A Study On College English Curriculum Design In The New Era

The New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics sees both opportunities and challenges for College English(CE)curriculum in terms of the national development strategies,higher education,foreign language learning,international education and many other aspects.It is necessary to review what in CE curriculum has been achieved since CE courses undertake the major task of foreign languages teaching in higher education,and it is also important to investigate the new changes of CE curriculum's needs and the current state of CE curriculum design,so as to facilitate CE courses to provide a better service for the national development,discipline construction,and students' learning.This dissertation proposes two questions for research:(1)What needs do CE curriculum face now?(2)What is the current state of CE curriculum in higher education?To deal with Question 1,this paper makes a literature review to define what CE curriculum is and what CE curriculum design is.And based on the investigation into the findings of CE curriculum design studies in the past three years,this paper concludes that the study on CE curriculum design in this dissertation will be handled from two aspects,that is,investigations of curriculum needs and the current state of CE curriculum design(objects,contents and structure).This paper establishes an investigation framework for the needs analysis of CE curriculum,which results from the literature review of needs analysis theories and relevant researches on CE curriculum design.Meanwhile,this paper outlines the key aspects of current needs facing CE curriculum with the help of the research data in this filed in the past three years,which serves as the foundation of what this paper intends to do next.With the above investigation framework,this paper explores the needs of CE curriculum from three aspects: requirements for all undergraduates' disciplines in China with the method of text analysis;the online investigation of undergraduates with the questionnaire made by this paper on the basis of the above research data,and the requirements made by employers for the prospective undergraduates with the data from the job websites.After analyzing the data from the above investigations,this paper finds: firstly,in terms of objectives,CET certificates are most valued bystudents and employers but neglected by all disciplinary requirements,some of which place a high demand on the students' English proficiency.Secondly,in the aspect of contents,English competence comes first for the students and employers,although it is as equal important as English knowledge for all disciplinary requirements;oral English is the most important for the three parties involved,though they have different opinions for other linguistic contents;disciplinary English,especially its reading part,is very popular now,even though general English is more fundamental in cultivating students' language proficiency;cross-cultural English is emphasized by some disciplines but it receives little attention from students and employers.Thirdly,with regard to structure,CE courses do not share a close connection with each other when disciplinary English and cross-cultural English are more important in the eyes of all parties involved.For the research question 2,this paper makes an investigation into the current state of CE curriculum design in two parts.On the one hand,the CE curriculum design of the top universities in China has been studied,with the Chinese curriculum design in the UK and US top universities as the counterpart so as to help better understand the CE curriculum state in China.On the other hand,this paper does teacher interviews to prepare a questionnaire for CE teachers so as to investigate the CE curriculum design in other universities in China.When the above work has completed,this paper makes a detailed analysis of the problems facing the CE curriculum design in China.These problems are as following.Firstly,CE curriculum design is faced with the problems of diversified needs in terms of objects,requirement changes in terms of linguistic competence and individual differences in terms of the same needs.Secondly,CE curriculum design has to meet the high demand of English language from some disciplines and CE courses do not work as a team with clearly defined responsibilities for each of them.Thirdly,there are many courses in CE curriculum but they are homogeneous in content and their quality has much room for improvement.After the discussion of these problems,this paper makes suggestions on how to design CE curriculum.The findings and conclusions in this paper will facilitate a better understanding of the needs and problems which curriculum management,researchers,and teachers will meet in the process of designing CE curriculum.This dissertation will also benefit those who would like to do research in the field of CE curriculum design by offering them a tentative research approach and it will help to make a reasonable CEcurriculum design to meet different demands of students with the considerations for both the long term and immediate term needs.The research findings and conclusions are tentative in terms of the scope of investigations and other research limits,such as the researcher's time and effort.Therefore,this paper hopes that more academic efforts in the future could be made for the research and development of CE curriculum design.