| Over the years, the English Education Program (EEP) in normal universities with its ownadvantage has produced hundreds and thousands of EFL teachers and made great contributionsto the development of education in China. With the deepening of educational reform, educationalpolicies have granted comprehensive universities the opportunities and options to run teachertraining/education programs. This has challenged the traditional single-purpose teachereducation institution of higher learning, and a more flexible and open system of teacherpreparation in our country is replacing the traditional one. Recently, the college or department offoreign studies, the college of international studies and the school of teacher education incomprehensive universities have been pooling their efforts in instruction and curriculum reformwith the aims of taking the lead in the fierce competition. They, besides offering the generalEnglish programs, take the cultivation of English personnel resources with multiple-orientationsas their future preparation models. Such circumstances bring about a keener competition thanever before, and the previous advantage of EEP has been weakened to some extent. At the sametime, the fast development of the New English Curriculum reform in secondary schools in ourcountry and the emerging trend of professionalism of teacher preparation have presented EEP innormal universities with serious challenges. More and more reform tasks in the fields ofcurricula and teaching have been posed for EEP. Curriculum is the medium to implement theteaching, the center link to fulfill the educational aims and training specifications, the importantcarrier of students' knowledge, the mirror to adapt to the changing society. To prepare studentswith a reasonable knowledge structure and qualifications to meet the needs of human resourcesmarkets, a sound curriculum system is very necessary. At present, some normal universities stillfollow the traditional curricular models, and their curriculum offering for EEP is based on anarrow scope with a heavy concentration on subject matter courses and literature courses whichfocus on knowledge imparting; the course module concerning educational studies is lacking in"teacher preparation feature", the curriculum offering is inflexible in management, and it lackscapacity to be sufficiently responsive to a changing environment. Therefore, curriculum reformhas become an urgent task for EEP in order to be in better alignment with society requirements.Curriculum optimization is an essential prerequisite and a breakthrough among thealternatives to EEP reform. The goal of curriculum optimization lies in attempting to construct ascientific and reasonable curriculum system in which all courses are organized in an orderly way,and various courses function well and promote each other to achieve internal coordination andpolymerization efficiency of curricula, for curriculum is one of the important means toimplement educational rationale, instruction and preparation patterns reform.Both the learner-oriented curriculum and humanistic curriculum cater to the learners'curricular needs and learners' self-development needs, advocate providing differentiatedcurricula and autonomous development opportunities for different learners, and encourage andsupport learners' overall development. Enlightened by these two perspectives we believe thatcurriculum offering of EEP, on the one hand, should guarantee to achieve its educational aimsand training specifications and, on the other hand, need to satisfy increasing curricular needs ofEEP students, and support students' self-actualization and develop them in an all-round way.What curricula do the students of EEP need? What suggestions for curriculum offering do theEFL teachers and TEFL specialists offer? What adjustments and innovations are necessary in ivorder to bring existing curricula into alignments with the professionalism trend of teacherpreparation? With these assump...
|
PDF Full Text Request