Nanjing, China -- Students in China no longer learn English by reciting “Long Live Chairman Mao” and other political slogans, as they did two decades ago, when President Richard M. Nixon’s 1972 visit reopened this nation to the West.
Now, under a government mandate aimed at helping the country prepare to compete in the global economy, undergraduates must take special classes in the language and pass an English- competency examination to receive degrees from most top universities.
Tensions between China and the United States have not slowed what is perhaps the most ambitious language-learning campaign in history. Knowing English is seen by students here as the key to landing a well-paying job or gaining admission to an American university or graduate school.
China’s enthusiasm for teaching and learning foreign languages has waxed and waned with the political tides. A virtual absence of speakers of Russian did not stop China from organizing a mass movement to learn that language in the 1950s. Professors also recall that during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, foreign-language study itself was considered treasonable.
In the China of the 1990s -- flooded with billions of dollars in overseas capital and more than 100,000 foreign-financed businesses -- students say that competence in English is one of the first rungs on the career ladder.
While the English-language drive has helped attract investment and innovation to China, educators call it a misguided effort that reflects deep-rooted instructional and structural flaws in the country’s higher-education system.
“Most teachers center their efforts on tests,” complains a biochemistry major at Zhejiang University, a prestigious institution in Hangzhou. “They don’t teach in a way that stimulates your imagination.”
As a result of Mao Zedong’s brutal suppression of intellectuals, many university professors are simply undereducated. Advanced degrees were introduced here only in the late 1970s. Despite a growing corps of overseas-educated instructors, talented students often complete a rigorous high- school curriculum knowing more than their teachers in some disciplines.
One observer, Cheng Kai-ming, dean of the faculty of education at the University of Hong Kong, says students in China “often have higher standards of English than their teachers. They learn basically on their own.”
That students are so highly motivated has meant that much progress has been made toward the goal of acquiring English, says Mr. Cheng. This, he adds, is in spite of the fact that the government’s mandate is “not well deliberated in terms of policy and pedagogy.” China, he says, is gaining English- language competence much faster than any other country in the region.
Still, in a recent government-administered test of English competence, fewer than half of China’s graduate students won a passing grade, the official press reported.
Only about 3 per cent of China’s students -- those who score well on their entrance examinations or who can afford fees that are two or three times the basic tuition -- are able to study in a university’s English-language department.
Everyone else studies in a specially designed program called “College English,” which focuses on reading and listening and virtually ignores speaking and writing. The curriculum offers the language as a set of discrete skills, training the vast majority of students to read a technical manual, but leaving them barely able to carry on a simple conversation.
Only a small proportion of students ever manage to speak the language. “We have been studying English for more than eight years, but we still can’t express ourselves,” laments one college junior, who has already passed the national exam.
“There is not a large need in China today for kids to use the language orally,” explains one Chinese professor of College English. “Most people will not have the need to communicate orally with the outside world. College English’s goal is to teach students to receive information from the outside world.
“The need for oral English is seen more in joint ventures, but the number of graduates working in joint ventures versus technical fields is, on a general scale, still very low,” he adds.
Absent from College English classrooms is any evidence of the advances in second-language acquisition made in the past 30 years, according to experts from other countries. They point to “listening” classes of several hundred students, eyes glazed, mouths closed, concentrating on their earphones and their answer sheets.
The foundation of English teaching in China is a process called “intensive reading,” which has been generally disdained by foreign instructors who have passed through the country in the past 15 years.
In an intensive-reading class, students read a passage and then “go over every word, phrase, every punctuation mark, every sentence -- ad infinitum, ad nauseam -- to find the ‘correct’ explanation,” writes Bill Holm in Coming Home Crazy, a memoir of a year he spent teaching English in China.
Chinese students say that such skills enable them to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language, which is required for admission to American universities. However, reliance on those skills also seems to limit their English comprehension once they arrive.
A Chinese teacher takes exception to the prevailing instructional methods, but says she feels powerless in the face of pressure for her students to pass their examinations. The methods, she says, “hinder students’ understanding of the main ideas. But we can do nothing about it.”