“English Novels” is an undergraduate course operated by the College of Foreign Languages, Northeastern University. Currently, it has been awarded as "Northeastern University's Fine Courses" and “First Batch of First-class Undergraduate Courses of Liaoning Province”. The course adopts five representative works in the history of British literature, including Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, David Copperfield, and Mrs. Dalloway, as texts.
The teaching objectives of the course are 1. To help students gain an in-depth understanding of representative writers and works of English literature, and through close reading of the works, to meet the requirements of the major on mastering the knowledge of English literature and familiarity with the history of English literature; 2. To help students improve their ability of literary appreciation, and through studying and discussing the types of works, writers’ styles, themes of the works, symbolic meanings, and literary compositions of the works, to achieve the goals of the major. To help students improve their literary appreciation ability, through studying and discussing the types of works, authors' styles, themes of works, literary composition of works, etc., to meet the requirements of this major on the comprehensive use of English and practical ability. 3. To help students develop the habit of deep reading and systematic thinking through effective reading guidance and training in response to the fragmented reading style that is currently more popular among students, so as to meet the requirements of this major in enhancing humanistic literacy; 4. To help students enhance their critical thinking ability. Taking the openness of the text as the principle, encourage students to actively carry out independent textual criticism, develop an open and critical mode of thinking, and meet the relevant requirements of this major to have critical thinking ability.
The teaching design of the course is to innovate the way of course content introduction, through film and television or other forms of discussion and introduction of works as an introduction, and strive to let students transform from popular readers to professional readers, starting from various aspects of the writer's genre, writing style, and background of the production of the work, and relying on the content and presentation of the work, and taking the previous and subsequent chapters of the work as the order, on the basis of the fine-tuning of the work, combined with group discussions, student reports and other forms, to cultivate students' independent understanding of the text, and to develop students' critical thinking ability. On the basis of intensive lectures on the works, combined with group discussions, student reports and other forms, the course cultivates students' ability to understand and appreciate literary works independently.
The innovative features of the course are as follows: 1. Strengthening the depth and breadth of the course content. The course focuses closely on improving students’ humanistic literacy, and on the basis of increasing the amount of reading of the text and the content of the lectures in class, it increases the depth of exploration of the works, and the degree of compatibility between the text and the students’ cognition; 2. Strengthening the systematic and cutting-edge nature of the course. The course team has made reference to the teaching resources of the University of Cambridge and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the resources of Sparknotes, Cliffnotes, Gradesaver and other online platforms through multi-faceted investigations and researches, and has continuously adjusted the teaching content on the basis of the existing course content to enhance the completeness and frontiers of the course system.
The course team plans to realize the full online course within one year, striving to radiate to more students who love literature and reading, and then will carry out the blended teaching mode combining online and offline. At the same time, in accordance with the overall deployment of the Liaoning Provincial Department of Education on open school running and inter-school cooperation in three provinces and one region of Northeast China, we will carry out the common sharing of the curriculum and implement the joint cultivation of students and cross-school elective courses.
