate our cultural soft power, which is very meaningful to the construction of the peaceful and harmonious external environment of our country in the future. As a result, college foreign language curriculum is playing a more and more important role in our higher education now.However, our foreign language curriculum, which has been influenced by the talent cultivation mode of professional education, has always emphasized on the pure mastery of foreign language skills. Although since the beginning of the 21st century some research universities in our country have accepted general education as their educational philosophy and carried out their undergraduate general education curriculum reform, and it is articulated in College English Curriculum Requirements (2007) that College English is not only a language curriculum that provides basic knowledge about English, but also a capacity enhancement curriculum that helps students broaden their horizons and learn about different cultures in the world, the realistic problem demanding solution is how to incorporate foreign language curriculum into the system of general education curriculum, which can play its part as humanistic education and accomplish the mission of general education.The researcher starts from this realistic problem, puts forward the core research question after literature review:what reform approaches should our foreign language curriculum take under the guidance of the notion of general education? That is to say, as an important part of general education, how should our foreign language curriculum adjust its decision on the elements of goals, content, implementation and evaluation?In order to answer the research question wholly and thoroughly, the research adopts history research method, literature research method and case study to make multiple dimensional analysis on the history of general education and college foreign language curriculum, on the theoretical construction of college foreign language from the perspective of general education and on the practical experience of the foreign language curriculum in American general education, on the basis of which the researcher analyzes the current situation of the foreign language curriculum in our general education and its inner and outer contexts with the literature research method, comparison study, questionnaire and interview etc, in order to explore the reform approaches of our foreign language curriculum in the future.The research has arrived at the conclusion that from the perspective of general education, the college foreign language curriculum must follow the reform approaches as below to adjust its decisions:(1) The planners of college foreign language curriculum must change their educational notion, ensure college foreign language curriculum belong to the humanities and find its proper position in the system of general education. The plan should return to humanity, set a student-oriented value and take the advancement of students’ humanistic quality as its highest and final purpose. In addition, college foreign language curriculum should reconstruct plural, hierarchical and individualized purposes.(2) College foreign language curriculum must focus more on cultural literacy than on linguistic literacy, allowing students to enrich and develop their humanistic spirit. The planners should choose real materials which come from the realistic life or world and apply the 3P (Perspectives, Products and Practices) dimensional framework in the panning process of curricular content. Moreover, at its advanced level, the curriculum should incorporate the classic literature of the target language country into its content in order to shape students’ value and promote their aesthetic appreciation, thereby realizing its function of humanistic education.(3) College foreign language curriculum should build a continuum from language-driven curriculum to content-driven curriculum; it must follow the principle of integrity to generate construction of its horizontal structure, integrating with the other curriculum in general education, with the society and with students; it must take problems or issues as the starting point of designing multiple course types.(4) College foreign language curriculum should think highly of students’ experience, setting up a model of instruction, which takes classroom instruction as the core and extra-curricular activities, tutorial, web community and international communication as the axis. This model of instruction combines students’various experiences and opportunities of foreign language study in the university, integrating formal study with informal study, the study in the real world and that in the virtual world, the study within the campus with that outside the campus, and the common study with the individual one, therefore developing students’language knowledge, skills and humanistic quality comprehensively. Moreover, under the guidance of eclecticism, the curriculum should use the mainstream communicative approaches flexibly and preferentially; its teaching methods should shift from how to teach to how to learn after learning about students’characteristics.(5) College foreign language curriculum should respect students’ differences and take students’all-round development as the fundamental aim of learning outcome evaluation. Simultaneously, its evaluations indexes should be more plural, adopting and valuing such indexes embodying students’comprehensive quality as positive learning attitudes, cross-cultural communication ability, broad international views, critical thinking and correct cultural values. In the evaluation approaches, it should not only reduce quantitative evaluation like tests or exams and increase qualitative evaluation, but synthesize diverse human-oriented formative evaluation approaches such as electronic portfolios, discussion or interview between teachers and students, students’self-evaluation and peer-evaluation and reflective writing etc.