The first Guangdong Foreign Language Masters Lecture opened in Yifu Science Hall of South China University of Technology, attracting nearly 200 college English teachers from various domestic universities on March 30 in 2019.
In recent years, with the constant deepening of reform and innovation of public English teaching in universities, academic English teaching aiming at cultivating learners' academic ability has become an important part of college English curriculum reform and innovation. In order to better explore the methods and models of Academic English teaching in colleges and universities, the School of Foreign Languages of South China University of Technology organized the "Open Classes and Training Seminar on College Academic English for Key Teachers" jointly with Guangdong Advisory Committee on Teaching College English Course to Undergraduates in Higher Education and Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Academic English teaching teams from South China University of Technology and Sun Yat-sen University have been sharing experience and ideas on academic English teaching design, classroom teaching implementation, blended teaching mode and teacher ability training through expert lectures, open classes and other forms to explore ways to build academic English "excellent course".
At the seminar, Professor Han Jinlong, vice chairman of Guangdong Advisory Committee on Teaching College English to Undergraduatesin Higher Education and head of our academic English teaching team, analyzed the goals and positioning of academic English in the Chinese context, and believed that the current goal should be to build "excellent course" of academic English, and proposed that academic English should contribute to first-class undergraduate education. Associate Professor Xu Ying proposed a corpus-based and data-driven vocabulary teaching model based on the description of vocabulary competence in the China English Proficiency Scale, and designed teaching activities to promote academic vocabulary learning. Ms. Zhu Lin gave a lecture on the academic English curriculum construction and basic situation in SCUT, including ACADEMIC English MOOC and SPOC, academic English blended teaching mode, teaching effect, student evaluation and teaching reflection. Ms. Shen Juan introduced the application of PBL in academic English teaching in SCUT, using students’ interactive practice as examples. Ms. Feng Pengpeng, associate professor of Sun Yat-sen University, introduced the academic English curriculum design based on blended teaching and the cooperative writing community based on teaching materials. Guided by cutting-edge writing theory, Associate Professor Chen Jing put forward a new approach to the teaching and research of academic English writing, and introduced the research background of academic English writing and academic "genre" writing, the main research schools of writing teaching and research cases of academic English writing in Sun Yat-sen University.
Experts make teaching and research exchanges and sharing
After the lecture, the delegates went to Building 34 to view and emulate the comprehensive academic English class and listening and speaking class given by four young teachers, who are Tian Jing, Shi Ying, LuXin and Lu Rong respectively.
Teachers give demonstration classes
At present, it is an urgent task to reform public English teaching so as to make it better serve the national development strategy and the talent training plan of various specialties, so that efficiently cultivate specialized talents with international competitiveness.This requires us to actively participate in the teaching reform, with academic English curriculum construction as a breakthrough, to create"excellent course". As a bridge course, academic English is an extension of college English course and should reflect school-based characteristics. Currently, the reform of Academic English teaching in domestic universities has entered an ext stage. Based on their own school-based characteristics and talent training objectives, colleges and universities have formulated school-based plans and teaching programs for academic English teaching and implemented them. Academic English teaching in our school started in 2015, which is an early start and has a certain influence in Guangdong and even in China. Our college English teaching team will optimize the curriculum and spare no efforts to build "excellent course" and cancel useless courses to further consolidate the basic foundation of college academic English teaching to improve teaching quality and strengthen the connotation construction, constantly meeting the various talent training objectives and demand for English ability of different collages under the guidance of the forty teaching rules and principles for undergraduates proposed by the Ministry of Education.
