Keynote Speech II Teacher Education in the New Era:Opportunities and Challenges for Teacheroriented Foreign Language Majors

Zhang Shaojie

Northeast Normal University

[Abstract] A new pattern of teacher education,which is marked by normal universities and colleges as the main body and high-level non-normal universities as participants,is just beginning to take shape in China.This new pattern is favorable to foreign language majors of normal universities and colleges in playing a major role in teacher education as well as to those of both normal and high-level non-normal universities in fostering their connotative development in foreign language teacher education.Meanwhile,the new pattern will force us to rethink the relationship between teacher quality and academic quality,push forward the construction of teaching abilities in teacher education,and improve an overall quality of teacher training so as to reach the goal of constructing a unified system of pre-professional education and post-professional training.The paper calls for going with the new trend of teacher education development in the new era in order to shoulder the mission of cultivating excellent foreign language teachers for the country.

[Keywords] teacher education;foreign language teacher education;opportunity and challenge;foreign language major

Bionote

Zhang Shaojie now serves as Dean of Rutgers-Newark Institute at Northeast Normal University.He is a senior professor and doctoral supervisor in the School of Foreign Languages.He obtained his Ph.D degree from Beijing Foreign Studies University in 1999.He was a visiting scholar at the University of Iowa,USA between 1992-1993 and at the Nottingham University,UK in 2002,and also Fulbright visiting scholar under supervision of Professor John Searle at UC Berkeley between 2005-2006.He was Dean of School of Foreign Languages between 1996-2007 and Vice President of Northeast Normal University between 2008-2013.He was also a member of Directing Committee for Foreign Language Teaching under the Ministry of Education in China from 2002 to 2018,and a deputy director of Directing Committee for English Majors from 2010 to 2018.In addition,he is currently Director of Directing Committee for English Majors of Jilin Province as well as a deputy director of China Pragmatics Association.

The areas of his academic interest include theoretical linguistics,pragmatics,and applied linguistics.Over the past 30 years,He has completed 5 projects on grammar and pragmatics,Saussurean linguistic theory,post-Gricean pragmatics,China foreign education,and grammar-pragmatics interface which are financially supported respectively by the funds of Social Sciences and Humanities of Ministry of Education and the funds of National Social Sciences of China.So far he has collaboratively or individually published nearly 100 articles which appear in both domestic and international journals in the fields of his interest.In recent years,he has been invited to deliver lectures in various universities and has actively participated in conferences as well as activities at home and abroad.