HUANG Guowen is a Chair Professor of the CJ Programme selected by the Ministry of Education of P.R. China.  He is Dean of the School of Foreign Studies as well as Director of Centre for Ecolinguistics at South China Agricultural University. He received two PhD degrees respectively from the University of Edinburgh (applied linguistics, 1992) and Cardiff University (functional linguistics, 1995). He was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University during 2004-2005, and he was Chair of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association (2011-2014). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Zhongguo Waiyu (Foreign Languages in China) (HEP, Beijing), co-editor-in-chief of the M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series (Springer), and is co-editor of the Journal of World Languages (de Gruyter), apart from serving as an adviser or member of editorial boards for a number of international journals and publishers. His main research interests include systemic functional linguistics, ecolinguistics, applied linguistics, discourse analysis and translation studies.

      A Chinese interpretation of moral education, which is called political-ideological education if directly translated, has become an essential component of the curriculum in institutions of higher education in China, and in the area of college English education, this kind of education is to be embedded in the teaching process, from teaching materials to classroom teaching, and from in-class activities to extra-curricula projects. This talk will report the design and the compilation of a coursebook which is intended to serve this special purpose. The name of the coursebook is the New Era Mingde College English (integrated Coursebook) and it consists of three textbooks (published by Higher Education Press, 2021). The talk will survey the present teaching situation to argue for the importance of designing the coursebook. This will be followed by the discussion and evaluation of different types of syllabuses in English textbooks used in China. The focus of the talk is on the multi-syllabus of the coursebook, which is made up of four syllabuses, the core syllabus (which is called the elemental syllabus because it is the core elements of the Chinese socialist core values), the skills-based syllabus, the task-based syllabus, and the learner-centred syllabus. The speaker will address two questions: “What are the relationships among the four syllabuses in the multi-syllabus?” and “How is the multi-syllabus related to the methodology in terms of classroom implementation?” By answering these two questions, the speaker will emphasise the important role of the classroom teacher even if the learner-centred approach is regarded as the priority of the college English education in present-day China.