Course designing for High School Entrance Examination

High School Entrance Examination（HSEE）is one of the most important examinations in China and it comes in June every year at the end of junior middle school year.Goals and Objectives

According to the National Curriculum Standard（NCS），middle school students should be able to acquire basic listening，speaking，reading and writing skills. To fulfill the demand of NCS，HSEE has been designed into eight parts，that is Listening，Multiple Choices，Reading，Cloze Test，Communication，Translating and Writing.

To meet the demand of the test，this class is designed to help the students to get high scores in HSEE and the goals and objectives of the course are as follows：

1.Goals：to improve their English and get ideal scores in HSEE

2.Objectives：

a.To know and understand 1500 words.

b.To know basic phrases like V+prep.，V+adv.，etc.

c.To understand basic sentences structures and grammars like S+V+O，S+Linking-V+P，attributive clauses，noun clauses，etc

d.To have the ability to understand basic passages like text book，magazine，the Internet articles，advertisement，etc.

e.To have the ability to do some translating work with the help of some key information.

f.To have the ability to write about notes，e-mails，advertisements，different kinds of letters and to write about some heated topics of the society.（James Dean Brown 2001 P71-76）

To help the students achieve the goals and objectives，a General Reviewing Course will be given to the HESS participants.

The basic situation of the class is as follow.

Course Name：General Reviewing if HESS English

Duration：Six months

Participants：25 students in Grade Nine

Materials：Qidong Zhongkao，Vocabulary and Phrase book

Supplementary Materials：Test papers of the former years and other exercises

The detailed design of the course is as follow：

Number of units： 24 units 10 lessons in each unit

Amount of lessons： 240 lessons

Length of each lesson： 45 mins

Frequency if the lessons： Two classes a day and five days a week/ 10 lessons in a week

Frequency of tests Mini test once a week Formal tests once a month

Literature Review

·Basis of course designing

HSEE is a competitive test to choose students who can be admitted to key high school and who can only go to normal high school while some cannot go to high school. As a result，the test is designed to check out whether the students have learned what should be taught and be learned in junior middle school. This class is designed for students to prepare for the test and meanwhile according to（James Dean Brown 2001 P11，12），I designed the course as Skills-Based Syllabuses and Task-Based Syllabuses as the students should have the abilities to use English and to complete the examination，getting good scores.（James Dean Brown 2001 P61），

·Participants situation and Needs analysis

To decide what level of the course should be given to the students，a placement test will be given to the participants to test their original English level and the level of their test skills so that the teacher can find out what language skills a learner needs and to identify a gap between what students are able to do and what they need to be able to do.（Jack C. Richard P52）

As the twenty-five students are lower level students in their public schools and their average scores is 65（Perfect scores is 120，the highest is 95 and the lowest is 33）.

·Teaching Methods and Testing

Word cards，grammar brochures are used in the vocabulary and grammar parts to arouse the students interests and attract their attention.

Once program objectives have been established，testing is，or should be，a natural next stop in the process of curriculum design.（James Dean Brown 2001 P108）

·Predictable problems and solutions

As there are 25 participants in the course and it will last for six months，there are some predictable problems：

1.Some students are not good at memorizing while there is a lot of memorizing work in English study especially for the test.

2.Some students cannot insist on studying for that long as six month and they will feel tired during the process.

3.During the process，some students will meet with some uncontrolled situation such as illness，family issues etc. because of that，they will fall behind and even lose their confidence.

To solve the problems，encouragement and care should be given to the students throughout the course.

Conclusion

To design a course，its the first step to have a good course. To know the participants and the materials is the first step to make a course plan. No plan is fixed and unchangeable.

Preferences

[1]Jack C. Richard Curriculum Development in Language Teaching

[2]James Dean Brown The Elements of Language Curriculum：A Systematic Approach to Program Development

[3]Lorin W. Anderson A Taxonomy for Learning，Teaching and Assessing- A Revision of Blooms Taxonomy of Educational Objectives（Complete Edition）

[4]William E. Pinar International Handbook of Curriculum Research

[5]Wesley Null Curriculum：From Theory to Practice

作者簡介：王大智（1985—），男，汉族，籍贯：辽宁葫芦岛，单位：辽宁省葫芦岛市连山区汇智文化教育培训中心有限公司，研究方向：教学法。

（作者单位：辽宁省葫芦岛市连山区汇智

文化教育培训中心有限公司）