AN EFFICIENCY EVALUATION ON GENERAL EGNLISH COURSES AIMING AT CULTIVATING GLOBAL INNOVATIVE ABILITY

Abstract. In recent years, higher educational institutions in China have been answering national appeals to construct “New Engineering” talent cultivation, which advocate interdisciplinary and cross- disciplinary international cooperation and integration. Conventional general-shared curriculum has been examined and evaluated. The insufficiency for development of undergraduates’ global competency has been detected among such curriculum in an engineering major oriented university in northern-eastern China, University of Science and Technology Liaoning (USTL).

This study aims to examine the efficiency of the conventional General English courses offered in USTL, an engineering majors oriented provincial university in northern eastern China.

The premise concept of this research topic is that English should retreat to the position of “communication tool” in the higher education stage on students’ academic ladders. Language is the clue to knowledge input and the medium of opinion output after critical thinking. The language and culture learning courses of undergraduate students, in “New Engineering” construction era, should take cultivating talents’ information literacy as the course’s or the course group’s teaching objective. Cooperatively, as an organic whole, English-delivered interdisciplinary courses are closely related to one another. The courses bring students into the information fields involved in international academic research circles.

There are three key questions are expected to be resolved in this reforming project, including the improvement in inter-connectivity between courses, the realisation of Decentralisation in teaching designs, and the induction of an On-Campus Internationalisation Indicator System. With the research methods of Literature Comparison and Qualitive Metasynthesis, questionnaire surveys, and in-depth interviews, the research and practice of this project have evolved into three aspects of conclusions.

Firstly, it is necessary to connect courses with a consistent teaching objective of values and ethics. Secondly, teachers’ role should be shifted from core motivator of the classes to managers of teaching resources. Finally, on-campus internationalisation removed the financial barrier to students from average-income families, granting all students an equal opportunity to experience international classroom and curriculum.

Keywords: on-campus internationalisation, higher education, multicultural classroom, cross-cultural communication