Construction of 'Liberal Arts Component' of the Second Foreign Language Education: From the Narratives of Faculty and Students in a Chinese Lesson

Second foreign language courses, which are positioned as a liberal arts subject, are said to have a “liberal arts component” other than or beyond the language learning. However, compared to the goal of language learning, the “liberal arts component” is not as clear. This paper attempts to discuss the following questions via a hermeneutic approach. Firstly, how do the faculty and students evaluate the actual class held under COVID-19? Secondly, what are students’ views on the “liberal arts component” of the curriculum? Finally, this paper will discuss the gap between the “curriculum as perceived by the faculty” and the “curriculum as perceived by the students”. The main result of this paper reveals that, in terms of their interpretation of the course content, the students’ perceptions are not always what the faculty intended. Students tend to embed the narrative about their learning experiences into their own life experience. As a result, in some extreme cases, they even construct their learning experience in the opposite to what the faculty intended, which suggests that there is a huge gap between the faculty’s perception of the curriculum and the students’ perceptions of the curriculum, especially on the construction of its “liberal arts component”.