On Optimizing College Curriculum Structure

What kind of curriculum the college students should be provided with has been the key problem to be solved by colleges. In order to solve this problem, people have to know the answers to the following question:in the process of optimizing college curriculum, what idea and what principles should be followed? By taking English majors'curriculum as the example, this doctoral dissertation argues that the answers to the question is that colleges should optimize curriculum by following the idea of all-round development and the principles reflecting the idea of full development.Taking English majors'curriculum as the example, the dissertation has firstly discussed the problem of stressing instrumental value in optimizing college curriculum. Based on the discussion, the dissertation has studied the idea of all-round development from both personal angle and interpersonal angle. It has argued that if studied from personal angle, all-round development means the harmonious development between the aspects of factors, such as moral qualities, intellectual ability, physical fitness and aesthetic appreciation, and the aspects of relation factors, such as the relationship between individual and nature, the relationship between individuals and the relationship between the individual and himself. If studied from interpersonal angle, all-round development is the accord development of universality and individuality, which means that the universality and individuality coexist in the individual's development process, in which the development of universality does not depress the development of the individuality but provides the wider and stronger development basis; meanwhile, the development of individuality does not negate the development of universality but provides good development conditions for it. The law of accord development of universality and individuality is that both universality and individuality in accordance shows the diachronically co-development and synchronically relative-development. Then, on the basis, the dissertation has studied the presentation of full development on college curriculum.The dissertation has proposed that when optimizing curriculum, colleges should follow the general principle, which is carrying out the idea of all-round development through the whole process, and the specific principles, which are the principles of objectives optimization, the principles of course content optimization and the principles of optimizing learning activity models.More specifically, the principle of objectives optimization includes three sub-principles that are completeness, faithfulness and the maximization of individuality development. The sub-principle of completeness refers to that all the basic factors consisting of man's all-round development should be designed in the objectives; the principle of faithfulness means that the relation between the sub-objectives in objectives should be optimized according to the original relationship between human and human's production; the principle of maximization of individuality development is that the standards in the objectives should not designed according to the too high level but according to the relatively low level so that students have more time and energy to spend in developing their individualities.The principles of course content optimization include three sub-principles that are the principle of completeness, the principle of compound integration and infiltrative integration, and the principle of stressing individuality. What should be particularly mentioned here is that the integration of infiltration and that of combination have the same agreement point, that is the sameness among different courses, but the integration results are different in these cases that infiltration does not change the features of the courses but combination does. Both infiltration and combination will promote the curriculum function of cultivating qualified person.The principles of optimizing learning activity models includes three sub-principles that are being clear about the learning subject and object, the completeness of learning activities, and adopting the integration mechanism of hierarchical matching. Here, the integration mechanism is a kind of matching integration among learning activity ways and the course objective, course content, as well as the state of students. Meanwhile, this kind of integration is of universality and individuality at different levels. One of the results is the universality integration body at macro-layer and middle-layer, which is the basis of the individuality integration at micro-layer. And the individuality integration on the basis of the universality integration body is the mechanism of learning activity ways. Its effective work requires the learning activity ways which can exert students'emotion owns the priority in the process of universality integrating. At the same time, enough freedom should be left for the students to make the individuality integration that is what students have to do.In the last chapter, the dissertation has illustrated the value of the above theories by dissecting the curriculum now used by English majors of Hunan Normal University.The research approaches applied to the study are mainly literature search, investigation, comparative study, illustration, etc.