A Research On Cultivating Educational Professional Competence Of English Majors In Higher Normal Universities

Along with the continuous development of quality education and reform of English curriculum, 21st century brings forward more and more requirements to English teachers. Normal universities and colleges shoulder cultivating qualified English teachers for basic education. For decades of years, normal universities and colleges have trained numerous English teachers. However, their educational pattern has nothing different with non-normal universities. That is to say, these normal universities and colleges haven't fashioned their own features. Under the condition of the reform of English curriculum, more and more abuse of English major education in normal universities and colleges emerged, such as narrow knowledge, mixed educational beliefs, devoid of psychological endurance and weak educational professional competence. Nowadays, under the circumstances of the reform of basic education and teacher professionalization, educational professional competence cultivating of English majors in normal universities and colleges has been put forward in front of English educators.Due to the lack of corresponding research between English major of normal universities and English teaching of basic education, a big gap between the present status of English major and the development requirements of basic education has come into being. Take the English department of Tianshui Normal University as an example, its cultivation of English majors has the following deficiencies: a) So far as the educational objective is concerned, less is taken into account about its own educational conditions, so blindly emphasizes training compound talents to meet with multiple vocations, b) Concurrent model of training teachers has been adopted with the result of sacrificing teacher-training characteristics because of stressing technicality, c) So far as its curriculum design is concerned, more regards are put on English major courses and theories, compared with educational courses and practice. Therefore, if normal universities and colleges like Tianshui Normal University do not pay more attention to their reform and construction, actively acclimatize themselves to the reform of basic education, their 'products' will never follow the modem Englishteaching and the rapid development of basic education.We should regards English majors of normal universities and colleges as compound talents as well. Its model is "English plus education". Obviously, this kind of compounding is characterized by educational competence training. As a conclusion, English major in normal universities and colleges should mainly cultivate the following educational professional competence: 1) cognitive competence; 2) reflective competence; 3) creative and designing competence; 4) implementing competence; 5) observation competence; 6) discourse competence; 7) interactive competence; 8) group monitoring competence; 9) presentation and operation competence; 10) research competence.