The English Curriculum in the People's Republic of China

The status and role of English as a school subject in China has fluctuated wildly because of its desirable but sensitive connotations. English is the language of world trade and communications, which makes its study an important strategy in implementing internationally-oriented policies for "modernization", while its historical overtones of imperialism, capitalism and even barbarianism are unwelcome for those who prefer more self-reliant and isolationist approaches. This paper traces the career of the English curriculum in China since 1949, with particular reference to the junior secondary school curriculum, through an analysis of the national syllabus and textbooks. It identifies five distinct periods and analyses the major forces of curriculum change, the dynamics of curriculum design, and the principal features of models for change in each of the periods. It is argued that the overall process of policy-making, and curriculum development specifically, has been characterized by a complexity and pattern of development which is not adequately recognized in existing portrayals that have focused on the relationship between macro political shifts and educational policies, and have emphasized the role of the state

Trialing project-based learning in a new EAP ESP course: A collaborative reflective practice of three college English teachers

Currently in many Chinese universities, the traditional College English course is facing the risk of being ‘marginalized’, replaced or even removed, and many hours previously allocated to the course are now being taken by EAP or ESP. At X University in northern China, a curriculum reform as such is taking place, as a result of which a new course has been created called ‘xue ke’ English. Despite the fact that ‘xue ke’ means subject literally, the course designer has made it clear that subject content is not the target, nor is the course the same as EAP or ESP. This curriculum initiative, while possibly having been justified with a rationale of some kind (e.g. to meet with changing social and/or academic needs of students and/or institutions), this is posing a great challenge for, as well as considerable pressure on, a number of College English teachers who have taught this single course for almost their entire teaching career. In such a context, three teachers formed a peer support group in Semester One this year, to work collaboratively co-tackling the challenge, and they chose Project-Based Learning (PBL) for the new course. This presentation will report on the implementation of this project, including the overall designing, operational procedure, and the teachers’ reflections. Based on discussion, pre-agreement was reached on the purpose and manner of collaboration as offering peer support for more effective teaching and learning and fulfilling and pleasant professional development. A WeChat group was set up as the chief platform for messaging, idea-sharing, and resource-exchanging. Physical meetings were supplementary, with sound agenda but flexible time, and venues. Mosoteach cloud class (lan mo yun ban ke) was established as a tool for virtual learning, employed both in and after class. Discussions were held at the beginning of the semester which determined only brief outlines for PBL implementation and allowed space for everyone to autonomously explore in their own way. Constant further discussions followed, which generated a great deal of opportunities for peer learning and lesson plan modifications. A reflective journal, in a greater or lesser detailed manner, was also kept by each teacher to record the journey of the collaboration. At the end of the semester, it was commonly recognized that, although challenges existed, the collaboration was overall a success and they were all willing to continue with it and endeavor to refine it to be a more professional and productive approach

Australian tropes of nature: representation and appropriation in EFL teaching

Postcolonial criticism has repeatedly expressed scepticism concerning the possibility of appropriate representation of cultures and identities. This seems even more problematic when assessing cultural production in the context of school education – a system which claims authority of representation because it requires comprehensibility and testability of the teaching contents and objectives. Influenced by critical theory’s attempts at mapping cultural representation in its complexity, several didactic models have been put forward in order to provide a conceptual basis for a holistic assessment of culture and intercultural competence in an educational context. Among the most prominent ones is Michael Byram’s model (1997), which promotes the ideal of “Intercultural Communicative Competence” by assessing the level of intercultural (communicative) competence along the lines of the categories “knowledge, skills, and attitudes”. Against the critical backdrop of the conflicting priorities and paradigms established above, this paper will investigate to what extent the representation of Australian nature in ELT materials captures intercultural competence in its cognitive, pragmatic and affective complexity – despite the above mentioned structural impediments inherent in the (German) school system. By taking a closer look at the presentation of Australian tropes of nature, it will scrutinize whether nature serves as a trope in which complex negotiations of cultural identities can play themselves out - and if so, along which didactic lines

