The grand opening of the 9th International Conference on English Language Teaching (ELT2020) was held on October 16th, 2020. With the theme of “Insight and Foresight: English Language Teaching for a Community of Shared Future for Humankind,” this international conference was organized by China English Language Education Association under the Association for Comparative Studies of English and Chinese, hosted by Beijing Normal University and co-hosted by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
On the afternoon of October 16th, Professor Zhang Wenzhong from the College of Foreign Languages in Nankai University hosted the symposium called “Activities of RightOempower and English Learning Experience” which attracted more than 200 experts and scholars in English teaching. “The RightOempower Approach” is an original theory proposed by Nankai University, with the core proposition “unification of the role, the right and the responsibility, integration of doing, learning and practice, and endogenization of abilities.” This theory was initiated from the innovative practice of two courses, “Personalized English Learning” and “English Learning in a research way.” Over the years, through teaching experiments and curriculum reform studies across different colleges and universities, the theoretical connotation gets increasingly perfected and the practice patterns gradually mature. Since 2017, “RightOempower” English teaching has become a regular topic of symposium in the International Conference on English Language Teaching.
From the perspective of learners, this symposium presented the latest achievements of language teaching studies based on the idea of “RightOempower” from two aspects: task models and learning experience. In this symposium, Professor Zhang Wenzhong first introduced his interest in the “Personalized English Learning” course and the “integration of doing, learning and practice” task design in terms of task models. Then, Dr. Liu Hao from Tianjin University of Technology, Dr. Zuo Hongshan from Sichuan University, Liu Yongliang, teacher from Qujing Normal University, Feng Ruiling, teacher from Tianjin Normal University and Dr. Zhang Chen from Nankai University respectively reported five results of RightOempower empirical studies. These results involve the multi-dimensional study on learners’ learning experience in English courses based on platforms in terms of “integration of doing, learning and practice,” the development of students' ability to deep learning in personalized English learning tasks, the study on the influence of projected-based writing teaching on the socialization of college students, internationally cooperative online courses’ influence on teachers’ effect of RightOempower and writing psychology’s influence on the complexity of L2 writing.
In this symposium, speakers and attendees had extensively discussions and active communication. The consensus among them is that the “RightOempower Approach” offers methods and inspirations to the reform of English teaching, thus having wide prospects for application in this field.
