Status And Countermeasures Of Undergraduate English Majors’ Humanistic Quality

The humanistic education of English majors should not be ignored for basically tworeasons. Firstly, it is decided by the humanistic and liberal nature of English as a discipline aswell as a kind of human language which requires that more emphasis should be given on thehumanistic function of language than the instrumental for real language learners. Secondly,Chinese undergraduate English majors are mostly labeled as “mouthpiece” between twolanguages with “absence of analytical thinking capacity”. This criticism deeply reflect thatresearchers neglect that English is a rich education system of integrating humanism education,humanities education, humane education and language skill quality.In consequence, under the impulsion of several factors as undergraduate teachingevaluation and English teaching reform, many researchers have begun to emphasize thehumanistic education of English majors in recent years. In reality, the TEM8exam has added“General Knowledge” since2005. Thus it is extremely vital to fully understand and explorethe status of English majors’ humanistic education that plays a key role in implementation ofhumanistic education for enhancing students’ overall humanistic quality.While the previous studies of humanistic education and humanistic quality were mostlybased on either on the pure experience and understanding or on theoretical analysis whichlack data support, the author attempts to study English majors’ situation of humanistic qualityfrom a new angle and tries to innovate the methodology.The study takes the humanistic education as theoretical foundation,351English majorsof Department of Foreign Languages of Northwest A&F University as research object, andadopts methods of questionnaire survey and literature study to analyze the status of the threelevels of the humanistic quality (humanistic knowledge, humanistic spirit and humanisticbehavior). The study aims to provide certain reference for students’ comprehensivedevelopment and improve the teaching quality of English major by using SPSS21.0to do thedescriptive analysis and chi square test.The research questions are as follows:1) What is the status quo of English majors’ humanistic quality?2) If there is the deficiency of humanistic quality, what causes the deficiency?The results of the study show that the English majors’ humanistic quality is weak. The specific research results could be concluded from two perspectives. One is the lack ofhumanistic knowledge and the other is the utilitarian tendency of values. There exist mainlythree reasons for the deficiency of students’ humanistic quality which are the syllabus’sobscure definition on inter-disciplinary foreign languages talents and the instrumentality andutilitarianism of the curriculum. Based on the research results, the author put forward threeeffective strategies including optimizing curriculum, advocating classics reading andutilization of second classroom activities for humanistic education improve students’humanistic quality.Finally, this paper discusses the limitations of the research and recommendations forfurther study. The research sample is limited and not large enough which makes the researchresult fail to generate a comprehensive picture of English majors’ humanistic quality. Acomparative study between English majors and non-English majors will be preferred. Or theanalysis study on English majors’ humanistic quality of a certain area or certain type ofuniversities. Besides, owing to the author’s lack of teaching practice, the countermeasures putforward in the light of existing problems lack the support of practice. Further study isexpected to test or verify the effectiveness of the strategies in teaching practice by using themethodology of diachronic study.