The College English Teaching Department (CETD) of the School of Foreign Languages, South China University of Technology was founded in 1985. It’s currently staffed by 48 members, including 3 professors (including an Excellent Teacher of Guangdong Province), 7 associate professors, 9 of them with doctoral degree, 5 of them applying for doctoral degree and 14 tutors for postgraduate students. Moreover, another 10 foreign teachers have been employed. Most of them are young and middle-aged teachers, with reasonable professional titles and academic qualifications, which form a dynamic and enterprising teaching team.
The College English Teaching Department is responsible for the English courses for non-English major undergraduates, and undertakes the teaching tasks of basic English courses and general curriculum for all undergraduates. The college English teaching team had boldly explored and experimented with new teaching modes, and in the 1990s, it was the first team in the country to develop a CD-ROM for college English teaching. The team took the lead among all domestic universities in designing and implementing a new multimedia teaching model based on the Internet and campus network. Over the years, the College English team of SCUT had been adhering to the development concept of “keeping pace with the time and blazing new trails”, constantly reformed, and thereby had made a series of achievements, such as: State-level excellent courses (2003), Ministry of Education’s college English teaching reform demonstration site (2006), state-level teaching team (2008), Guangdong Experimental Teaching Demonstration Center (2012), state-level excellent resource sharing course (2016), state-level excellent open online courses (2018), first prize of Guangdong Education and Teaching Achievement Award (higher education) (2019), Guangdong Province’s Curriculum Ideological and Political Demonstration Course (2021), Guangdong Province’s Curriculum Ideological and Political Demonstration Team (2021), Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Ideological and Political Demonstration Course (2021), Ministry of Education’s Curriculum Ideological and Political Teaching Masters and Teaching Team (2021). The team also had successively won 2 National Teaching Achievement Awards and 9 Provincial Teaching Achievement Awards.
The College English Teaching Department takes the cultivation of famous teachers, famous courses and famous teaching materials as a breakthrough, and has formed its own characteristics in teaching ideas, contents and methods, greatly improving the teaching quality. It has played the leading role in the reform of the college English teaching in domestic and has promoted the further development of college English teaching. In recent years, the college English teaching team has continuously explored and reformed, and gradually established a brand-new curriculum system. College English has developed from a single curriculum to a series of curriculum systems covering 25 English general courses and other modules. Each module is interconnected and complementary to meet the needs of undergraduates at different levels and stages for English learning, providing systematic language training for the “international talents with international vision, familiarity with international rules, and participation in international affairs and competition”.
The academic English course set up since 2015 has provided English academic language support for the construction of all English courses and all English Majors of the University. It has inserted language wings for the cultivation of outstanding “innovative, creative, entrepreneurial” talents in diverse fields, so that they can play a greater role in the international academic arena in the future and become international leading talents in their respective engineering and technical fields.
The college English teaching team makes full use of the teaching mode of deep integration of modern information technology and curriculum, carries out smart teaching, builds a new ecology of teaching and learning activities, reconstructs a learning space, and changed the teaching-oriented mode to a diversified learning mode which is based on project cooperation, teamwork, and autonomous learning and group discussion, so as to fully arouse students’ enthusiasm for learning and enhance their participation. MOOC courses “British and American Music and Culture” and “Academic English” are open to social learners on the platforms of “XuetangX” and “the Chinese University MOOC”, with more than 100,000 students taking courses. The MOOC course “Academic English” is launched on the platform of “XuetangX”, with more than 70,000 students taking courses. Nearly 3,000 students in our university take the “Academic English” course based on mixed teaching mode every year, and the teaching effect of the course has been further improved.
Person in Charge & Contact Information:
Director: Zhan Shuangjuan Tel: 87113365 Email: flsjzhan@scut.edu.cn
Deputy Director: Zhou Pindi Tel: 87112178 Email: pdzhou@scut.edu.cn
