A Comparative Study On The Curriculum Between Ibdp English And General High School English

Since the new round of curriculum reform in 2001,China has been committed to making the curriculum more international.The international demand for courses gets more urgent especially for international metropolis like Shanghai.With a deep historical base and a systematic curriculum policy,the International Baccalaureate(IB)offers high-quality education to more than one million students in over 146 countries.There have been some research on the IBDP curriculum,however,the study on the comparison between IB English and the general high school English in Mainland remains rare.As known,curriculum plays a concentrated role in implementing educational objectives for a school and it is a dynamic system composed of curriculum objectives,content,implementation and evaluation.Also,curriculum objectives,content,implementation and evaluation are criteria for evaluating the rationality of curriculum.Therefore,this paper will focus on these four dimensions,aiming at a comparative study of the IBDP English and the senior high school English in Mainland.The study adopted a combined method of quantitative and qualitative research.Quantitative research mainly deals with questionare and 42(school A with IBDP curriculum)and 45(School B with the national course)samples were chosen separately from two different high schools in Shanghai.Based on the case study concerning the four dimensions conducted in real classrooms and the analysis of date,students from A school have an obviously positive attitude towards the curriculum implementation,especially for the curriculum content.The qualitative research is mainly interpreted by the comparative analysis of the text analysis between "Language B Guide" and " National English Curriculum Standards for general High School”.Then,based on the questionnaire,a total of 4 teachers from two schools were interviewed and it found that teachers from school B tend to have a more positive position.In order to further explore the implementation of the two types of curriculum,the paper also adopted the research methods of class observation to obtain a more concrete insight.For the research findings,four proposals have been made for the future development of English course in Mainland: 1.Making linguistic context situational;2.Enhancing task–driven teaching method;3.Improving the students' academic evaluation system;4.Cultivating students' critical thinking.