Opportunities and Challenges for English Major in Polytechnic Colleges under the National Standards

Abstract

The survival of English major as a discipline is facing serious challenge due to saturation. Many polytechnic universities and colleges tried to equip their English major with certain special traits, which is, however, quite controversial. With a careful analysis of the upcoming National Standards of Teaching Quality for Undergraduate English Majors, this paper attempts to clarify the opportunities and challenges for many polytechnic universities and colleges to develop their English Major with specialty and distinctive characteristics. The opportunities lie in the legitimacy of feature courses acknowledged and institutionalized by the National Standard, while the unprecedented challenges include teacher resources, interdisciplinary cooperation, credit allocation for different types of courses and graduates’ quality in the process of developing feature courses to form certain specialty. Polytechnic colleges will have to seize the opportunities by directly facing the challenges and cracking the problems.