| The Compulsory School Chinese Curriculum Standards of our country, which was made in July 2001, is a product of the new curriculum reform of the country. Massachusetts English Language Arts Curriculum Framework of the United States, which was made in June 2001, serves also as a totally new version after the curriculum reform of the State of Massachusetts. This paper has made a comparison and analysis between the above two curriculums in their similarities and differences of their ideologies, structures, aims (standards), strategies and assessments. The definite aims of this research are to search for some helpful ideas or approaches to help further improve our Chinese curriculum reform.1. In the aspect of the curriculum ideologies, the Curriculum Standards of our country states its new ideology from four points: first, improve the students' Chinese literacy; second, clearly make sure the features of the Chinese teaching; thirdly, spark plug the learning fashions of self-determination, cooperation and investigation; fourthly, construct an open and dynamic Chinese curriculum. The four points which have both some inheritance of the past and some invention, show the guiding ideas of the Chinese education of this new era. The Curriculum Framework of Massachusetts State states its ideas in ten points which include the relationship between language and thinking, challenging learning, reading, writing and intelligence, media, instruction giving, curriculum building, strategies and self-determination, voice of oral and written presentation, sense of being common and unifying force of language, etc.2. In the aspect of curriculum structure, our Curriculum Standards takes the designing approach of nine-year system which contains a big aim with four different schooling stage aims under it. The design was made according to the three-dimension idea of knowledge and ability, process and approach, and mood, feeling and ideology of value. The three dimensions mix with each other and make a whole. Whereas the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework was made under the designing approach of being recursive and interdependent. The Curriculum ideas which are in fact its ten Guiding Principles, properly govern the whole curriculum and help divide the content into four strands: language, reading and literature, writing, media, by applying its twenty-seven General Standards to the contents. By the way, these General Standards were again specified into Learning Standards which all serve as teaching aims.3. In the aspect of the curriculum standards' aims, the big aim of our curriculum divides itself into five parts: words learning and writing, reading, sentence writing or composition, oral communication, and the last one, integrated learning. With most of the standards as similar as ours, the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework shows its peculiarity in its mediastandards.4. In the aspect of teaching strategies, both the curriculum standards show their common features of being systematic and specific in reading and also in writing, with an emphasis on the cultivation of students' ability and methods. The differences lie in the attitudes towards new words learning, which we stress the writing of the new words much more strongly than the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework, for our characters are hard to write, but they don't share this worry of writing, so they only pay attention to the words expanding. Our Curriculum Standards stresses more on the interaction of oral communication than theirs while they emphasize much more about the consideration of the audience and the purposes.5. In the aspect of assessment, our Curriculum Standards shows special concern to the beauty education of character writing while the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework stresses still on the expansion of the students' vocabulary. In evaluating reading approaches, our Curriculum Standards pays more attention to the evaluation of the methods, speed and reading scope while the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework emphasizes the ability of the students...
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