A Tentative Study Of Business English Curriculum Design For The Newly-Built Local Universities

With the development of the economic globalization, the international communication on society, politics, economy, trade and culture is getting more and more close. Therefore, the Business English talents who are experts both in mastering at least one language and some specific knowledge in international business are great in need (Weng Fengxiang:2009). Business English as a major has been greatly developed with the great need of the talents. In2007, The Ministry of Education firstly granted the Business English Major in University of International Business and Economics, and then another two universities---Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade have also been granted the Business English Major in the following years. Up to the year2011, there are32universities having been granted the Business English Major in China, which further promotes the development of Business English. As to the construction of Business English Major, the curriculum design has become one of the most important issues. How to design scientific and" reasonable Business English courses determines the fulfillment of training Business English talents.Referring to the source theory of Business English, there are not any unified understandings,. Chen Jianping (2010) argues that the main theory of Business English comes from ESP, Applied Linguistics, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Economics and language. According to Weng Fengxiang (2009), the perspectives of Business English can be summed up to:the perspective of education:the perspective of linguistics; the perspective of international business; the perspective of cross-cultural communication and the perspective of philosophy. Wang Lifei (2011) argues that the main theoretical system of Business English comes from ESP, EBP, Applied Linguistics and cross-cultural communication and so on. In spite of the different understandings of the source theory of Business English, most scholars of Business English accept ESP as the theory of Business English. In this paper, the author prefers ESP as the core theory to guide the BE curriculum design. ESP was firstly put forward by the applied linguists in western countries in the1960s. With the end of the Second World War, the global economy was recovered and developed. The rapid development of science and technology brought more and more communication and cooperation in most perspectives among the world. Meanwhile, English, as the international language, plays an important role which caused a boom in learning English. In this process, the purposes of learning English are becoming various than before. The English language learning has gradually combined with the need of profession, education and job hunting. In order to meet the need of the different purposes of learning English, ESP theory came into being. ESP theory is the requirement of the development of world economy, and also it is one of the biggest breakthroughs in the development of linguistics. The core of ESP theory is to analyze and meet the different needs of the different English learners. Therefore, ESP courses must be on the basis of making need analysis.Since1990s, with the university enrollment expansion, more and more universities or colleges have been established in order to accommodate the growing number of students. These universities or colleges mainly come from the merge of some schools for professional training or uploading directly. The scale of students has been, greatly enlarged. These universities or colleges are usually called Newly-built Local Universities (Sheng Zhengfa:2010). These kinds of universities or colleges usually located in the local cities (with only several lie in provincial cities) and they are funded mainly by the local cities. The students are mainly from the local cities (Zhang Tianshe:2010). According to the statistics, there are about200universities like these in China. As the new force of high education in China (Wu Qidi:2001), these universities have their own specialties, in teachers, students, management, fund and so on. Considering these limitations, these universities need to work out their own ways to develop Business English.This paper intends to discuss the similarities and differences on Business English curriculum design of the8newly-built local universities in Shandong Province and try to find the basic element courses for the newly-built local universities. Firstly, it gives the current situation of Business English curriculum design of the8newly-built local universities in Shandong Province, and then makes a contrast analysis between the curriculum designs in these8universities. At last, this paper suggests the basic BE courses for the newly-built local universities. On the way of developing Business English, besides drawing lessons from other universities, the newly-built local universities must conduct a complete need analysis of the students, the local cities, the enterprises and so on. And then try to develop their specialty courses to meet the requirements of the society.