Teaching English with Chinese characteristics: a corpus analysis of changes in university curricula
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Feng (Kevin) Jiang
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Ken Hyland
Abstract
English language teaching has had a chequered history in China, reflecting an increasing desire to modernise and participate on the world stage combined with a watchful caution against importing unwanted cultural elements. Change, however, has proceeded rapidly in the last 35 years, and China now provides around 700,000 postgraduate students annually to Western universities. Given this importance to western universities and the concerns surrounding the nature and perceived purposes of English-medium instruction, we believe a better understanding of Chinese ELT is crucial. This article tracks the changing role and importance of English in China through its language policy for university non-English majors. We do this using a corpus approach to analyse the keywords in the 1986, 1999, 2007 and 2020 iterations of the national curriculum documents. Our results show a focus on language skills has been replaced by employer-friendly communicative requirements, followed by greater student awareness of learning strategies, and most recently, a more culturally sensitive and critical orientation. We offer a study of an EFL curriculum development outside a more familiar Western context, suggesting the value of discourse analyses to understanding key changes in curricula, and revealing that choices regarding language instruction are rarely ‘neutral’ pedagogical decisions.
Acknowledgments
No Artificial Intelligence (AI) and/or Machine Learning Tools are used.
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Research ethics: No human participants involved
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Author contributions: The authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: The authors state no conflict of interest.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Data availability: The raw data can be obtained on request from the corresponding author.
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Ethical approval: It is clearly stated that no human participants are involved in this study, and the data collection procedure and treatment are ethical and considerate of confidentiality. And the text data can be shared at the request to the corresponding author. In addition, there is no conflict of interest between the two authors.
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