Nowadays, with the release of Announcement on the Confirmed Results of the 2nd Batch of National First-Class Undergraduate Courses, College English (Ⅲ) in our
university has been granted as one of the online-offline blended first-class courses. This is the second time that College English course has been confirmed as the national
first-class undergraduate course after the approval of the same level course College English: Approaches to Improving English Skills.
Among the 2nd batch of the approved national first-class courses, College English (Ⅲ) is the only online-offline blended College English course selected among Universities affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and in Hei Longjiang Province. There are only 7 universities in which College English courses have been
accepted twice consecutively by national first-class undergraduate courses.
College English (Ⅲ) is a public basic course for the 2nd year non-English majors in our university, with professor Wang Lili, the associate dean of Foreign Language
Schools, as the course leader, and Wang Xin, Yuan Fei, Yue Tieyan and Zhang Xiaohui as the key members. Relying on MOOCs and Unipus platform, the course carries out mixed teaching which integrates language and value-oriented education based on English passages from textbooks and ideological and political discourse from Chinese culture and national current affairs. The course finds solutions to the westernization of teaching content and enables students to elucidate Chinese culture and tell the Chinese stories well in
English. Combining the cultivation of language learning skills, critical thinking ability and comprehensive literacy, the course breaks the time-space boundary of teaching.
With a variety of interactive and participatory activities, the course tackles the problem of learning being separated from application, forging a classroom embedded with
difficulties, in-depth exploration, challenge and attraction. Accordingly, a multi-dimension classroom takes into shape, where students engage themselves in online activities before class, teachers give a face-to-face guidance in class, and teachers and students are cooperatively involved in reflection after class.
In recent years, College English teaching team has been plunging deep into the curriculum construction with the consistent adoption of student-oriented approach,
optimization of course systems and contents, and implementation of formative assessments, ceaselessly improving the course to a much higher, innovative and challenging
level. In November 2020, College English: Approaches to Improving English Skills was confirmed as the 1st batch of national online first-class courses. In January 2022,
College English (Ⅲ) was designated to be the 2nd batch of model courses and teaching teams from the ideological and political perspective in higher education institutions of Hei Longjiang province. The acceptance by the 2nd batch of national first-class undergraduate courses is conducive to giving a full play to the potential achieved through online
and offline blended teaching, and the exemplary and leading role of first-class courses, giving a boost to the continuous and stable in-depth development of college English
teaching reform both inside and outside the university.
