A Study Of Curriculum Design For M.Ed In English

Curriculum design plays so significant a role in a teaching program that a reasonable and scientific curriculum design is demanded in each teaching program. It can affect some certain batch even the whole batch of all the learners of a major. In recent years, the focus on planners’ or designers’ simple arrangement of teaching contents and structures in curriculum design has changed into learners’ learning needs. These needs include both objective information and subjective information about learners. And these information may answer what kind of knowledge and skills that learners intend to achieve, what kind of knowledge and skills are learners interested in, what kind of learning methods they think can be useful in mastering these knowledge and skills, what kind of teaching methods and learning resources they think they need, and what kind of evaluation methods are reasonable to evaluate their performance in their learning process. In recent years, more and more attention is attracted to M.Ed because of the needs of our society as well as its curriculum design.This research is to study the curriculum design for M.Ed in English in some normal universities. The present research is expected to know more about M.Ed’s learning needs and offer some useful suggestions for curriculum design that could better fulfill the requirements of M.Ed in English in colleges for nationalities. The following three questions are addressed: 1. Are M.Ed and teachers satisfied with the current curriculum design? 2.What problems does the present curriculum design exist? 3. What do the students expect to learn during their post-graduate study?Two questionnaires are designed to get the answers to these three questions under the guidance of theories of needs analysis and curriculum design. They are distributed to 85 M.Ed of Grade 2013 and some teachers in Chongqing Normal University and some other normal universities. In addition, some M.Ed who have graduated are invited to do an interview. And data gathered from the two questionnaires are analyzed by SPSS 20.0(Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).The research results of the present study show that:(1) Generally speaking, most majority of M.Ed and teachers are satisfied with the current curriculum design. The existing curriculum could basically meet M.Ed’s needs from aspects of teaching methods and evaluation. Learners’ needs, which are not so satisfactorily met, focuses on the teachers’ quality, current learning resources and the implementing of practical courses.(2) The main problem in the current curriculum design is the arrangement of practice from the aspects of time, proportion, implementing, ways and cohesion with theory.(3) In terms of their learning needs, apart from the basic theoretical knowledge about teaching, M.Ed intend to learn some more professional knowledge of English, including linguistics, cultural knowledge and literature. In terms of skills, besides the in-classroom teaching skills, they also expect to improve their organizing ability and ability of managing a class.Aiming at solving these problems existing in the current curriculum design for M.Ed in English, three suggestions has been put forward. Firstly, more series of lectures should be offered to both M.Ed and teachers in order that they all get to know the current situation of the basic education. Secondly, courses about professional knowledge of English should be added into the current curriculum properly in order to satisfy learners’ needs, especially for those who were not English majors before. Thirdly, in order to decrease the problems of practice, colleges may cooperate with some primary and secondary schools to make M.Ed practice in time after study of theoretical knowledge. By doing this, time of practice for them to improve their teaching skills will be adequate and seasonable. In this way, cultivation of M.Ed can really make sense to improve their practical ability.