Objectives and Related Requirements of College English Teaching: A Comparative Textual Analysis of College English Curriculum Requirements and College English Teaching Guidelines (2020 Version)

In order to explore the longitudinal development of the objectives and their related requirements of college English teaching in the last nearly two decades in China, the author adopting the methods of literature reading and textual analysis, draws a diachronic comparison between the College English Curriculum Requirements and the College English Teaching Guidelines(2020 version). Through careful reading and analyzing, the key findings are that at least three-aspect similarities and differences respectively exist in the two documents. For the similarities, the teaching objectives and their related requirements in the two documents both reflect the value orientation of instrumentality, the attention to students’ autonomous learning as well as their comprehensive cultural literacy and the classification of three-level teaching requirements. However, as to the differences, firstly, special attention has been paid to the cultivation of students’ listening and speaking skills in the teaching objectives of the Curriculum Requirements, while humanity in the teaching objectives of the Guidelines(2020 version) has increasingly become a major value orientation; additionally, an overall description of three-level teaching requirements has been made in the Guidelines(2020 version) apart from the individual description of each language skill; lastly, the numbers have been taken full advantage of to quantify English proficiency(five basic language skills) of three levels in teaching requirements of the Curriculum Requirements. Drawing on these findings, some corresponding suggestions are provided with in this paper.