English in Chinese higher education: past difficulties, current initiatives and future challenges

4.1. Government policies and their implementation

With the government aware of the problems regarding foreign language acquisition since the 2000s and anxious to find solutions, there have been a number of top-down policy initiatives to improve the final outcome of years of language learning. In 2004, the Ministry of Education issued the College English Course Teaching Requirement which focused on the delivery of English-language education: university teachers of foreign languages were encouraged to use oral methods and introduce student-centred learning.

Oral work presented a challenge. Since large classes continued to be the norm, it was not possible to offer small group oral sessions. One solution was to offer practice within a language laboratory environment. Students interacted with machines to improve their oral skills. This dovetailed with a change in tertiary assessment. There had been an oral component to the College English Test (CET) since 1999 in some major cities, although it had only been taken by students who passed CET 4 with marks of 80% or above or CET 6 with marks of 75% or above.² As the oral examination was rolled out to more centres, there was growing use of the language laboratory since the test itself was machine based, and the language lab was well suited to preparing for it.³

However, the introduction of machines in the teaching and testing of oral work introduced further issues. As much oral work consists of interaction between software and language learner rather than between two human interlocutors, new problems arose. The opportunity for students to create their own language is not usually met in the language laboratory context. Examining the CET examination website for 2016 underscores how formulaic exchanges are in this machine context.⁴ Students cannot develop a conversation but only follow a very mechanical path. Experience in the rest of the world has shown the limited results from this kind of automated language teaching (Tomlinson 2008; Quirk and Widdowson 1985). However, this was the solution on offer and the policymakers hoped that the introduction of “speaking to a machine” would help with “opening mouth” and change the old image of “deaf English” (聋子英语) and “dumb English”（哑巴英语）(Lin 2002).

The College English Course Teaching Requirement directive also promoted student-centred language learning. The communicative language teaching (CLT) approach with its interactive strategies and individualised learning was held up as a goal. In the 1980s, the first initiatives had accompanied China’s increased interaction with the wider world. Once the barriers were down, partnerships and links with foreign universities developed swiftly. By 2015, a large number of Chinese cooperation programmes with foreign universities (932 at undergraduate level and 223 at graduate level) were registered with the Ministry of Education. In this context, native English-speaking teachers came to China on visits and exchanges and were one of the key ways that CLT was introduced into the system. And as Chinese academics went on study trips abroad they too adopted and adapted some of the pedagogical ideas prevalent in other places where English was being taught as a foreign or additional language.

4.2. The teachers

So how is the teaching profession responding to policy? The literature shows a widespread desire among teacher trainers to do something about the low level of skills after 8–12 years in the English as a foreign language classroom. From among much discussion of new methodologies, we might mention in particular Li and Lu’s (2012) work on individualised instruction in large classes of integrated English in computer-assisted language learning environments; Chen and Liu (2015) studies of college English teaching based on needs analysis and tailored to personalised development; Chen and He (2015) exploration of how students can help with preparations for the English-language class. As the authors claim, in specific contexts and on a small scale, many of these experiments were moderately effective.

However, these initiatives were not rolled out across the country. In a series of structured interviews with university teachers of English, from different regions of China, carried out in 2015–2016, Zheng and Wright () found some evidence that student-centered learning has not taken root in all regions. Given the situation sketched out above it is quite understandable why teachers might like to retain control in the English-language classroom. Teachers who were worried about their competence in standard English, felt more vulnerable if they departed from the highly structured class with textual commentary at its heart. Such classes can be prepared and there is less unpredictability. And where there has been a move from the printed page to multimedia, there is still apparently a high degree of rigid planning. Liu and Long (2014) and Rao and Lei (2014) noted how collaborative class preparation, which was the norm for textual study, continues with the new multimedia focus; they found widespread evidence that PowerPoints were still produced collectively. Given this practice, it seems that the foreign language class remains in the straitjacket of prepared classroom activities, where there is little opportunity for individual creative language work. Such planning and structure militates against any unscheduled oral exchanges and their development. Teachers’ concern to get input exactly right restricts any natural interaction.

Third, there is also the ongoing problem of large classes. Zheng and Wright () found evidence of classes of 70+ in General English. In such settings, teaching tends to be little more than crowd control. Marking for such large numbers takes time away from experimentation. There is no space for individualised programmes. Teachers admitted that they tended to keep to tried and tested methods, and these were mostly text based.

In general, there is a widespread desire in the pedagogic literature to move to language learning strategies that give better results. However, the straitjacket of the exam-oriented system in which teachers work and the weight of tradition lead many to opt to remain within their comfort zone and to maintain a teacher-centred approach (Yan 2015).

