LIANG Junying, XIANG Mingyou, MIN Shangchao, CHEN Xiangjing, ZHOU Jie
This paper focuses on the philosophies and paths of building the College English Courses (CEC) Virtual Teaching & Research Center led by Zhejiang University. Based on the concepts of “fostering virtue through education, integrating research with education, connecting the east with the west, and contributing jointly for shared benefits”, the CEC Virtual Teaching & Research Center commits itself to boosting core competitiveness featuring “innovation in course concepts, optimization in the course system, improvement in teaching and assessment, and enhancement in technological application”, and developing its organization system with “five elements”, namely serving the nation, perfecting the system, integrating research with education, innovating curriculum design, and contributing for shared benefits. The building of the CEC Virtual Teaching & Research Center reflects the efforts to actively explore innovative forms and modes of basic teaching organizations, which conforms to the requirements on College English teaching in the information age and responds to both the growth need of student individuals and the strategic need of national development.
The Project-based College English Virtual Teaching & Research Center was among the first batch of national experimental virtual teaching & research centers approved by the Ministry of Education. It aims for innovativeness in theoretical research, modes of organization and operation, and focal areas of work, and for excellence in course and teaching materials development, teaching methodology, and pedagogical research. To this end, the center coordinates collaboration in course development, resource construction and faculty development among school-based or virtual teaching & research groups, and encourages the sharing of academic and teaching resources, expertise, and pedagogical research achievements.
This paper introduces the background of virtual teaching & research centers, and sketches foreign language virtual teaching & research center projects approved by the Ministry of Education in 2022. It then gives an overview of the development of the Virtual Teaching & Research Center of College English Curriculum Development. Based on the proposed virtual community of practice model, the paper further illustrates its intended implementation from the aspects of theoretical basis, organizational management and community of practice.
Adopting a mixed design based on the Latent Growth Curve Modeling and Retrodictive Modeling from a Complexity Theory perspective, this study investigates the macro, meso and micro developmental features of English writing competence in a group of English-major freshmen across one year. It uses lexical complexity, sentence complexity, accuracy and fluency as the variables, and finds that: (1) the students' CAF development is not linear, faster at the beginning and the end than in the middle; (2) the students' English writing competence can be longitudinally classified into three prototypes, namely the continuous stable type, bouncing first and then stable type, and alternate bouncing and stable type; (3) the CAF development of the typical students indicates that the dynamic correlations among the sub-systems are different in three prototypes, and distribution of cognitive resources, initial writing habits, feedback and motivation are the driving forces of different outcomes. The results have implications for teaching of English writing.
Based on China's Standards of English Language Ability (CSE), this study explores an implementation path of assessment for learning (AfL) in college English writing, including two implementation stages of CSE application and assessment practice. At the stage of CSE application, scale descriptors are properly processed to clarify writing ability, design writing tasks, and develop rating scales, so as to ensure rationality and feasibility of AfL implementation. The stage of assessment practice places emphasis on the combination of formative and summative evaluation, encourages students' full participation, and actively adopts new technologies to help teachers and students receive high-quality feedback. The construction of the AfL implementation path is a helpful attempt to give full play to the role of CSE, and provides some implications for more effective English writing assessment.
Playing an important role in learners' L2 writing development, engagement with feedback is jointly affected by individual factors and environmental factors. The application of automated writing evaluation (AWE) system has furnished L2 writing pedagogic practice with a new environment of integrated feedback. This study examines the impact of the integrated feedback environment on learner engagement and L2 writing performance. The findings reveal that: (1) integrated feedback significantly outshines teacher feedback in improving learner engagement and consequently L2 writing performance; (2) in the integrated feedback environment, cognitive engagement has the greatest impact on learners' L2 writing performance, followed by behavioral engagement and affective engagement, and regarding cognitive engagement, the use of metacognitive strategies significantly contributes to a valid prediction of learners' writing performance.
Research on English listening comprehension difficulties of Chinese EFL learners is still in its infancy. The present study explores the inner structure of listening comprehension difficulties based on the language comprehension theory, and investigates the relationship between listening comprehension ability and difficulties. The results show that English listening comprehension difficulties are composed of difficulties at three stages of perception, parsing and utilization. Freshmen majoring in English encounter listening comprehension difficulties in a similar pattern, most frequently at the stage of perception, then utilization, and least frequently parsing; the lower their listening comprehension ability is, the more frequently they may encounter listening comprehension difficulties at three stages. The findings provide some implications for teaching of English listening.
This paper explains the definition and education objectives of strategic top-notch foreign language talents. By drawing on Ausubel's three-dimensional achievement motivation theory and taking Honors College of Shanghai International Studies University as a case, the paper proposes three cultivation mechanisms of multi-college education, multi-link honor education and multi-level incentives. It further details on curriculum system construction, academic training and practice, values-led education, liberal arts education, national conditions and internationalization education, the evaluation system and the rotating flow system, which serve as the main cultivation paths of top-notch foreign language talents.
By using the CiteSpace software to visually analyze 356 journal papers themed on financial English included in CNKI from 2002 to 2021, this paper surveys the development of financial English research in China. The results are as follows: (1) the research institutions of the core literature are mostly finance and economics academies; (2) the research focuses are mainly language ontology and translation of financial English, talent training system, and innovative teaching reform; (3) the research trend has developed from scattered studies to macroscopic, systematic and diversified studies, but there are still such problems as the shallow research level, dominant speculative research methods, unbalanced research objects, homogeneous research perspectives and unidirectional kinetic energy of research. In the future, financial English researchers should improve the research level of financial English teaching reform, deepen verifiable information-aided empirical research, balance research fields and themes, enrich the interdisciplinary nature of financial English research, and explore the path of international financial English communication.
This study adopts a 5-dimension error scoring system including fidelity, fluency, terminology translation, style and cultural reception to compare the English-Chinese translation qualities between a group of translation learners majoring in English and a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system. The results show that the NMT's total error score and fidelity error score are significantly lower than the translation learners' mean error score, but its fluency error score is significantly higher than the translation learners' mean score. The differences between human and machine translation in terminology translation, style and cultural reception are not statistically significant. In view of the results, translation instructors should make efforts to alleviate learner anxiety, guide and supervise the proper use of machine translation technology, and reform measures of translation teaching assessment.