Research on the Student-centered Learning in Mass Media Reading Course

Abstract

With China’s impressive development in all fields, the need for all-round talents is becoming increasingly eminent. The society and our country demand that university students should not only be an expert in their own specialization, but also they be able to communicate cross cultures. Mass Media Reading course, as an integral part of the university English courses, is designed to serve that purpose. Through this course, students are supposed to broaden their minds and push forward the frontiers of knowledge by learning the culturally-loaded information embedded in the foreign news. They are also expected to sharpen their minds by exchanges of ideas and by comparing different perspectives. They are to hone their skills in English reading, speaking and translation through this course. The current course design is not successful in fulfilling all the purposes, and previous classroom performance shows the students are reluctant to receive new information and know the outside world through newspaper reading which they think is beyond their reach. However, studies and papers analyzing this issue are lacking. Therefore, research on how to improve students’ enthusiasm and motivation in this course should be conducted. This paper tries to shed some light on the modes of student-centered learning that arouse students’ interest in and enthusiasm for this course. Hopefully, this will be helpful to the teachers and students learning this course.