Dynamic

Dynamic

The second D is the quality of curriculum of CLT.In other words,curriculum of CLT needs to be evaluated and innovated from time to time.A dynamic procedure needs to be established within the department of languages in each university in dealing with the changing composition of students.Because the changes of students’composition take place so rapidly and obviously,lecturers cannot wait for the governments to issue new policies from time to time,nor can they wait for external reviews on the programs and courses every four to five years.The stability of the curriculum needs to be evaluated and constant revision and modification must be made,particularly,the teaching content must be updated annually.

Though regularly mapping existing courses according to AQF is essential to lecturers in Australian universities,this unified national policy does not provide an explicit standard for program design of CLT in Australian universities.Particularly AQF is a general policy therefore it is impossible to address the specific issue such as needs of CHBS and NCBS.Australian universities should take advantage of their autonomous power to resolve the problem of streaming of students belonging to two cohorts.Joint efforts can be made by establishing a tertiary working party statewide or nationwide to work out a detailed guideline for streaming in the university level.For those universities where streaming has been made,their successful experiences are valuable to be shared by those where streaming has not been implemented.

Undeniably,there is a concern that the limitation of resources such as qualified teachers and funding support restricts the implementation of streaming.By following the financial plan and strategy of each university,department of languages may have a minimum number in enrolment for opening a new course and recruit more teachers.Because of the complexity involved in this issue,effective approaches need to be explored.For example,cross university cooperation might be helpful.When the common approach is applied in streaming under a unified policy,students who are learning at the same level in different universities could be taught together.This will also ease the complexity of transferring credits if students would like to study at different universities.

Regarding streaming,cooperation between universities can be extended to compiling new teaching materials.Of course,a lot of Chinese textbooks published in China can be used for CHBS.For instance,Tang(2009)suggests three forms of textbook compilation for overseas Chinese students.But they are not specifically designed for Australian NCBS who are studying and living in Australian socio-cultural context.The current concern about the political influence from overseas countries leads Australian lecturers to consider development of appropriate teaching materials for their streamed class of CLT.

Teaching content is closely linked with teaching process.At this stage,lecturers of CLT in Australian universities have to use the available imported or local compiled textbooks since material development takes time and the shortage of appropriate textbooks could not be changed overnight.This situation urges lecturers to be more creative in improving the teaching process.In other words,pedagogy provides more room to innovation in addition to curricula.