A Study On English Major Curriculum Development In Universities Of Science And Technology

English language education for English majors in China aims at training interpreters, translators, teachers, researchers and administrators for institutions of higher learning, public or private organizations, business and trading companies, and research institutions, as these professionals are required to have a good command of English and a sufficient foundational knowledge in humanities and social sciences. However, the current English major students trained with traditional teaching methods can hardly meet the increasing demand of our social and economic development. At the end of the twentieth century, the National Supervising Committee of Foreign Language Majors has realized the problems of the foreign language major and point out explicitly in the work program,"We have fully recognized that it is high time to change the lagging situation of the reform in college foreign language major education and reform needs to be carried out profoundly and entirely…"(Dai Weidong, 1998:6-7). The training of combining language skills with professional knowledge is great progress compared with the training aim of pure language skills. Nevertheless, there still exist problems of various kinds and the cultivation aim falls far behind what the society requires of foreign language talents as well as the expectation of students. As there is a sharp conflict between students'needs and social demand on English learning on the one hand, and the status quo of Chinese English major education on the other, it is high time to reform the present English major curriculum.In this research, developing a new English major curriculum is justified from both theoretical and empirical grounds. Through the review of some theories concerned about curriculum development (Taba 1962; Skilbeck 1984; Brown 2001) and needs analysis, a reshaped English major curriculum is put forward based on the reform of curriculum development in a key university of science and technology in China. The summarization of the existing problems in the cultivation of English majors and a brief survey of ELT/FLT curriculum development in foreign countries as well have led to some interesting findings in ELT curriculum development in China. In the light of its specific circumstances, an empirical study is conducted among the undergraduate and graduate students in four universities employing a mixed-method research by both quantitative and qualitative approaches, such as student questionnaires and interviews with teachers and students so as to identify what the students'needs are and explore the detailed problems in curriculum design. Based on the needs analysis, a new curriculum characterized by modularization comes to light,...