On the afternoon of May 28, Gong Yafu, a researcher at National Institute of Education Sciences, and the chairman of the Foreign Language Teaching Committee of the Chinese Society of Education, visited the Huaxia Curriculum Forum, and made a report entitled “Constructing another systematicness of the English discipline system”. Associated Professor Wang Tao presided over the forum, Guo Baoxian, Cheng Xiao, Cui Yunhuo, Zhang Wei and Wang Xiaoming attended the forum.

Content of the Report

Gong Yafu first introduced the traditional systematicness of the English discipline system, named “function-structure” system. The goal of traditional foreign language teaching is to cultivate students’ communicative competence and language application ability. Under the guidance of the “function-structure” theory, language is taught separately, to be specific, grammar and the function of language are taught in a certain order in a certain school year. However, this leads to a series of problems, such as it does not conform to the law of students’ mastery of language, it only pays attention to the external function of language, which neglects students’ inner world.

Under this circumstance, how can we design another kind of systematicness? Gong examined foreign language education from the perspective of human development and pointed out that the core value of English education is to cultivate a good communicator, rather than communicative competence. English education should also devote itself to the cultivation of good character and virtue. Thus, by studying the concepts, objectives, contents and approaches of English education, Gong put forward a new value system and curriculum framework of English education, that is, “multi-goal English curriculum”. It includes three dimensions: social and cultural goals, thinking and cognitive goals, language communication goals.

Gong takes “competency goal” as the core to design tasks, the purpose is to provide teachers with a superior teaching goal; a reference framework independent of language knowledge such as topic, text, grammar, function, vocabulary and language skills such as listening, speaking, reading and writing.

He acknowledged Professor Cui Yunhuo’s opinion that learning directed to the development of competency must be real, it requires the intervention of real situations and tasks. Only when one or more knowledge is used to accomplish a specific task in a real situation, can key competencies, necessary qualities and values be evaluated.

Different from the previous systematicness led by “topic”, the systematicness advocated by Gong takes “task” as the core. The input content, activity process, and the background of language learning materials are all presented in the form of tasks. It takes “task” as the main unit of analysis, the goal is to train people with all-round development, and the auxiliary textbook is New Notion English.

Finally, Gong expounded the suggestions on the construction of English discipline system from several aspects, such as the content outline, task outline, evaluation structure and evaluation system, multimodal teaching materials and textbook resources etc.

Discussion Session

In the process of communication and interaction, Professor Cui Yunhuo pointed out the consistency between Gong’s educational ideas and those of ICI. He also said that Gong is the vanguard of English curriculum teaching reform from the perspective of cultivating people.

The experts present had a heated discussion on the values in English learning, and the problem of how to deal with the relationship between themes and tasks, how to design tasks, how to treat “big concepts”, out-of-school training, subject education and so on.