建构英语教学中新的师生角色

建构主义的出现给教育领域带来了一场革命。建构主义学习理论对传统英语教学的师生角色观提出了挑战。在新的学习理论指导下,教师和学生的角色也随着变化,师生承担着多元角色。     

浅谈“因材施教”专业英语教学——以化工专业英语为例

随着就业形势日趋严峻,用人单位对应聘者的要求越来越高。因此,高技能复合型外语人才倍受青睐。提高学生就业竞争优势已然成为高职高专教育发展的巨大挑战和必然趋势。文章通过分析化工专业英语教学现状,提出"因材施教"、学校自出教材和增大专业英语教学实习实训的几点建议。     

Presentation 教学方法在高职英语教学中的应用

在高职英语课堂教学过程中,Presentation 是一种重要的教学方法,通过 presentation 课堂活动的展开,可以充分发挥学生主体作用,调动学习积极性、主动性,提高学生综合能力。本文对 presentation 的概念、理论依据、实施过程、教学注意事项和教学效果评价进行了分析。     

17-18世纪英文文献中的中国建筑意象

17—18世纪,伴随着蓬勃发展的全球贸易,欧洲掀起了一场波及诸多领域的"中国风"。在英国,从政治家、哲学家、文人等一代文化精英致力于翻译、编纂传入欧洲有关中国的文献,到全社会对自然风致园、"中国风"点景建筑的实践与讨论,再到18世纪末英国人出版直击中国的著作,存世的一系列英文文献、设计图纸中多有关涉中国古代建筑的信息。本文以时间脉络为轴,尽可能全面搜集17—18世纪在英传播的涉及中国古代建筑的文献史料,根据不同时间段因社会背景有异、对中国建筑认知的深度不同,初步作一分类。希望可以为今后明晰中国建筑意象在英国的内容变迁与英国本土政治、经济、文化等各方面互动联系的深入研究提供史料基础。     

本科生国际化培养模式探索——以北京航空航天大学土木与机场工程专业为例

北京航空航天大学土木与机场工程专业自2012年开设本科生国际化实验班以来,突出学校航空航天基础设施建设特色,综合中英文课程体系、国际暑期学校和国际交换学习完成授课内容。在人才培养上,注重参加科技竞赛,依托科研项目,辅以名师学术报告、学术会议等全方位提高学生的国际视野,激发创新思维,培养综合型高端人才。     

当前高职院校基础英语课程教学存在的问题与对策

近年来,虽然国家对于高等职业教育的发展给予了大力的关注和支持,高等职业教育规模进一步扩大;然而伴随着高考生源的减少,高考英语教学改革的实施,高职院校学生的英语学习热情明显不足,课堂教学效率低下。本文旨在分析当前高职院校基础英语教学存在的主要问题,并探索解决问题的途径。     

MEMIS: A Mobile-Supported English-Medium Instruction System

Education is one of the most important elements in our lives, as it provides a direct gain in knowledge. Thus, in order to provide better academic achievement, more and more instructors are adapting collaborative learning to their classes. However, two major problems lurk behind collaborative learning. First, it is difficult to apply collaborative learning because students tend to engage passively with traditional lectures. As a result, interactive technologies such as clickers have been applied to increase interactive learning and raise the rate of interaction. Nevertheless, these interactive technologies still have some limitations, such as limited mobility, high costs, setup issues, technical difficulties, and little support of higher-order thinking skills. Second, recently there has been an increasing number of EMI (English as Medium of Instruction) courses added to university course offerings in countries where English is not the first language. The goal of these courses is to support university internationalization and address the global status of English. However, it is even harder to achieve in-class interaction in large EMI lecture courses. In addition, some studies argue that EMI courses might affect the overall learning of course content because of students’ poor lecture comprehension and passive engagement in class.In order to address the limitations of interactive technologies, encourage more collaborative learning, facilitate greater in-class interaction in large lecture courses, and resolve students’ poor lecture comprehension in EMI courses, the author introduces MEMIS (Mobile-Supported English-Medium Instruction System), which includes both a T&S (Teachers & Students) mobile app and an EMI pedagogical method. The author first provides detailed implementation and all the features of the T&S mobile app, which improves students’ perceptions of classroom participation and in-class interaction. Then the author explains how she develops her EMI pedagogy such that it utilizes the features of the T&S mobile app to: 1) increase students’ overall learning in her EMI course, 2) develop students’ construction of knowledge and higher-order thinking, and 3) achieve all six cognitive processes from Bloom’s revised taxonomy. The author adapts a quasi-experimental design, statistically analyzes the effectiveness of both exam scores and final grades between a control group and an experimental group, and then asks students to evaluate their experiences and provide feedback about MEMIS. Based on both statistical results and students’ overall feedback, the author confirms that MEMIS is an effective approach that improves lecture comprehension, encourages more class engagement, promotes collaborative learning, and achieves better learning outcomes.     

The effects of animated pedagogical agents in an English-as-a-foreign-language learning environment

Animated pedagogical agents (APAs) have frequently been used as a powerful addition to learning environments, since APAs have been known to facilitate learning. APAs can present various features, such as voice, movements, gestures and pointing, and researchers have sought to verify specifically which features of agents effectively contribute to learning. Previous studies have studied these features by comparing different degrees of agent embodiment in the evaluation of the image effect (i.e., students learn more when learning systems have visual APAs), the embodied agent effect (i.e., fully embodied agents that deliver instruction aurally and use gestures to improve learning outcomes in text-only learning systems), the modality effect (i.e., oral instruction contributes to the learning process), and the expressiveness effect (i.e., fully embodied agents promote more effective learning than static ones). Some of these studies have investigated the image, embodied agent and modality effects in the same learning environment, but they were not the same studies that investigated the expressiveness effect. The expressiveness effect allows us to separate the movements of the agent from its other features, such as the agent's image, so investigating this effect is as important as investigating the other effects. We are not aware of any studies that investigated all of these four effects within the same learning system, nor that evaluated any of these effects in language learning environments. Accordingly, this paper describes the design, implementation, and analysis of an APA designed to evaluate the abovementioned effects. The APA was integrated into a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) system to teach English as a foreign language to Brazilian students. A total of 72 Brazilian undergraduate students were divided into four groups, each of which used a different version of the APA in the same CALL system: no agent, a voice-only agent, a static agent, or a fully embodied agent. We compared students’ gain scores (i.e., difference between pre- and posttest scores) across groups to evaluate each of the four effects. Though the outcomes of our study supported the presence of the embodied agent and modality effects, we were not able to demonstrate the image or expressiveness effects in the experiment. Our results indicate that the voice of the agent might contribute more positively to learning than movements, gestures and pointing.     

借助现代信息技术,助推高职高效英语简

现如今，科技发展迅猛，我们生活中的每个方面都会涉及到现代化的信息技术，就教学领域来说，当然也深受其影响，现代化的信息技术可以帮助高职英语方面的教学，改革教学方式，不断进取，从而有更好的发展。在本文中，作者通过摸索，分析了怎么样在高职英语的教学过程中更好的借助现代化的信息手段来给学生们上课，从而使得学生们的学习兴趣被激发，营造课堂气氛，取得理想的教学效果。