A Study Of The Freshman Seminar In The Context Of College Integrated English

The Freshman Seminar is a teaching-research seminar (a form of the lecture system) and also a seminar course set up for freshmen. It originated from Seminar (a kind of teaching method), transformed by Berlin University and permeating the teaching ideal of combining instruction and research advocated by Wilhelm Von Humboldt.The aim of the Freshman Seminar in the context of College Integrated English is to assist freshmen in fitting into brand-new college environment and learning methods, and complete a smooth transition from high school to the university. According to the two teaching objectives, two models are formed:one is the adaptive-oriented model and the other is the academic-oriented model. To be specific, freshman seminar is to assist freshmen in fitting into college learning environment, to effectively integrate middle school English and to cultivate students’ability of searching, collecting and summarizing by having seminars with a purpose to lay foundation for college students’later academic research. Emerging with New College Integrated English Course 3 and New College Integrated English Course 4 for non-English majors gives Freshman Seminar a new objective——designing and implementing training exercises for students’ English comprehensive abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translation with a combination of the textbook.In this thesis, as an observer and listener, the author observed and recorded the whole teaching practice. Several qualitative research methods like the survey, the case study, and so on are employed to study and analyze thee teaching practice and learning process of some non-English majors enrolled in 2014 from four experiment English classes in seminar-style teaching model——choosing 85 freshmen’s topic-related speeches for each unit and corrected compositions, handing out 127 questionnaires, and doing interviews with 14 respondents in three groups. Constructivism and Cooperative learning theory are used as the supporting theories to further study the college students’English learning process and results, and freshman seminar teaching model in order to provide a teaching practice for the College English Reform.The following findings can be drawn from observation and the analysis of questionnaires and interviews:1. For the slides of topic-related speeches for each unit, with the guidance of questions in the Freshman Seminar in the context of College Integrated English, the vast majority of participants can make full use of the campus English platform and network, search for related information, develop their cognition, and select, edict and process materials they retrieve as well as resources recommended by the teacher to make a theme-clear colorful slides of topic-related speeches for each unit. In this way, students have greatly expanded and extended the text content, background knowledge and the knowledge of western culture; at the same time, the classroom atmosphere is activated, forming a good English learning atmosphere.2. For writing correction, most students can generally employ the knowledge of the text, vocabulary from the textbook, and sentence patterns to further explore related issues, and complete well-organized and informative compositions, and thus they have the preliminary scientific-inquiry ability;3. For the group activities, cooperative learning is an effective way for students to engage in abundant practical linguistic activities, imitate the product promotion, job fairs held by students and debating from the text, and undertake extracurricular activities; the activities serve to promote the relationship, improve the ability of mutual communication, interaction and exploration;4.90.8% of students studied are satisfied with the Freshman Seminar in College Integrated English, and they sing high praise for all the teaching links. They also express a strong learning need for the increase of training spoken English in class.To sum up, the teaching procedures of the Freshman Seminar in the context of College English include providing the teacher’s guiding questions, requiring students to do independent research on related topics in each unit through knowledge processing and construction, and taking part in cooperative learning and so on. These all benefit students a lot in their thesis writing, and participating in relevant research.