Status Quo And Reforms On The Lesson Plan For Teaching English Majors In Private Colleges

In June,2001, Chinese Ministry of Education issued Curriculum Reform Outline of the Basic Education.(Outline will be addressed in short.) A craze for curriculum reform was triggered thereby. It challenges classroom teaching and personnel training, puts a higher expectation on teachers' teaching methodology in high education as well. The Outline points out, "We should change the tendency of overemphasizing knowledge conduction; attach importance to forming positive learning attitudes; integrate the process of learning to learn and forming correct values with the course of attaining basic knowledge and basic skills."The outline puts great emphasis on students' learning attitudes, processes and methods, makes it a key point as to how to guide students to learn, insists the teachers focus on students' emotions and attitudes.Lesson plans play a key role in teaching practice. "A lesson plan is a framework of a lesson in which teachers make advance decisions about what they hope to achieve and how they would like to achieve it. In other words, teachers need to think about the aims to be achieved, materials to be covered, activities to be organized, and techniques and resources to be used in order to achieve aims of the lesson." (Wangqiang 2006:51)A good preparation premises a good lecture. It reflects a teacher's teaching ideas and teaching competence. Therefore, a lesson plan plays a decisive role in classroom teaching. Apart from that, in the present situation of curriculum reform, a lesson plan is expected to display the teacher's ideas on how to deal with textbooks, how to analyze students, how to boost students' learning interest, learning ability and emotional value in teaching.Traditional lesson plans feed students with too much knowledge but ignore their acquisition process; pay great attention to the analysis of teaching materials but oversee the analysis of students; in the teaching practice, traditional plans are formalized but fail to play any functional role.The researcher did a systematic study on lesson plans in her teaching practice. This paper sets out to examine the shortcomings of traditional plans in Chinese private colleges; to enlist the theoretical support for a reform on lesson plans; to test whether the new plan will function positively in fostering students' English comprehensive competence, learning interest, learning ability and affectionate orientation.The researcher formulated the outline of this paper based on her consultation of many literature and related researches:she firstly reflects the demerits in traditional plans. She then designed a new model of the lesson plan with the support of some learning theories. This paper provides two examples of the new model. In comparison with the traditional plans, the new plan has the following traits:an analysis of students'cognition is added; some impractical or formal elements are deleted and concrete designs of classroom activities are included; focus is shifted from targets and results to procedures and processes.Samples in this empirical study are the third year English majors (Class Three and Class Five), from City College of Wuhan University of Science and Technology (WUST). The researcher teaches the two classes with traditional plans and new plans respectively. The experiment lasts from week 8 to week 17 for 40 merits. After analyzing data from the pre-test, post-test and questionnaires, conclusions can be drawn as follows:the new plan failed to improve subjects'English comprehensive competence; but with clearly stated objectives to boost students'abilities and affection, with different class activities designed for specific teaching objectives, the new plans clearly played a role in training students' self-learning ability and positive attitudes. Thus, the new plan helps to facilitate the curriculum reform and fulfill the long-term goal of quality education.