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Introduction
As China is a huge country and English is one of the most foreign languages, the scale of its teaching is extensive. It is therefore impossible to give a full description of EFL by just reviewing the English teaching of a single city. Any attempt to do so will risk oversimplication of the Chinese context. There are bound to be differences in the process of new curriculum between the major cities and small cities, between coastal and inland areas and between key and ordinary schools. This paper focuses on developing the English curriculum for my home town----Sichuan province, which is located in the southwest of China.
Students’ identities
Compared with the English majors, non-English majors have the dilemma of time arrangement between the major course and English learning. In Sichuan, non-English majors spend 5 to 6 hours on English studying per week, and this is already included in the curriculum time. Even though college English is a compulsory subject at tertiary education, for non-English majors there is no English class once they have moved to the third grade. This policy can be found in the college English teaching curriculum, published by the Education Ministry in 2003.
Principles of developing the curriculum
Developing an English curriculum for non-English majors has to take cultural influences on linguistic dimension, pedagogical dimension, and students’ identity into account. Namely, it has to akin to developing curriculum based on the recognition of cultural differences.
First of all, I will analyze the cultural differences on linguistic dimensions by discussing the relationship between language and culture. Secondly, I will analyze culture from pedagogical dimension. Culture plays an important role in teaching methods. Thirdly, learning English should not mean losing learners’ culture and identity.
Developing an English curriculum and pedagogy
Based on the principles discussed above and the local contexts considered, I would develop a curriculum and pedagogy that would include:
１．Non-communicative teaching: focus on the structures of language, how they are formed, and what they mean. Some examples are “substitution exercises”, “discovery” and awareness-raising activities. Substitution exercises are related to synonym, antonym and phrase practice. Discovery and awareness-raising activities involve in practising correct mistakes in sentence or paragraphs.
２．Pre-communicative major students, who have to pass the college English Test Band four (CET-4) to get their degree. As a result, developing the curriculum has to follow the examination. 3. Communicative language teaching: practice pre-taught language in context where it communicates new information, for example, information gap activities.
4. Providing structured communication opportunities: to use language to communicate in situations which elicit pre-learnt language, but with some unpredictability. For example, structured role-playing tasks, complex information-exchange activities. The main focus moves to the communication of meanings, but the teacher has carefully structured the situation to ensure that the learners can cope with is with their existing resources.
5. Ensuring authentic communication: using language to communicate in situations where the meanings are predictable, for example, creative role-play, or complex problem-solving and discussion. This is the strongest focus, compared with phase 3 and 4, on the communication of messages, and in which the language forms are correspondingly unpredictable. Debating probably is an activity to be organized. In terms of Burns and Joyce (1997:128), spoken interactions within disparate group may also be more genuinely communicative as learners draw on individual resources to negotiate meaning with each other.
A high quality curriculum motivates students to retain their own Chinese cultural identity. The learners will be able to use English to tell others about their own culture.
Conclusion
The goal of developing curriculum and pedagogy is that will be good for everyone. To achieve it, perhaps teachers have to make compromises. In my hometown, for example, considering the classroom condition, where there are over-sized classes, teachers probably confront difficulty in out of control if asking students to move around to conduct a survey among their classmates using recently taught language. Under this condition, teachers have to change their communicative activities of curriculum into non-communicative activities. It is obvious that students who prefer learning English start with speaking are likely to have the worst outcomes and they cannot receive expected effects. Therefore, teachers need to transform the activity into asking a partner for information to complete a picture or table, in which the students do not need to move around. This would be a fair way to deal with this issue in order to realize the goal---the curriculum and pedagogy are of benefit to everyone. In a word, develop a curriculum in contexts: appropriate to their learners, their colleges, and their societies.
