Reform and Exploration of Bilingual Teaching in Software College

Dongming Chen, Yi Ma ＊, Beilei Wang

Abstract: At present, many domestic colleges and universities have opened bilingual teaching,and achieved gratifying results, but bilingual teaching is still facing a lot of problems. Based on the concept and definition of bilingual teaching, this paper expounds the role and meaning of bilingual teaching, analyses the present situation and existing problems of bilingual teaching, and puts forward the effective way of bilingual teaching in colleges and universities.

Key words: bilingual teaching; teaching reform; teaching methods and measures

1 Introduction

Bilingual teaching refers to teaching professional courses through two languages as teaching media.In higher education, bilingual teaching is not only English-Chinese learning, but also to help learners learn how to use English, grasp the subject matter. It is the integration of professional learning and as well as language learning[1-2].

Bilingual teaching is conducive to the professional level of students, the improvement of foreign language level[3-5]. Bilingual teaching reduces the student's difficulties due to language barrier and reduces the difficulty of learners. So that students master the professional knowledge at the same time, facilitate foreign language ability, especially in listening, speaking reading and writing. Bilingual teaching is conducive to the introduction of foreign educational resources, so that students experience“authentic”English. Modern university originated in the west, and the universities of chemistry, electronics,engineering, physics and other science and engineering knowledge is mainly from the west, its writings are mainly written in foreign languages. At present, in science and technology, most of the latest literature is to use foreign language to spread and exchange.Therefore, the development of bilingual teaching helps to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding caused by translation, to avoid information deformation. Finally,bilingual teaching is conducive to the improvement of students’comprehensive quality and ability.

Chinese traditional teaching mainly pays attention to knowledge, while western teaching mainly pays attention to the cultivation of students’ ability.Therefore, the combination of the two approaches,the use of an international language to better learn professional skills and knowledge, can also enable us to better carry out quality education.

Under the trend of internationalization of education and talent, our country’s demand for talents who master both profession and foreign language is growing, in order to cultivate a high level of postgraduates with international vision and innovative ability, accelerate the process of internationalization of teaching, the educational department make specific and clear requirements for bilingual teaching. Bilingual teaching has been widely noticed by universities and developed rapidly. The characteristics of software engineering of our school decide that the professional post-graduates have a great deal of dependence on English; it means the post-graduate education should adopt the mode of bilingual teaching. The development of bilingual teaching work is a complicated and systematic project involving teaching model, teacher training, teaching materials, teaching management and teaching evaluation.

There are still some shortcomings both in theory and practice in college bilingual teaching, which also led to dissatisfaction with the results of bilingual teaching.

2 Problems

At present, the problems of bilingual teaching in postgraduates are mainly reflected in the following aspects.

Some students have fear and contradiction in bilingual teaching. Students are the main target of Chinese teaching. The foreign language level of students directly affects the teaching result. As colleges and universities expanding enrollment, more and more students enter the campus. And a considerable number of students have poor foreign language level, especially in the listening. Students do not understand the teacher lectures, and their own ideas cannot be expressed timely. Most of the students couldn’t understand crosscultural communication, and of course cannot correctly understand the essence of the content.

Students are not enthusiastic about bilingual teaching in English. Software engineering is a typical science and engineering major, most students focus on learning the expertise of software engineering, and they do not think English bilingual teaching has any help in software engineering expertise. Students focus on the professional aspects such as programming, system development and etc. However, they ignore the role of English in software engineering, which will result in the slow progress of students in future research work,students' learning initiative and effect will not obvious.This series of questions, no doubt become a barrier to promote bilingual teaching.

Teachers do not understand bilingual teaching thoroughly. Many teachers are short of English cultural background in the process of teaching, ignoring why oral English transform into professional terminology.They do not understand the cultural connotation and language consensus. They focus on translating the knowledge into English when preparing, explaining the surface meaning of technical terms to students.This leads to the boring results of bilingual teaching in English, and also reduces the students’ interest in learning.

Bilingual teaching is an important factor for teachers,and teachers are the direct implementation of bilingual teaching. Teachers' devotion is one of the main aspects that affect bilingual teaching. Most professional teachers work long-term in teaching, they do have a high theoretical foundation and professional skills, but few of them can teach freely using foreign language.The smooth development of bilingual teaching is inseparable from the teacher’s higher language ability,precise professional knowledge.

The method of bilingual teaching is too monotonous.In the English bilingual teaching of computer, software engineering, etc, classroom teaching and students’unilateral acceptance are employed by most bilingual teaching courses. The students who are good at English can barely keep up with the teacher, but students with poor English fundamentals must put all their attention on English comprehension, which lead to dull classroom atmosphere and the students’ lack of learning interest. Bilingual courses have evolved into English classes, which teach English only.

3 Perform and Explorations

Most of the graduate students of the software college are fresh graduates, normally, their English foundation is great. They have the ability of English listening,speaking, reading and writing, etc. Therefore, colleges have the conditions of carrying out bilingual teaching reform of post-graduate courses.

3.1 Students

We should guide students to correct their attitude and strengthen their recognition of bilingual teaching.Students are the main part of learning when the teacher is lecturing, and teaching should be student-centered,and arousing the enthusiasm of students is to improve the teaching effect. We should let students realize that English is ubiquitous in the field of expertise imperceptibly, and it is a powerful guarantee for the smooth development of scientific research work, so as to promote students' recognition of bilingual teaching.Whether bilingual teaching can be implemented smoothly depends largely on the level of acceptance of students' foreign language proficiency and professional competence. Students should have a strong professional level and self-learning ability. Bilingual courses is more difficult for students to understand and accept than courses teaching by mother tongue, especially some of the logical contents, and students have to spend more self-study time to digest what they have learnt. Ordinary English vocabulary, different areas of expertise will have different meanings. Therefore,students are at a high professional level at the same time, they need to have self-learning ability, by reading the original textbooks and watching films and television, etc., to improve their foreign language level.Otherwise, students do not understand the situation and then have to take methods and spend extra time to make up again, and ultimately affect the result of bilingual learning and teaching.

