项目设计:英语专业毕业实践环节的创新

Learning through Projects:an Innovation in Undergraduate Thesis

英语专业毕业论文是考查学生综合能力、评估学业成绩的重要方式,近年质量呈滑坡趋势。电大本科英语专业的毕业实践环节采取了与国内高校通行的"写论文"模式完全不同的行动研究设计理念和方法,把"写论文"改为"做项目",达到"做中得学"的目的。本文介绍了电大英语专业毕业实践环节进行"教学实践设计"(教育方向)和"商务项目设计"(商务方向)的改革尝试和具体运作模式,推动学习者在真实世界中发现问题,提出解决问题的方案和步骤,经过实践验证和反思,从而达到更深层次知识的掌握和应用。"做项目"的英语专业本科毕业生在更高层次的认知能力(分析能力、综合能力、评估能力、深化学习的能力等)方面有了明显的提升。

The final-year thesis, a common practice for the Chinese college seniors to finish their undergraduate study, has played a very important part in evaluating graduating English-major students' competence and integrated skills acquired at college. However, most academics believe the quality of the thesis is declining in the past ten years. Different from the traditional 'thesis writing'model adopted by regular colleges and universities for almost six decades, the pilot program 'Teaching English at a Distance'has experimented with 'doing projects', which is based upon action research, to complete the college study and to promote the idea of 'learning by doing'. This paper presents a detailed description of the thesis writing reform in terms of 'Practical Project Design'in English language teacher education and 'Practical Business Project and Proposal Design' in Business English course. The author concludes that this innovation motivates learners to identify work-related problems and launch projects to solve these problems, so as to improve their practice and develop higher cognitive skills like analysis, synthesis and evaluation, and to overcome the dichotomies between knowledge and work, and between learning and thinking.