Media Literacy Education In Language Courses

Near in the last twenty years, faced with the powerful influence of mass media, Canada, England, the United States, Australia, France, Germany, Norway, Finland, Sweden gradually integrate media education into regular curriculum among whole country or parts of regions in their primary or high schools. In this integration process of each curriculum, language arts brings "viewing" and "representing" into existing courses. Besides listening, speaking, reading and writing ability, it began to develop students' media viewing and media representing ability.This paper primarily introduce some western developed countries' teaching theory and practice about media education in English curriculum, such as the United States, England and Canada, etc., then attempts to derive some useful experiences which may enlighten media literacy localization in Chinese curriculum. This paper includes five parts: the first part introduces the media education history in English curriculum in western developed countries; the second part interprets the concept of "literacy" and "text", then introduces "media literacy" concept in Chinese curriculum; the third part translate and analysis the content of media literacy in English curriculum standards among some foreign countries; the fourth part introduces and discusses the teaching content and the teaching method of media literacy in English language curriculum; and the last part makes a useful exploration in media literacy localization in Chinese curriculum.At present, media education is confined to the communication theories field in our country, this paper put "media literacy" into educational field and focus on the relationship of the media education and language curriculum. As a cross-curriculum subject, there is rare person pays close attention on it now . I hope this incomplete exploration can provide some value to our future research.