Comparative Research On Language Education Between Chinese And American Universities

In universities, language education is regarded as a kind of higher education onnative language based on secondary language and a core curriculum in humanitieseducation centering on humanistic culture knowledge, which aims to supervise andguide college students to improve language application ability and personality culture.In university education stage, language education mainly consists of “College Chinese”,“Writing”,“Eloquence” and other courses, and also involves elective courses associatedwith history culture and extracurricular activities, etc., further improves the languageproficiency of students to more elegant style, develops high-level thinking skills andgood quality of thinking, thus helping students gain aesthetic judgment and acceptcultural influence, and promoting healthy personality and humanistic spirit.Although language is one of three core abilities during our individualdevelopments, but college students’ language proficiency and literacy are graduallydecreasing, such the decrease has resulted in unprecedented embarrassment ofuniversity language education. Many experts pay more worries on this issue, mediasectors make efforts to attract people’s eyeballs on this issue, and educators make avariety of explorations for solution of this issue. It is very necessary and urgent to breakthrough university language education and reform university language courses.Experience from others may be helpful to our breakthrough, in face of thisembarrassment.This paper compares the language education situation between Chinese andAmerican universities by integrating actual teaching experience, n basis of comparativeresearch and analysis on a lot of literatures. The paper describes, analyzes andresearches position of language education respectively in the Chinese and Americaneducation systems, comparison on language education curriculums and teachingmethods and other aspects between Chinese and American universities in morecomprehensive, scientific, in-depth manner, thus further puts forward some ideas andrecommendations on researches of university language education, and providesreferences for higher education language teaching and research.The first chapter, introduction part of the paper, describes the connotative meaningof language education, as well as background and significance of studying this issue. Itoutlines development situation and main problems in university language education inChina and America on basis of brief analysis on previous studies, and also proposesproblems needing to be addressed during development process of language highereducation.The second chapter analyzes the understanding and standards on languageeducation by Chinese and American educators, makes macroscopic comparisons onposition of language education respectively in the Chinese and American educationsystems, and analyzes language educational differences and similarities between both countries by comparing job markets and talents selection basis between China andAmerica.The third chapter focuses on discussing the comparative study on the curriculumand teaching methods of language education between Chinese universities andAmerican universities. The first section mainly compares language reading teaching. Bycontrasting similarities and differences of language reading teaching between China andAmerica, it helps to know details about American reading teaching, to learn aboutexcellent foreign teaching ideas and methods, and then to improve language teachingsituation in China. The second section mainly compares language writing. Americanuniversities pay attention to special, creative and practical writing exercise.Nevertheless, writing courses in China’s universities are characterized by monotonouscontents, emphasizing on form and teaching in a separate subject. By such thecomparison, defects of higher native language education and the objective of reform areobviously shown.The forth chapter makes suggestions on how to practically strengthen languageeducation in China’s universities and effectively enhance students’ ability to handlenative language by referring to successful practice and experience of American researchuniversities in developing core language education courses in general education: firstly,it is required to communicate the importance of developing Chinese language quality inthe whole society, creating a favorable social environment of native language educationin universities; secondly, universities should change ideas, increase input, andestablish necessary systems for language education; thirdly, it is necessary to learn fromAmerican universities, push teaching reform of College Chinese, actively exploreeffective ways to enhance native language ability, build College Chinese at the coreincluding native language teaching curriculum such as writing, speaking training andliteracy appreciation courses and so on because the improvement of language educationhelps language teaching goes back to where it should be, which is a significant objectivelanguage educators in universities should realize.