On April 29, the School of Foreign Languages held an online University-level teaching salon for the “Construction of First-class College Foreign Language Courses”. The salon was jointly sponsored by Jiangsu University Teacher Development Center and the School of Foreign Languages. It was hosted by the Center for International Language Courses (College English Teaching Department III) at SFL. CILC Director Kong Lingxuan presided over the salon. CILC Deputy Director Wu Yuanyuan made a keynote speech. SFL Deputy Dean Wu Peng made a concluding remark. JSU undergraduate superintendents Li Wenqing, Xu Kangmei and Zhang Qi’an attended the meeting, each of whom offered guidance on it. More than 60 faculty members of the School of Foreign Languages participated in the online workshop.
In her keynote speech, Wu Yuanyuan introduced the history and experience of their offline application for the first-class College English course from the end of 2019 to the beginning of 2020 from the aspects of the conception of curriculum design, course construction progress, teaching achievements and innovative features. According to Wu, the focal point of the first-class course construction should fully meet the requirements of “Two Features and One Difficulty”. This is especially the case with foreign language courses. The key issues concerning the application for first-class foreign language courses include novel teaching notions, qualified learning difficulty, rich teaching contents, effective teaching mode, and appropriate evaluation. After her speech, directors of all undergraduate departments for teaching voiced their opinions on the course construction of College English. They very much appreciated the efforts of College English faculty to implement the College English teaching mode of “One Body and Two Wings” (One Body refers to the cultivation of students’ Engilsh practical application capability while Two Wings refer to the promotion of intercultural communicative capability and critical discussion capability), and their efforts to conduct ideological and political education by integrating the core socialist values into the teaching processes. They all extended wishes to take time to select excellent courses and upscale them, to quicken the course reform, and to file application for the next round of first-class courses.
After the collective discussion, Wu Peng made remarks and summary on the salon. He pointed out that the application for first-class courses, especially for the online/offline blended first-class courses, is the key to transforming the School of Foreign Languages from “a large school for teaching” to “a powerful school for teaching”. It is of primal importance to the foreign language specialty construction and the foreign language teaching of the SFL in the coming 3 years. All departments and faculty members should take the initiative to work for the construction of first-class courses, attaching importance to it, trying to mend the gaps between their current work and the specified criteria, striving to win about 3 first-class courses at the provincial or state level and about 15 first-class courses at the University level, ensuring that we will win 1 teaching achievement award of the provincial level, and making the greatest effort to win 1 teaching achievement award of the state level. Despite the achievements that have been made in College English course construction, there is a long way to go before we stop. All College English faculty should make deeper exploration into how to construct College English into a “Gold Course”, further conglomerating the excellent features of this course and making more applications so that we might improve, promote and form a virtuous cycle of it.
The three teaching superintendents sang a high praise for the teaching salon, pointing at the remarkable achievements that have been made in College English course reform and development. They said that this is a really good teaching salon, for it has a practical theme, a large audience and produces a good effect.
(School of Foreign Languages)
Chinese
English