How To Deal With Hidden Curriculum In English Teaching

Hidden curriculum had fruitful research findings from the 1960s by many researchers. Kohlberg (1970) identifies the hidden curriculum as it bears on moral education and the role of the teacher in transmitting moral standards. Vallance (1983) defines the hidden curriculum as the one which bears non-academic but educationally significant consequences of schooling that occur systematically but are not made explicit at any level of the public rationales for education.In recent years, some domestic scholars also turn their attention to the issue of hidden curriculum. However, the main focus of most of the research done so far is on the moral and value transmission dimension of hidden curriculum. There is not much research on the hidden curriculum caused by the mismatches between various factors involved in the curriculum planning, designing and implementation process. This perspective of hidden curriculum is what the author of this paper intends to explore.With years of experience of teaching English at Taizhou Radio and Television University, the author has discovered some problems about the current curriculum of the university and tentatively proposes the hypothesis that those problems are caused by the hidden curriculum. If the author's hypothesis can be verified by his study, the research will shed some light on ways to improve the current curriculum of the university he is working for and it may also contribute to the development of a coherent curriculum for other Radio and Television Universities for they all share some common characteristics. In order to testify his hypothesis, the author of this paper conducts an empirical study in TZTVU by means of questionnaires and interviews. The results of the study indicates that various kinds of mismatches existing within the current curriculum.Enlightened by the constructivism theory, the author points out that the current curriculum needs innovation and then proposes process planning as an approach to innovate the curriculum. He also proposes a network-based collaborative teaching and learning mode as a means to achieve this purpose.