In May, the teaching team of the Department of Engineering English, led by Ms. Sun Ying, lectured by Ms. Du Yang and participated by Ms. Wen Jing, Ms. Deng Juanjuan and Ms. Wu Minrui, took part in the “FLTRP Star Teacher Contest” of 2022 co-sponsored by the Steering Committee of Foreign Language and Literature Teaching in General Undergraduate Universities in Sichuan Province, the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press and the Committee of College Foreign Language of Sichuan Higher Education Association. After nearly a month of contest, we finally won the first prize in the college English group in the Sichuan provincial final.
In accordance with the national development trend and the development trend of foreign language education, the theme of this year’s contest is “Effective Use of Foreign Language Teaching Materials: Unifying Ideology and Science”, and teachers are required to participate as a team. This not only requires the participating teachers to deeply understand the teaching materials, formulate a teaching plan with school and academic conditions, and create a lively and effective classroom, but also requires teamwork and intellectual cohesion in the process, as well as innovative teaching design, which organically integrates international perspective, national sentiment, cultural literacy and other thinking and political education contents into language teaching to implement the mission of educating students and promoting their development.
The team chose the first unit of the New Horizons College English Reading and Writing Course used by freshmen as the material for the contest and designed a lively and effective writing lesson. In the light of the actual situation of our school, where engineering and non-English majors are the teaching targets, Ms. Sun Ying proposes to combine the output-oriented teaching method with the cognitive load theory in teaching concept, to implement the unit objective of “telling Chinese stories in English” on the one hand, and to help students eliminate or minimize the external cognitive load in the teaching activities on the other hand. On the other hand, she will help students to eliminate or minimize the external cognitive load in the teaching activities, and guide them to mobilize cognition, master skills and complete output step by step.
The teaching concept is embodied in the teaching design. The teacher took the text as the basis to show students the three levels of writing and polishing language, namely accuracy, diversity and elegance, and also took the students’ first draft of composition as an example to complete the internalization and practice of language skills through classroom interactions such as group collaboration and teachers’ comments. In the classroom scene of the teaching contest, Ms. Du Yang was calm and airy, with fluent and beautiful English lectures, as well as lively but orderly classroom student discussions and interactions, making the class pace comfortable and reflecting her superior classroom control ability. Finally, the urban rail teaching team won the first prize of the College English group in the Sichuan provincial final of the “FLTRP Star Teacher Contest” in 2022.
In addition to the honor, the teaching contest brings more thoughts and continuous progress. College English teachers should take the responsibility of establishing moral education, integrating teaching materials and practice, optimizing teaching design, improving teaching quality, organically integrating the cultivation of language skills with the shaping of students’ ideological and moral character, enlightening wisdom, implementing the mission of educating people, and promoting more comprehensive and healthy development of students.