| Along with the internationalization of politics,economy and culture,postgraduates are increasingly involved in activities which require appropriate English proficiency in reading professional documents,listening to specialized courses or speeches,writing academic papers,attending international academic conferences or seminars and studying abroad.However,most of them have certain difficulties in doing such kind of things in English.In order to reach requirements of the state and society on personnel training under the background of higher education internationalization,it is a must to reform English courses for postgraduates,changing from language-based general English to profession-based academic English.Firstly, this study illustrates the basic concepts and necessity of academic English. And after working over piles of scholars' periodicals and books published at home or abroad, I make a literature review of previous studies from aspects of curriculum, teaching, student needs, linguistics, textbooks, external reference and evaluation and assessment. Based on enough theoretical knowledge, I compile a questionnaire named a survey on English curriculum for non-English major postgraduates in Jiangxi colleges and universities, which is divided into three parts: part one is an investigation of demographic characteristics including gender, university, grade and subject category, following by the second part, current situation investigation of public English courses for postgraduates. The last part consists of student needs, English proficiency and advice on curriculum in term of academic English. The survey shows that taken the colleges and universities in Jiangxi province as an example, there are some problems in the teaching process of General English-oriented public English classes, which fail to meet widespread needs of academic English among postgraduates and are urgently in need of reform. On the one hand, it is necessary to improve the existing curriculum teaching mode; on the other hand, to meet the requirements of the society, colleges and students, academic English courses should be augmented on the basis of available general English course system.By analyzing the questionnaire results and drawing lessons from domestic and foreign colleges in curriculum and teaching, I propose an idea of constructing an academic English course system, which contains such measures: firstly, language learning and academic activities should be combined together; secondly, both exempt and elective English courses coexist; thirdly, public English courses are content-based, composed of general English and academic English; fourthly, strong cooperation need to be strengthened between language teachers and profession teachers; lastly, to speed up the construction of teaching materials and corpus is a pressing demand. Meanwhile, in view of the distribution of academic English requirements among postgraduates, along with their English proficiency, and the internationalization of colleges and universities in Jiangxi, two types of academic English course are advocated to be offered, which are academic English writing and academic English communication. A further study demonstrates that postgraduates have more pressing needs in academic English reading and writing. Therefore, particular measures on the teaching of academic English writing are rendered in order to offer practical and beneficial references for the opening, implementation and promotion of academic English courses in Jiangxi province. |
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