4.3. The students

Among the students there is a similar division. On the one hand, those students who see English merely as one of the qualifications necessary to progress to higher levels of education are content with the focus on grammar knowledge and written text comprehension. On the other, those with ambitions to use English as a tool in their further study or in their future career express their disappointment at the courses they are offered in the public sector (Cai 2012a) and (where they can) often opt for study in private colleges or abroad.

Instrumental reasons have been a major factor in keeping students focused on acquiring some competence in English. The status of English as a compulsory subject in the Gaokao, the state examination which is the gatekeeper to HE and the necessity of achieving a pass at CET 4 for degree conferment have ensured a base line of instrumental motivation.⁵ There has, naturally, been some discontent that English acts as gatekeeper for educational progression. See Shao and Gao (2016) for a discussion of the debate. And, as certain universities begin to permit graduation without CET 4 (e.g. Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Huadong Normal University, Huadong University of Science and Technology among others), we should expect some change. Where individual universities use their autonomy to award degrees without the English component, there are likely consequences. For the disciplines and academic routes where a pass in College English Band 4 is no longer required, English-language learning will not be so widespread. Skills will deteriorate. But in any case where learners were acquiring English to fulfil educational requirements rather than for any real communicative need, motivation was never strong and language acquisition was never deeply rooted.

On the other hand, the market may replace the stimulus. There is, as Shao and Gao (2016) report, division in the population. Among those who aim for elite jobs where English would be a necessary skill or see themselves in foreign travel situations where English would be an asset, the motivation to become proficient in English is strong. In the growing middle class the belief that English is the passport to well-rewarded work is strengthened as graduate employers demand high grades in the CET before they will consider candidates. Elites have long seen the utility of knowing the foreign languages that allow them to function in diplomacy, foreign investment, international trade, knowledge exchange, etc. The growing middle class in China is making the same evaluation. Current research (Wei 2016​​) confirms that this section of society perceives English as a necessary (if not sufficient) prerequisite for professional success.

Given the poor record in parts of the state system for the development of English-language skills, there has been a growing tendency to bypass it. Parents, who are rich enough, make sure that their children gain the language skills necessary for careers in a globalising world in a variety of ways. In 2002, the Private School Education Law began to dismantle the blocks to private education (Simon 2013; Mangin 2015). There are conflicting reports of the numbers being educated in private schools but there is no dispute that the phenomenon is on the rise.⁶ Some of these are English medium and/or run in collaboration with educational institutions from outside China.⁷

The number of people who are studying abroad has also grown exponentially. Since China first opened up to international study in 1978, a total of 4 million Chinese have studied abroad (MoE (Ministry of Education) 2016). In the single year of 2014, 459,800 students were undertaking all or part of their HE in foreign universities, which represented an increase of 11.1% compared to 2013 (MoE 2016​​). The three top destinations were English-speaking states: the US, the UK and Australia. Again we should note that this is an elite phenomenon, with 92% of those studying abroad funded by their families.

A less expensive, and thus more accessible way of improving English skills, has been to use digital technology to supplement the classroom. China is now the biggest market for digital English-language learning products, not only in the Asia region but also in the world. Marketing sources reveal that the revenues for digital English-language learning products reached $701.1 million in 2015 and have been growing by 7.8% per annum. (Ambient Insight 2015)

Thus, there is at the moment a fundamental difference between a group of middle-class students with access to resources, travel, private courses and study abroad, who have acquired English to a level where they can use it confidently and hope to do so for professional purposes, and the large majority of students who report that they “seldom” use English (Wei and Su 2012), who do not have obvious reasons for learning the language and whose skills remain at a very basic level.

5.1. Foreign language learning in large states

Which populations learn foreign languages? The short answer to this question is “those who come from small states”. It is no coincidence that the country in the European Union which reports the largest number of bi/multilinguals among its population is Luxembourg (Eurobarometer 2012). Luxembourgers only number approximately 400,000 and for many activities, they need to go outside their borders. Luxemburgish will not serve them outside their state.

On the other hand, those from gigantic communities of communication do not have the same need to step outside their native/national language group. China contains approximately a fifth of the world’s population, many of whom know/use the national language, Mandarin. Mandarin-speaking Chinese thus have an enormous number of possible interlocutors without crossing state borders. In this they are broadly comparable to Americans, who can interact with 325 million co-nationals (or indeed the estimated billion and a half English speakers in the world). In both cases the sheer size of the community of communication makes it likely that it will provide the informants, the collaborators, the audience required by most of its members.

