Sensing the Poetic Habitat - A Study of Middle School Chinese Teaching from the Perspectives of Life Aesthetics

The concept of life aesthetics reflects an individual’s cry for life and pursuit of beauty,inspiring individuals to discover their spiritual home,sense their poetic habitat,and enjoy the beauty of life flowing from their fingertips.Chinese education,viewed through the lens of life aesthetics,is founded on the natural characteristics of life,stimulating the aesthetic sense of individual life through the allure of language,and teaching students to view life through the aesthetic lens as well as from an understanding of life’s essence.Teachers and students are required to take an aesthetic view of life as theoretical guidance,based on core Chinese literacy,with textbook contents serving as carriers and classroom instruction as the position,closely connected to students’actual lives,in order to help stimulate aesthetic experience among students,improve their aesthetic ability through aesthetic activities,and thus establish a correct view of life.

Developments of Professional Learning Communities and Challenges for Principals in Chinese Urban Middle Schools

Professional learning communities(PLCs)have seen a rapid spread all around the world over the past 30 years.Since then it has been proved that they can improve teaching quality and thereby the achievement of students,and so PLCs have attracted increasing attention especially from education systems.In China,PLCs have been developed vigorously within schools since the implementation of the‘New Curriculum Reform’in 2000.However,the west has paid scant attention to and were not familiar with them since most research in this field in China was published in Chinese.Furthermore,PLCs are influenced by contextual and cultural factors,and therefore PLCs in Chinese education systems are different from those in Anglo-American settings due to long-standing cultural differences,which require consideration.Therefore,this research will investigate the PLCs in China that may be of interest.Many recent studies have shown that,although PLCs have made significant progress in Chinese urban middle schools through the enthusiastic efforts of educators and scholars,there are still several barriers.The primary purpose of this research is to review the development of PLCs and additionally to analyse the challenges faced by the principals.

A Brief Description of Audio-Lingual Method and Discussion of its Advantages and Disadvantages vis-a-vis the English Language Teaching Situation in Chinese Middle Schools

With the development of reform and open policy, foreign languages become more and moreuseful. And how to teach a foreign language is an important matter. A lot of methods of teaching foreign languages have been developed. There’re grammar-trans-lation method, direct method, audio-lingual method, communicative method, etc. In this paper I in-