On May 11th, English Listening and Speaking Course Effective Teaching Mode Open Classroom and Teaching Seminar was held in Xingshen Building in Nankai University, sponsored by the Higher Education Press and co-organized by the College of Foreign Languages. The seminar was aimed to:
promote the English listening and speaking teaching to better satisfy the needs of talent cultivation in the new era;
to share English speaking and listening effective teaching materials, methods, and modes after years’ reform
and to explore new ways to make the the reform in English speaking and listening more efficient to meet new changes and social needs.
The seminar employed a variety of activities such as lectures, courses, class observation, and seminars. It has invited a lot of experts and scholars from both the Higher Education Press and Department of College English of Nankai University to give lectures on “Global Competence and English Speaking Listening Competence”, “Exploraion of English Listening and Speaking Course Effective Teaching Modes”, “Course Design and Practice in Effective English Listening and Speaking Teaching”, and “Teachers’ Development Community”. More than 200 English teachers from different universities in China participated in the seminar.
Professor Yan Guodong, Dean of the College of Foreign Languages of Nankai University, delivered a welcome speech to all the teachers. As a teachers committed to foreign language teaching for many years, he expressed his strong wish that all our teachers could value teaching and introduce effective teaching.
Xie Sen, the president of Foreign Language Press Department of Higher Education Press, delivered a speech, in which he made a detailed analysis and summary of college English teaching forms and fruits, and displayed what the Higher Education Press had achieved in college English teaching. Sean Bermingham, National Geographic Learning Specialist of America gave a lecture on Global Competence: Developing Essential Skills for the 21st Century. In the lecture, he emphasized that global vision and intercultural communication skills should be valued in English teaching.
Li Xia, deputy dean of the College of Foreign Languages and director of the Department of Public English Teaching of Nankai University, brought a report on ““Exploration of the O-AMAS Effective Teaching Model and Practice in Nankai University”. Based on the real situation of English teaching in Nankai University, she analyzed the problems in current English teaching, put forward the main characteristics of effective teaching, and shared some practical methods in effective teaching of higher education. Especially, she focused on the effective teaching O-AMAS mode independently developed by the Nankai University Effective Teaching team (NKET).
Tang Lei from the Department of Public English Teaching of the College of Foreign Languages gave a report on “The Design of Audio and Visual Teaching Based on O-AMAS Effective Teaching Mode”. In addition, He worked with Shi Yu from the Department of Public English Teaching to demonstrate classroom teaching about “College English Speaking & Listening Visual Teaching Based on TED Talks”. In Mr. Tang’s demonstration, the meeting room was transformed into a classroom for teaching and he together with his students presented lively English teaching with multiple activities adopted throughout. All the participating teachers were attracted and amazed by Tang’s excellent teaching design and teaching itself. How to improve the traditional single teaching mode? How to make the class more attractive to the students? These two questions were well concerned by most of our English teachers. Therefore, Shi Yu shared some experience according to the teaching video to provide some workable approaches for our teachers in their future teaching.
As China has been working hard to cultivate first-class universities and college students as well as to cultivate more innovative international talents, it is significant to improve English teaching, an essential part in higher education. College English teaching should aim to improve the students’ language competence and their overall capabilities in intercultural communication, critical thinking, and academic exploration. The effective teaching mode created by Nankai University will help to improve our college English teaching.