3.2 Teaching environment

Provide a good environment, and promote the improvement of teachers’ own ability. Improve the level of teachers by sending them to study abroad or other ways. Teacher’s guidance is the source of classroom learning result, teacher’s personal ability also determines his personal charm, to a great extent,it affect students’ recognition of bilingual teaching.Bilingual teaching teachers should have a clear understanding of the relationship between professional knowledge and English. On the one hand, improve their understanding of English culture connotation constantly, on the other hand, update and master the professional knowledge of the frontier. Not only focus on using English in class, but also pay more attention to background knowledge and the explanation of cultural connotation. They should improve their own computer professional knowledge, to ensure that the amount of information taught in the classroom and the diversity of teaching methods.

The relevant departments of the school should develop the appropriate teaching plan, training programs, graduation design, organizational teaching and daily management system, the implementation of bilingual teaching effect, security system, assessment system and a series of activities to study and follow up, so that bilingual teaching There are rules to follow,there are systems to follow. According to the actual situation, China’s universities focus on training and indraught, simultaneously, that is, through a variety of channels to foster their own teachers, and at the same time, to introduce talents with strong professional background as well as foreign language ability. To compare with the conventional teaching, bilingual teaching requires teachers to spend more time and energy, so teachers who carry out bilingual teaching should be given appropriate policy support. The college also gives financial support to improve the hours of remuneration, teaching and research projects, domestic and foreign visits and other support.

3.3 Teaching system

Improve the teaching system. Import well-known university teaching system and the original textbook;employ foreign teachers to participate in teaching plan. English original textbook is rigorous, wide coverage and has large amount of information, so that teachers and students can come into contact with the“authentic”English. It is helpful for students’ indepth expansion of learning. In order to improve the teaching effect, reference books should be provided for students, which cannot only reduce the difficulty of bilingual teaching, but also enable students to complete the course better. Let students feel foreign well-known university professional courses, experience the charm of the original textbooks, and often communicate with foreign teachers to improve English professional ability.

3.4 Teaching method

Bilingual teaching should make full use of multimedia resources, and provide a large number of flexible and vivid multimedia courseware, to stimulate students’vision and hearing, improve students’English proficiency as well as learning professional courses. During the process of teaching activities,teachers can set up a number of challenging projects,so that students in the classroom can answer questions in English adequately. This can not only improve the interest of students, but also can enhance students' selfconfidence. Teachers can encourage students to access to English literature independently to find and purpose solutions through assign homework. Encourage students to refer to a large number of foreign highlevel papers, writing English papers, improve students’ability to use English when doing scientific research.

Foreign language teaching ways and means should be based on the students’ foreign language proficiency and professional level, and the teaching process should also be step by step, otherwise learning and teaching tend to get into trouble. The purpose of bilingual teaching is to learn professional knowledge, language is only a tool for communication, should not be cart before the horse.

3.5 Network course platform

Build a network course platform. With the help of BB,teachers should display teaching platform, teaching syllabus, teaching calendar, teaching materials,question and answer discussion and other teaching resources on the network platform for students to download, including pre-class necessary professional words and pre-arranged course tasks, so students can be aware of the main content of this lesson and the difficult words before class. So that both teachers and students can better complete the classroom interaction.The instructor should show the latest research results at home and abroad as reference materials on the network platform after the introduction of each part of the course, provided to students as post-class reading materials. This will not only enrich the content of the course, but also improve students’ self-learning ability and cultivate students’ spirit of scientific research.

3.6 Teaching evaluation

Strengthen the support of bilingual teaching, design advanced and scientific bilingual teaching evaluation system. Bilingual teaching is a complex and arduous work, universities need to increase support for bilingual teaching, improve the management level, so as to ensure the smooth implementation of bilingual teaching. Bilingual teaching is different from the traditional teaching, it is particularly important to establish scientific and standardized evaluation mechanism, the existing results-based evaluation and process monitoring must be combined. Design and carry out the “difference” assessment on the teaching process and teaching effect, let students evaluate teachers.

4 Performance

Take the English course Data Structures as an example,after implementation of bilingual teaching, the average scores, excellent rate and pass rate are shown in Table 1. As a comparison, we also see the performance of algorithm design and analysis which is Chinese course in Table 2.

Table 1 performance of Data Structures.

Table 2 performance of Algorithm Design and Analysis.

We can see that for the programming language class, the English teaching achievement is better than the Chinese teaching achievement. For Englishtaught courses, it is easier for students to adapt foreign excellent teaching materials to practical courses. The English environment documentation is richer and helps students solve problems and improve their abilities.

5 Conclusion

Through the above bilingual teaching reform, to mobilize the enthusiasm of students, who learn to participate in bilingual learning. The establishment of a scientific and rational teacher training programs to improve teachers' personal ability. Design the advanced teaching system, the introduction of foreign highlevel teaching materials and invite foreign teachers to participate in teaching. Design a wealth of teaching methods on the school BB platform, building a rich bilingual teaching support platform. Designed the bilingual teaching support and evaluation system and improved the effect of bilingual teaching.