A Study On English Education Students' Satisfaction With Freshman Seminar

English education freshman seminar is a relatively new course for undergraduate English education majors.It embodies the common features of freshman seminar as a shared course discussed by freshmen and professors.Group discussion among students and teachers,students'active engagement and inquiry learning are necessities in freshman seminar.As a freshman seminar,heuristic teaching,independent learning and research-based study are of great significance in the process of teaching,which means teachers face a much higher demand and also students need to change their stereotype in learning.English education freshman seminar fully represents the features of the reform of undergraduate English education.Recently there have been a lot of researches reporting on the features of freshman seminar in China and abroad and exploring the practice of freshman seminar in domestic universities,but the studies of evaluation of teaching quality of freshman seminar,especially the studies of satisfaction on English education freshman seminar are rare.In order to improve the quality of English education freshman seminar and facilitate the practice of freshman seminar in colleges and universities in China as well as enrich the studies of freshman seminar,the present research aims to study freshman's satisfaction with English education freshman seminar.The participants of this study are 110 freshmen and 4 teachers of freshman seminar in the school of foreign languages of a normal university.The methods adopted for this research include questionnaire,interview and textual analysis.Through questionnaire,the author collects the data related students' satisfaction with freshman seminar from the perspectives of course design,teacher's teaching,teaching content,learning effects and learning resources.Besides,the more comprehensive information about students'satisfaction of freshman seminar is gained by means of interview and textual analysis.The results of the collected data show that there do exist a high level of students'satisfaction of English education freshman seminar in general.It's found that students prefer to choose the teaching location flexibly and are satisfactory with formative assessment.Teachers' question design is satisfactory on the whole and most teachers of freshman seminar can actively guide students to freely express their thoughts and inspire them to think deeply.But students are not satisfied with the amount of assignments,teachers' feedback on homework and the interaction with teachers out of class.With regard to teaching content,students are very interested in the topics,which are learner styles,language learning strategies,university learning and learning resources and tools.It is relatively difficult for freshmen to grasp the basic English skills related to listening,speaking,reading and writing and the way teacher's teaching and the atmosphere of classroom play a significant part.The contents of specialized courses should not cover too much professional knowledge,but add something interesting and close to students'daily life into the professional courses.Students' sharing of their life and learning planning can play a significant role in peer learning and teachers should invite more top teachers and senior students to share their experience.In terms of learning effects,most of students can achieve a good result in the ability of scientific research,recognition of English education major,role transition and learning objectives and future career development.As for learning resources,university should give great impetus to the construction and improvement of cloud platform and deepen students' consciousness of independent studying with really understanding and applying autonomy learning even without teachers' supervision.The outcomes of the present research are expected to be noticed by not only teachers giving English education freshman seminar but also other teachers undertaking freshman seminar so as to improve the quality of undergraduate education and promote the practice of freshman seminar in China.