The College English Department (CED) is staffed by 48 full-time teachers – including 1 professor, 5 associate professors, 41 lecturers, and 1 assistant – 40 of whom hold a master's degree or higher academic titles.
The CED is tasked with teaching general English to non-English undergraduate and graduate majors. In pace with a new round of curriculum reform, by offering leveled and categorized courses, the CED is striving to fulfill the training requirements from different colleges for their students. In addition to general-purpose English courses, a series of multidisciplinary courses are offered, including English for special purpose, English for academic exchange, as well as English for humanities. Presently among the offered courses are College English Level I, II and III, General English for Graduate students , Advanced Audiovisual Course, Business English, Medical English, Academic English for Reading and Writing, Intercultural Communication, Anglo-American Culture, Anglo-American Literature, and IELTS-oriented Training Courses. Meanwhile, the CED is continuously developing new courses, actively engaging in the construction and start-up of general knowledge courses, in the hope of providing high-quality, personalized courses to cater for the need of different students for language learning and personal development.
Over the years, under "A Teaching Guideline for College General English Curriculum", the CED has been actively exploring a teaching reform to enhance the overall quality of students and to boost their comprehensive ability to use the English language. In combination with a full use of modern teaching aids, a reform is under way in a wide range concerning curriculum content, curriculum system, teaching modes, teaching methods as well as teaching evaluation, striving to build a personalized model for college English teaching. Well integrated with a new trend of teaching reform, personalized teaching, online-offline teaching and MOOCs teaching have proved effective means characteristic of college English teaching in Hangzhou Normal University.
In recent years, teachers of CED have made great breakthrough in teaching and research. A large number of research projects undertaken by teachers of CED have been approved, which include four provincial-level projects and more than 20 municipal-level projects. In addition, more than 30 school-level projects related to scientific research or educational reform are also approved. And dozens of paper have been published in core academic journals home and abroad. What’s more, teachers of CED have been honored with numerous awards in teaching competitions and national micro-lecture contests, including 5 winners of first or second provincial level prize in the SFLEP (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press) National Foreign Language Teaching Contest, 3 winners of first or second national level prize in various micro-lecture contests and one winner of first provincial level prize in teaching technological achievement. And several teachers have won the titles of “Teaching Rookies” of Hangzhou Normal University (HZNU) and “Excellent Teachers” in Hangzhou Municipal Education System. On the other hand, lots of on-line courses have been made. Up to now, one video open course is running successfully on the “ICourse” web site and a series of micro-lectures, mainly made by teachers of CED, are running on SFLEP website as well. All these on-line courses, learned and shared by learners nationwide, greatly improved the social impact of the School of Foreign Languages of HZNU.
The teaching quality and student's extracurricular guidance are always given priorities to college English teaching. With the guidance of teachers, nearly 80% of non-English major students at HZNU could pass CET 4(College English Test Band 4) on the first try and dozens of students turned in good performance in various contests, such as The Information Decoding Contest, The CCTV FLTRP(Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press) Cup National College Students English Speech Contest, The National College Students’ English Knowledge Competition and The College Students Writing Contest in Zhejiang Province.
CED is dedicated to creating an English-learning atmosphere in the campus through a Self Study and Tutoring Center based in the Language Lab Centre. Along with regular weekly Q&A sessions both on-site and on-line, twelve to fifteen lectures featuring culture, language skills and beyond are held each semester on the venue to boost the English-learning passion. So far, six seasons( semesters) of the Weekends Lab learning have been held, with 3000 or so students’ attendance in each season. It will be carried on as a good means to facilitate students’ English learning.
CED is committed to improving the faculty performance with combined effort to press on with reform and refining teaching management, as part of the efforts to help the students overcome the language barrier and develop into future talents with global vision.
