<Author>Michael</Author>
<Topic>Letter to Person in Charge of English Language Teaching and Future Goals</Topic>
<Source></Source>
<Nationality>USA</Nationality>
Dear Dean,
I have enjoyed very much teaching English at your university, and thank you for your great hospitality during my stay in China. I have found our English majors, both the juniors and seniors whom I have taught, to be mostly serious and dedicated students in their learning of English. They are bright and intelligent. They have learned English at an extensive level, with many helpful classes, starting with the freshman year. The juniors have taken intensive reading 5 and 6, mass media, translation, listening comprehension, linguistics, and writing all in English. The seniors have taken intensive reading 7 and 8, and will each write a 5,000 word research paper in English before graduation, listening comprehension, writing, translation, teaching methods; American literary history, composition and rhetoric, pedagogy and education, and British literature, again all in English. Your program is very comprehensive, and has trained our students very well. Since most of them will be English teachers, we should have considerable confidence in their abilities in English. I am also pleased to see that they are learning some information technology such as the ability to create power point assignments. You have very good listening laboratories.
If I could make some modest recommendations, they would include one new course at the junior or senior level, if possible, in intercultural communication. Since intercultural communication emphasizes communication between different cultures, this would seem to be most beneficial for our English majors. This course might replace the second senior intensive reading class that is now taught in Chinese, or some course might be moved into the sophomore level to accommodate this new course. It would be helpful for the University to provide television sets for each dormitory room, with access to CCTV 9 International, the all English station. Though many students might choose the Chinese stations, some would want to listen in English.
As English language movies are dubbed into Chinese on most of the television stations, it would be good to offer an English language movie for our students once a week entirely in the native English, perhaps with subtitles, instead of dubbing the voices. Many of my students have said that this would be a very helpful way to learn English and it is a common practice in many other countries, including Russia. Lots of Chinese students believe that they must memorize many English words in their dictionaries. I think that a better way to help them is through the context of English writing, when they then go to the dictionary to discover words actually in usage. It seems useful to me to install a computer in each dormitory room with Internet access which would encourage the students to search for information not only in Chinese, but also in English.
Cordially, Michael