Native-culture-oriented Model For College English Teaching As Part Of General Education

As one of the core courses of Chinese tertiary education, College English has undergone reforms on its objectives and teaching models. These reforms have been proved effective in the improvement of the students’English level. In the21st century, the role of English as an international language, together with the increasing intercultural communication appeals for further reform to the teaching content of College English. More and more scholars agree that teaching College English for general education should be the new trend which centers on the cultivation of the students’intercultural communicative competence and humanistic literacy. Its ultimate goal is to enable the students to do two-way intercultural communication. Just as the national feature of general education is characterized by the study of western classics, College English teaching for general education should have native culture, Chinese culture, to be exact, integrated into the teaching content. Therefore, research should be made on the construction of a workable and effective teaching model.Considering the ethnical background of the majority of the students in Hubei Institute for Nationalities, the author of the thesis has been conducting experiments of integrating elements of Chinese characteristic into English class for four years based on the principle of general education and intercultural foreign language teaching theory. With medical students of B level as the subject, the author made two successive years of experiments on the integration of Chinese culture into the teaching content. The topic of Chinese culture is decided by the theme of each unit in New Horizon College English, students are required to do activities in the form of group discussion and presentation, writing assignments and teacher’s explanation if necessary, online sources are recommended to the students for further study. Feedbacks from the students are drawn at the end of each semester to know how students perceive the concept and model. It is conducted mainly in two ways:personal interview at random and written feedbacks in their exercise books or written assignment. The students’performance in class and various tests all prove that the model is effective in sparking greater interest, stronger incentive and more confidence in English learning.Inspired by Harmer’s language teaching theory, three current influential theoretical frameworks of cultural teaching and teaching model in China as well as the results of the experiments, the author proposed a native-culture-oriented teaching model—EASA model, which is composed of three major parts including warm-up, in-depth study and output. Materials of Chinese characteristic are integrated in warm-up and output stages, while careful study of English is conducted in the stage of in-depth study. The model aims to refresh knowledge and concept, enrich the teaching content, and eventually greatly work out great improvement in the students. Two years’teaching practice shows that without any innovation made to the College English system, the application of the model to College English teaching can not only help improve the students’linguistic ability in ethnical colleges and universities, but also greatly promote their interest and confidence in learning English, which in a sense, is effective in changing the "dumb and deaf" English learning. In addition, the integration of Chinese culture contributes to the improvement of the minority students’ humanistic literacy and their ability of independent study, their sensitivity to cultural differences and intercultural communicative competence are also cultivated and improved.The model is not mature yet. Problems remain to be solved relating to the construction of the model, the choice of the teaching content, the training of the teacher. More efforts and research are to be made to perfect the model in the future.