Furthermore, in both the US and China, the sheer size of the country discourages those in its heartlands from crossing borders and the majority of each population has never travelled outside their country. Many are in remote sites from which it is difficult to move and do not have the economic means for travel. Many wishing to holiday do so within their states, diverse countries with many tourist destinations inside their borders. In consequence in both China and the US, a minority of citizens hold a passport for foreign travel.⁸ So the first factor that may have some consequence for foreign language acquisition is the size of the community of communication and the state. There is a long history of correlation between size of state and language learning. Citizens of small polities learn the languages of others to have a wider stage on which to act (Bailey 1991​​). The Chinese, like the Americans, have a large national stage and therefore reduced impetus to cross borders, both actual and linguistic.

5.2. Foreign language learning in states with high boundary fences

In addition to China’s geography, there is the weight of history. The Chinese have a long tradition of isolation. Ming and Manchu emperors banned travel and the communists under Mao closed frontiers. Even today the Chinese are dissuaded from crossing the borders of the virtual world of the Internet. Many global search engines are blocked or limited and the Chinese are channelled to China-based engines and directed to Chinese social media (see Riley 2015​​ for a recent overview).⁹ President Xi Jinping has discouraged outside influence and there is little evidence that the Chinese elite see value in foreign, particularly Western, ideas (MacFarquhar 2015; Xi 2013, 2014). The Chinese may thus feel the legacy of this long political tradition that forbade or discouraged foreign contact together with current elite attitudes towards foreign values. (Of course, isolationism may also provide the impetus for foreign language learning where individuals want to exit from the straitjackets imposed by isolationism and an inward-looking society.)

If they come from one of the many regions in China which only rarely sees a tourist or a traveller, they have little personal experience of the need to communicate across language barriers. And as Gong and Holliday (2015) argue, foreign language teaching is likely to fail in a situation, where students do not expect to use the language or participate in the “real-world”, “authentic” tasks of the textbook.

5.3. The rise and fall of lingua francas

A third impediment to foreign language learning comes, as we noted above, from being a speaker of the current lingua franca. When others learn the language of one’s own group, the motivation to learn their languages appears diminished. We can see this in the case of English native speakers.

English only became a major language of intergroup contact within the last two centuries. As the seventeenth-century commentator, Richard Carew, noted, the English of that period were good linguists because they had to be (Carew quoted in Camden 1984: 40). The numbers of speakers of English first increased in the wake of growing British imperial power. Military victory, vigorous colonial expansion and increased trade abroad, scientific discovery and political reform at home were all factors that increased Anglophone influence and motivated (or forced) others to learn English. The spread of English would have ended with the end of the British Empire and the decline of British economic and political power, but this did not take place, because English was also the language of the US, the next group to dominate. And in the recalibration of economic, military, political and technological power after World War Two, English continued to spread as the main lingua franca of the capitalist bloc led by the US (while Russian dominated as the lingua franca in the opposing communist bloc). After the fall of communism in Europe in the early 1990s the hegemony of English increased. English was the undisputed medium of neo-liberal globalisation. The needs of the global business elite were served by the spread of English as a lingua franca.

Against this background, the number of Anglophones acquiring fluency in languages other than English has fallen. In the UK, for example, the figures for those opting to learn a foreign language in school past the obligatory stage have shrunk year on year¹⁰ and foreign language skills among the population are woefully low.¹¹ However, the educational establishment does not foreground this macro reason for the waning interest in learning foreign languages. Its response has largely been to urge improvements in pedagogy with the aim of making foreign language acquisition more accessible, more attractive and more effective. We would argue, however, that the reasons for falling numbers and poor results have much more to do with student motivation than with teaching styles and teachers’ competence. The problem is that in their majority British students do not see the reasons to learn the foreign languages on offer in the curriculum.¹² The economic, political, scientific and cultural dominance of the English-speaking world has had a negative impact on the motivation for foreign language acquisition among English native speakers. English native speakers have seen that social mobility and their life projects are not usually dependent on success in foreign language learning, and have been content to let other groups learn English to provide the medium for global knowledge flows, cross-border interactions, transnational relations and international networks.

