Research On General Education Curriculum Offerings Of Foreign Language Instituets

The opinion that foreign language institutes should improve the implementationof general education has become the consensus of the foreign language professionals,due to the utilitarian tendency of foreign language education and neglecting foreignlanguage majors’ humanistic education as well as over-all abilities. In recent years,foreign language institutes have made certain achievements in the project of generaleducation, however, some problems still exist such as the blur definition of generaleducation and curriculum goals, unreasonable curriculum, etc. The thesis studies theconditions of general education curriculum offerings in foreign language instituteswith the application of literature review, documentary-researching method andcase-investigating method.The thesis can be divided into eight parts. The first part explains thesignificance of the research and introduces the present domestic and foreign studysituation as well as the main thoughts and methods of study.The second part analyzes the characteristics of the implementation of generaleducation in foreign language colleges through the following three aspects: the mainreasons, contributions and limitations and the basic conditions of the implementationof general education in foreign language institutes.According to the types and main characteristics of general education courses aswell as the principles of choosing the content elaborated in the third part, thefollowing two parts systematically studies the prevalent problems in the generaleducation curriculum in foreign language institutes. The research focuses on thegeneral education curriculum of four foreign language institutes: Beijing ForeignStudies University, Shanghai International Studies University, Guangdong Universityof Foreign Studies and the Sichuan International Studies University. According to thedetailed analyses of the credit composition for undergraduate students, the proportionand content areas of general education curriculum in the aforementioned four foreign language institutes given by diagrams, the present study discusses such problems likethe objectives, the structure and the content of the general education curriculumsystem with relevant and reliable data.The sixth part introduces the situations of the general education curriculum andcurriculum offerings of seven universities (three in China and four in foreigncountries). The valuable experiences summarized from the seven universities shedvaluable light on the improvement of general education and the eighth part proposes aplan of general education curriculum offerings for foreign language institutes.In the last part, the innovative findings of this thesis are stated briefly andlimitation of the present study and suggestions for the following study are presented.