Los sitcoms como herramienta para el aprendizaje cultural en el aula de inglés

Con la llegada de la globalización y la consolidación definitiva del inglés como lengua internacional, el lugar de la cultura en el proceso de aprendizaje de esta lengua también ha cambiado. De este modo, focalizar la enseñanza en hechos culturales de países anglófonos resulta insuficiente en el mundo en el que vivimos, donde la amplia mayoría de las interacciones en inglés se producen entre hablantes no nativos. Desde un punto de vista culturalmente descentralizado (Holliday, 2009), el desarrollo de la competencia intercultural y la conciencia crítica deben constituir una parte esencial del aprendizaje de idiomas (Byram, 2014). Sin embargo, la mayoría de los libros de texto utilizados no promueven este aprendizaje (inter)cultural. En este trabajo, proponemos que la televisión sea un recurso pedagógico complementario para lograr este objetivo. Nos hemos centrado en “sitcoms” (comedias de situación) para elaborar una lista de episodios que pueden ser utilizados en el entorno de la Educación Superior para desarrollar esta competencia cultural.With the emergence of globalization and English becoming a lingua franca for international communication, the place for culture in the language learning process has shifted as well. Thus, concentrating on cultural facts about English-speaking countries is insufficient for today’s world, where the vast majority of interactions happen among non-native speakers. From a culturally decentered standpoint (Holliday, 2009), intercultural competence and critical awareness constitute an essential part of language learning (Byram, 2014). However, most ELT textbooks do not promote complete (inter) cultural learning. In this article, we argue that TV can be an additional pedagogical tool to help achieve this goal. We focus on sitcoms compiling a list of episodes that can be used at tertiary level to develop cultural competence

Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy

A companion report to Carnegie's Time to Act, focuses on the specific skills and literacy support needed for reading in academic subject areas in higher grades. Outlines strategies for teaching content knowledge and reading strategies together

Terminologia Anatomica; Considered from the Perspective of Next-Generation Knowledge Sources

This report examines the semantic structure of Terminologia Anatomica, taking one randomly selected page as an example. The focus of analysis is the meaning imparted to an anatomical term by virtue of its location within the structured list. Terminologia’s structure expressed through hierarchies of headings, varied typographical styles, indentations and an alphanumeric code implies specific relationships between the terms embedded in the list. Together, terms and relationships can potentially capture essential elements of anatomical knowledge. The analysis focuses on these knowledge elements and evaluates the consistency and logic in their representation. Most critical of these elements are class inclusion and part-whole relationships, which are implied, rather than explicitly modeled by Terminologia. This limits the use of the term list to those who have some knowledge of anatomy and excludes computer programs from navigating through the terminology. Assuring consistency in the explicit representation of anatomical relationships would facilitate adoption of Terminologia as the anatomical standard by the various controlled medical terminology (CMT) projects. These projects are motivated by the need for computerizing the patient record, and their aim is to generate machineunderstandable representations of biomedical concepts, including anatomy. Because of the lack of a consistent and explicit representation of anatomy, each of these CMTs has generated it own anatomy model. None of these models is compatible with each other, yet each is consistent with textbook descriptions of anatomy. The analysis of the semantic structure of Terminologia Anatomica leads to some suggestions for enhancing the term list in ways that would facilitate its adoption as the standard for anatomical knowledge representation in biomedical informatics

A process-oriented language for describing aspects of reading comprehension

Includes bibliographical references (p. 36-38)The research described herein was supported in part by the National Institute of Education under Contract No. MS-NIE-C-400-76-011

Legal Translation Instruction at Discourse Level and the Problem of Equivalence

Legal translation is often claimed to be one of the most difficult types of technical translation. The difficulty may partly be due to the characteristic features of legal discourse which is typically archaic, obscure, complex, and culturally-bound, different linguistic systems, and the type of equivalence the legal translator seeks to achieve; and partly be due to the item-centered approach commonly used in teaching legal translation which emphasizes word-for-word equivalence. The present paper introduces a discourse-oriented approach as an alternative to the currently-used method of teaching legal translation in Iraqi universities. The major argument is that teaching legal translation at discourse level helps the students of translation to recognize the lexical, grammatical, pragmatic, and stylistic dimensions of the legal text which are essential for providing appropriate legal equivalence. Keywords: legal translation, legal equivalence, translation instruction, discourse-oriented approach, characteristics of legal discourse DOI: 10.7176/JEP/11-17-03 Publication date:June 30th 2020