An Empirical Study on Follow-up College English Curriculum Design

Despite the immense improvement of college English educational system in the teaching conditions, equipments as well as methods, little attention is attached to the follow-up college English curriculum design in many colleges and universities, especially the engineering ones. With the attempt to optimize the current curriculum based on the requirements made in NCRTCE (2004), a 2-year empirical study was conducted in North China Electric Power University(NCEPU), in which a set of elective courses in an open format was designed and developed by employing Computer and Classroom-Based (CCB) model and by combining the independent online learning with regular teaching in order to unlock the students' potential and enhance the efficiency in English learning. The whole process covered three stages: preparation, application, and evaluation, which lasted from 2010 to 2012 with 325 non-English majors in NCPEU as subjects. In this paper, these three stages are firstly presented respectively in details. Then insights and suggestions are provided concerning follow-up college English curriculum design based on the analysis and discussion of the results.