So as China begins to dominate on the world stage, we could question whether the Chinese might develop similar complacency. To address this point, we need to consider whether Chinese is spreading as a lingua franca? The reasons why prestige lingua francas spread are linked with the influence of their speakers. All prestige lingua francas have been the languages of groups with political authority, economic muscle, military might, technological superiority, cultural weight and soft power (in the sense developed by Nye in Nye 2004). In the last decades, China’s standing has increased in all these domains. Politically, China has assumed a commanding role in Asia (e.g. developing cooperation along the old Silk Road) and taken the lead globally (e.g. in issues raised by the BRICS/BRIIC ¹³ states). In economic terms, China is now considered the second most powerful economy in the world.¹⁴ In technological terms, China is spearheading some of the new green energy technologies¹⁵ and developing 5G communication technology. In terms of military power, China is one of the few nuclear powers and has a large standing army. Cultural exportation is diverse including the Hengdian film studio productions, which have world-wide distribution, and television miniseries sold abroad, particularly in Africa. The growing influence of the Chinese on the international stage is well documented (Jacques 2012; Lardy 2012; Yueh 2013; Zheng 2016).

So, we might ask whether those Chinese interacting with others in a globalising world are always needing to do so in English. Certainly many with aspirations to work in the transnational and international networks of finance and banking will need English. But what happens as power is recalibrated? The Chinese secured Shanghai as the site for the BRICS-led New Development Bank, in July 2015. Will English be the default language for this economic initiative? This is likely in the short term since the bank will have a rotating presidency, with the first president, K. V. Kamath, coming from India. But, the basic sociolinguistic truth is that in a multilingual situation the economically weaker learn the language of the more powerful. China had the clout to impose Shanghai as the site for the bank against competing claims. Will the Chinese also have the weight to use their language more if their economic input is the most significant?¹⁶

This is also the question where China acts alone to invest abroad. What is the place of international English in the massive Foreign Direct Investment deals that the People’s Republic of China (PRC)​​ made in 2015–2016? Is negotiation and interaction inevitably in English? Or have those who wish to do business with China started to make the effort to learn Chinese. It is very early in this process to work with anything more than anecdotal evidence but the growth of Confucius Institutes and Classrooms worldwide are an indicator that Chinese could be on the rise as a lingua franca.¹⁷ In 2016, official government websites were claiming at least 150 million learners worldwide (Hanban 2016b). There were – significantly – rising numbers learning Chinese in the US (Ruan, Zhang, and Leung 2015).

Where China has become a particularly dominant economic presence, people have turned to Chinese as a foreign language that is worth learning for economic advancement. Africa is of particular interest here (Nan 2013; Wangshu 2013). The Chinese have invested heavily in Africa because of their need for raw materials. The continent has been the destination of much Chinese migration. Pigato and Tang (2015) report more than 1.1. million Chinese in Africa and it is likely that this vastly under-reported. Many of these migrants have gone as employees of giant Chinese state-owned oil/gas companies and construction companies undertaking mining and infrastructure projects in Africa. Few workers here need to use a language other than Chinese. Many have gone from the agricultural sector of the population to farm in Africa and they too have tended to stay within language enclaves. Because of this massive Chinese investment, the availability of work in Chinese-led projects and a tendency among some Chinese groups not to know English, many Africans have recognised the utility of Chinese language learning, and the number of learners of Chinese as a foreign language has risen steadily in Africa. In 2016, there were 42 Confucius Institutes in 29 African countries (Hanban 2016a). The acquisition of Chinese has accompanied (and facilitated) the growing numbers of African students now studying in China (Akhtar, Pratt, and Bo 2015).

We might speculate that this pattern will be replicated as the Chinese in the managerial/technical class in Chinese-owned companies move around the globe. What will their language practices be? Transnational corporations founded in non-English speaking countries have often adopted English as the language of the company (e.g. Philips, Nokia). Is the situation in Chinese-owned companies the same and/or is it changing? Major companies, like Huawei and Lenovo do have English as one of their working languages, but discussion on their Chinese language websites show that the language issue is by no means resolved. Contributors to the discussion of Lenovo’s move to English for branches of the company outside China challenge the policy, suggesting that it is not necessary to follow the model of companies such as Korea’s Samsung because China is not in the same economic and political position as Korea.¹⁸ There is evidence here of some confidence that Chinese will serve the company’s purposes, even abroad.

So, although we are at a very early point in the process of the recalibration of language power, there are some first signs of evidence for our speculation that Chinese will be more widely used as a lingua franca in global settings.¹⁹ We know from history that reworkings of economic, political, technical hierarchies lead to the recalibration of language practices. Thus, we can expect to see Chinese developing further as a lingua franca in some settings outside its borders. Such a development needs to be taken into account in the foreign language classroom. It affects instrumental motivation profoundly. At the moment, many Chinese students from the middle class still prepare themselves for participation in the networks, flows and exchanges of globalisation by learning English. However, we have begun to note early indicators among our Chinese students in the UK that attitudes towards English are changing subtly. We wonder how much a certain new assertiveness stems from these issues of language prestige and lingua franca spread.²⁰