References：
[1]Hui, L (1997)．New bottles,old wine: Communicative language teaching in China. Forum，35(4), 38
[2]Meu, H & Reeser, T. W. (1997)．Parle-moi un peu! Information gap activities for beginning French classes. Boston: Heinle
As China is a huge country and English is one of the most foreign languages, the scale of its teaching is extensive. It is therefore impossible to give a full description of EFL by just reviewing the English teaching of a single city. Any attempt to do so will risk oversimplication of the Chinese context. There are bound to be differences in the process of new curriculum between the major cities and small cities, between coastal and inland areas and between key and ordinary schools. This paper focuses on developing the English curriculum for my home town----Sichuan province, which is located in the southwest of China.
Students’ identities
Compared with the English majors, non-English majors have the dilemma of time arrangement between the major course and English learning. In Sichuan, non-English majors spend 5 to 6 hours on English studying per week, and this is already included in the curriculum time. Even though college English is a compulsory subject at tertiary education, for non-English majors there is no English class once they have moved to the third grade. This policy can be found in the college English teaching curriculum, published by the Education Ministry in 2003.
Principles of developing the curriculum
Developing an English curriculum for non-English majors has to take cultural influences on linguistic dimension, pedagogical dimension, and students’ identity into account. Namely, it has to akin to developing curriculum based on the recognition of cultural differences.
First of all, I will analyze the cultural differences on linguistic dimensions by discussing the relationship between language and culture. Secondly, I will analyze culture from pedagogical dimension. Culture plays an important role in teaching methods. Thirdly, learning English should not mean losing learners’ culture and identity.
Developing an English curriculum and pedagogy
Based on the principles discussed above and the local contexts considered, I would develop a curriculum and pedagogy that would include:
１．Non-communicative teaching: focus on the structures of language, how they are formed, and what they mean. Some examples are “substitution exercises”, “discovery” and awareness-raising activities. Substitution exercises are related to synonym, antonym and phrase practice. Discovery and awareness-raising activities involve in practising correct mistakes in sentence or paragraphs.
２．Pre-communicative major students, who have to pass the college English Test Band four (CET-4) to get their degree. As a result, developing the curriculum has to follow the examination. 3. Communicative language teaching: practice pre-taught language in context where it communicates new information, for example, information gap activities.
4. Providing structured communication opportunities: to use language to communicate in situations which elicit pre-learnt language, but with some unpredictability. For example, structured role-playing tasks, complex information-exchange activities. The main focus moves to the communication of meanings, but the teacher has carefully structured the situation to ensure that the learners can cope with is with their existing resources.
5. Ensuring authentic communication: using language to communicate in situations where the meanings are predictable, for example, creative role-play, or complex problem-solving and discussion. This is the strongest focus, compared with phase 3 and 4, on the communication of messages, and in which the language forms are correspondingly unpredictable. Debating probably is an activity to be organized. In terms of Burns and Joyce (1997:128), spoken interactions within disparate group may also be more genuinely communicative as learners draw on individual resources to negotiate meaning with each other.
A high quality curriculum motivates students to retain their own Chinese cultural identity. The learners will be able to use English to tell others about their own culture.
Conclusion
The goal of developing curriculum and pedagogy is that will be good for everyone. To achieve it, perhaps teachers have to make compromises. In my hometown, for example, considering the classroom condition, where there are over-sized classes, teachers probably confront difficulty in out of control if asking students to move around to conduct a survey among their classmates using recently taught language. Under this condition, teachers have to change their communicative activities of curriculum into non-communicative activities. It is obvious that students who prefer learning English start with speaking are likely to have the worst outcomes and they cannot receive expected effects. Therefore, teachers need to transform the activity into asking a partner for information to complete a picture or table, in which the students do not need to move around. This would be a fair way to deal with this issue in order to realize the goal---the curriculum and pedagogy are of benefit to everyone. In a word, develop a curriculum in contexts: appropriate to their learners, their colleges, and their societies.
References：
[1]Hui, L (1997)．New bottles,old wine: Communicative language teaching in China. Forum，35(4), 38
[2]Meu, H & Reeser, T. W. (1997)．Parle-moi un peu! Information gap activities for beginning French classes. Boston: Heinle