Research On The Reform Of Foreign Language Teaching In Primary And Secondary Schools In The Context Of The Scottish Excellence Curriculum Reform

To follow the development trend of politics and economy and to meet the demand of higher quality of education,Scottish government launched the Curriculum for Excellence in 2004.Foreign languages teaching,as one of the parts in the basic education,thus becomes the elements to be reformed.However,since Scotland is an English-speaking country and people always thought that learning and speaking English are enough,citizens in Scotland used to keep the skepticism in foreign languages learning,and students had very low achievements in foreign languages.Languages teaching in Scotland,thus was not optimistic.To improve the quality of foreign languages classes at schools and to meet the need for languages talents in the development of Scottish economy,based on the main idea of Curriculum for Excellence,Scottish Education Department went into action to further promote foreign languages teaching.Take the advantage of resources,while searching for related literatures and policy materials,this study interviewed related official officers and professors in the universities.A teaching seminar for languages teachers had also been observed.Combined the theories and practices together,this study gives out a clear clue of the reforms in foreign languages teaching in Scotland.The Scottish government not only set new reform targets,but also enriched languages courses.Besides,local schools have arranged reasonable teaching hours and explored various teaching methods while the evaluation framework has been developed.After ten years of development,the reform has achieved periodic success.First of all,the integration among subjects vertically and laterally have been emphasized.Foreign languages teaching in Scotland has achieved interdisciplinarity as well as connection between primary and secondary.Secondly,ways of teaching cooperation has been gradually diversified.When the Scottish Government has developed multiple international cooperation,teachers have created more collaboration methods in languages classes,all of which provide opportunity and possibility to further improve the quality of languages teaching.At last,students' achievements in foreign languages have been improved.On the one hand,the rate of students of reaching National 5 has been significantly improved.On the other hand,the number of students who choose a foreign language to reach the Higher level also has increased.Hence,Scottish citizens,whose attitudes towards reforms in languages courses have been positively changed,gradually realized the importance and necessity of languages learning.But there are still some difficulties and challenges.For example,the teaching criterions are too abstract for teachers to handle,which makes the teaching evaluation becomes more difficult;most of the schools still have difficulties in balancing languages classes with other courses;and the shortage of languages teachers leads the reform lack of motivation.Back to the situations in China,after reflecting both achievements and existing problems,we thus can have a lot of inspirations in foreign languages teaching: both the instrumental and humanity functions of languages have to be considered to realize interdisplinarity;the cooperation between primary and secondary schools has to be strengthened to realize the vertical integration in languages teaching;the work of each working group has to be cleared and an integrated framework to guide languages teaching should be built;languages courses should be enriched and the flexibility of learning need to be improved;the beginning age could be lowered and the year of languages learning would then be extended;the standards for foreign languages teachers should be more stricter and further improved.