On the afternoon of March 18th, the second semester of the 2020-2021 school year bilingual teacher training class was held in Room G-209 of the teaching building. This training course was led by Professor Zhou Wengui, the leader of the bilingual teaching expert group. 9 young and middle-aged teachers from the School of Economics, School of Management, School of Education, and School of Information Technology participated in the training. The training course uses English as the working language.
Professor Zhou Wengui had an interactive exchange with the participating teachers around the theme of Bilingual Teaching in SCBC: Understanding and Practice. First, Professor Zhou and the students introduced themselves to each other in English. Then, Professor Zhou cut into the topic from Why SCBC Opens Bilingual Courses. Professor Zhou believes that from a macro perspective, under the conditions of internationalization, China has further expanded its opening to the outside world, and the construction and development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area has objectively formed a strong support for ordinary workers with relatively proficient English skills and high comprehensive quality. As a college with distinctive foreign language characteristics, SCBC needs to shoulder the mission of cultivating talents and actively meet the needs of the talent market. In addition, the promotion of bilingual teaching and improving students' ability to observe, think, discuss, research, and solve related problems in professional fields, and deal with professional business in English as a working language, can directly help the students of SCBC to face the future. The lecture strengthened the participants’ understanding of the importance of bilingual teaching.
Then, Professor Zhou exchanged views with the participating teachers on How to define the bilingual curriculum and how to avoid the big hoolong and one size fits all issues in the process of advancing bilingual teaching reform, which helps the participating teachers clarified the difference between bilingual courses and professional courses taught in Chinese and ordinary English courses. Professor Zhou emphasized that it is not possible to make bilingual courses into professional courses, that is, to teach professional courses in English again. However, it is not advisable to turn bilingual courses into English intensive or extensive reading courses.
Professor Zhou pointed out that the mistakes in traditional English teaching have directly led to the problems of high scores and low abilities, that is, strong test ability and weak language ability. The fundamental purpose of the school’s bilingual curriculum is to help students build a “Discourse System of specific discipline” based on English, and completely subvert the traditional English teaching and the training of Deaf English and Dumb English.
Based on his own study and work experience, Professor Zhou shared his thoughts and opinions with the trainees in humorous language, which benefited the trainees a lot and won warm applause from the trainees.