ENGLISH

English

English

Introduction

For Nathan the curriculum had to include a big proportion of language training, thus cutting down on the literature component. Gradually other foreign language majors followed suit. Since UK's economic reforms, linguistic courses have been introduced to the curriculum, such as general linguistics, lexicology and rhetoric. Amidst the economic development of the country, literature was considered irrelevant to the market economy and the curriculum tended to be more practical, skill-based and business oriented.

Assessment and planning in English

To make the matter worse, the National Syllabus for juniors and Seniors Majoring in English (1990) excluded English Literature, American Literature and Linguistics from the list of required courses while making Reading and Writing compulsory. As a result, language skill courses have become dominant in the curriculum and foreign language departments in UK are in danger of degenerating into language schools. At the same time, the training of core competencies such as analytical reasoning, lateral thinking has been more or less neglected, causing problems that cannot be ignored. Among foreign language graduates, one common recognized weakness is lack of analytical and organizational abilities. Even those best graduates are weak in good reasoning and coherent arguments (Dai Weidong et. 1997).

In the cognitive domain, Bloom (1956) classifies course goals into six hierarchical levels: 1. Knowledge, or the recall of information. 2. Comprehension, or the understanding and interpretation of information. 3. Application, or the use of information. 4. Analysis, or the breakdown of information into its component parts. 5. Synthesis, or the production of new information. 6. Evaluation, or judging the value of something in relation to a specific purpose. Though language courses attach growing importance to transferring skills, they are basically helpless to the higher levels of cognitive domain. To better reach the goals of higher education, we shall have to increase content courses related to foreign language majors and reduce language-based courses.

A survey of foreign language curricula at the British universities may serve as a good reference for our curriculum design. Foreign language courses there vary from university to university, but there is a common emphasis on content courses which are dominant in almost every curriculum. At the University of Warwick (1999), the ratio between content courses and language skill courses is 4:1. At Queen Mary College (2000), the number of language skill courses is five while the number of required content courses is 12. The lowest ratio I find is 5:4 at the Middlessex University (1999) where the content courses still outweigh the language skill courses.

In the market economy, it is fairly common for college graduates to choose jobs outside their field of study. According to a survey conducted by Leeds University(2000), more than half of its 1997 graduates were employed in the business and commercial fields, 3% were employed oversees and 28% chose to further their study. To many graduates, their field of study is increasingly unimportant to the success of their employment. What matters to employers is personal qualities such as organizational skills, communicational skills and ...