4.4. Presentation of
content of academic English programmes at NUR
4.4.1. Background
There are three kinds of academic English programmes at the
NUR: first, the one year intensive English course at EPLM; second, the English
course first year students have in their respective faculties after EPLM (i.e.
Oral and Written Expression) and third, the different English courses the
students in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities study both as subject and medium
of instruction. The last category is my concern in this chapter. It is worth
mentioning that the programme that will be analysed concerns the students who
study English as their area of specialisation.
In fact, the Department of English has a four year English
programme after which the graduates obtain a Bachelor's Degree in English. The
first two years equip students with general and specific courses and skills.
The latter constitutes a basis for the students to make a choice of their own
from three options in the third year: literature, linguistics and interpreting
and translation. This structure is a result of academic programme reforms that
were undertaken in the years 2000 and 2001 at the NUR. The reforms in question
have been informed by the general NUR policy whose guiding principle was
professionalising its educational system. In fact, graduates from the previous
programme obtained a Bachelor's Degree in General English and one could notice
that, after their training they were neither linguistics specialists nor
literature ones. The current programme offers the candidate a choice of three
fields of study as stated earlier (i.e. translating and interpreting included)
and students major in one of them.
4.4.2. Structure of the English
programme
As said in Chapter 3, I examine courses whose contents are
directly linked to issues related to the use of TV materials as teaching and
learning aids. To be more specific, Listening Comprehension One and Two are
related to this study as watching TV involves a great deal of listening.
Likewise, Conversational English I and II prepare the students in basic
listening features they come across frequently. As one can notice from the
structure of these courses, the programmes at the NUR provide the following
information: (1) course title and its code (2) objectives of the course and (3)
content. The latter is made up of two parts: theory and practice. Details on
the structure of courses mentioned above are found in Appendix E.
After having looked at the structure of the content of
academic English programmes for some courses, the next section deals with
analysis of the data I collected through questionnaires, interviews and
documents at the NUR.
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