Classroom Pedagogical Practices At Two Different Settings: A Comparative Case Study

With the rapid development of society, economy, science and culture and the increasing process of globalization, demands for foreign language learners has become multiple as a result of frequent exchanges and cooperation in these fields between China and other countries. In order to meet the multiple demands of the foreign language professionals, universities have greatly increased their enrolment of university students majoring in English, especially many universities of science and technology which used to recruit only students of science or technological majors have begun to cater for students of English majors. This study, aims to examine pedagogical practices of English-major reading classrooms in the university of liberal arts and the university of science and engineering, and discover similarities and differences in terms of phases, types of talk, instructional focus, skill focus and student products. The classroom observation scheme NENU Pedagogy Coding Scheme (NENUPCS) was adopted in this study and hope the results of this study will be helpful for the future English-major teaching reform.Taking Krashen's comprehensible input, Swain's output hypothesis and Michael Long's interaction hypothesis are used as theoretical bases, this study observed reading classrooms of eight English-major teachers from two different types of universities, and totally ninety six periods were video recorded. The results reveal the respective teaching features of the two schools, and the similarities and differences in terms of the five categories in NENUPCS.Firstly, generally speaking, the English-major reading classrooms of BHU and NEDU are traditional and teacher-centered, with little teacher-student and student-student activities in classroom time. More than eighty percent of teachers'talk is curriculum-related, and no regulatory talk is observed. The whole class lecture, IRF account for half of the teaching time. Secondly, from the point of knowledge classification, teachers from the two schools all pay much attention to the text content and language form. Large amount of time is spent in text comprehension and structural analysis. Of all the observed data, there are no activities related to real language use and learning strategies. Both schools lay importance on oral output and no written outputs are found in the classroom time. Thirdly, NEDU classrooms appear to be more teacher-centered and teachers devote more time to language form, like pronunciation, words and grammar explanation, and so on. Fourthly, in terms of student products, BHU students tend to give more sustained and complete answers individually, while NEDU students are willing to answer questions together, usually several words or phrases with teacher's help. Fifthly, as the language level of English-major students from two different types of universities are quite different, NEDU students usually performed passively and less confident when they share the same teaching syllabus and textbooks with BHU students.