ABriefHistoryofEnglishLanguageTeachinginChina

A Brief History of English Language Teaching in China

Joseph Boyle

Among the many different aspects of China which have fascinated the West are the sheer size of its

population, its remote and mysterious culture, and the intricate difficulty of its language. Equally,

the West has always intrigued China, with its technological advancement despite its "barbarity", its

cultural diversity within a small space, and the way in which one of its languages - English - has

managed to become the lingua franca of the world.

China originally felt no need of the West, in fact deliberately avoided all contact, for fear of cultural

contamination. The bombing of the Chinese embassy during the Kosovo war was a terrible setback

in relations which had been steadily improving. However, despite this, partly because of its desire to

join the World Trade Organisation (WTO), China has welcomed and listened politely to leaders of

Western countries as they gave their views on democracy and human rights. The language in which

President Clinton spoke, during his visit to China, was of course English. President Jiang Zemin

made his replies in Chinese. But each was backed up by a team of first-class interpreters, who made

smooth communication possible.

Formal training in interpretation is comparatively recent in China. It was only in 1978 that the first

programme for Translators and Interpreters started at the Beijing Foreign Language Institute. The

programme subsequently developed into the prestigious school of translation in the Beijing Foreign

Studies University.

The learning of English in China, however, has a longer history and now occupies the attention of

millions of its people. How many million is hard to say, since much depends on the level of

proficiency one takes as the norm (Crystal, 1985). But there are probably in the region of three

hundred million actively engaged in the job of learning English.

China's reasons for learning English were well summed up twenty years ago by a team from the U.S.

International Communication Agency after visiting five cities and many educational institutions in

China: "The Chinese view English primarily as a necessary tool which can facilitate access to

modem scientific and technological advances, and secondarily as a vehicle to promote commerce

and understanding between the People's Republic of China and countries where English is a major

language" (Cowan et al., 1979).

This basic motivation has not changed, as can be seen from the Report of the English 2000

Conference in Beijing, sponsored jointly by the British Council and the State Education Commis-

sion of the People's Republic of China, in which reasons for the learning of English by Chinese

were summarised: "They learn English because it is the language of science, specifically perhaps of

the majority of research journals. They learn it because it is the neutral language of commerce, the

standard currency of international travel and communication. They learn it because you find more

software in English than in all other languages put together" (Bowers, 1996:3). The story of English

language learning is not uniform throughout China. Maley (1995:7) warns anyone embarking on a study of contemporary China about the difficulty of "making sensible generalisations about it, since

China is not one place geographically, but many". The learning of English in the mountainous

provinces near Tibet is very different from the way it is studied in the cities of Nanjing, Shanghai or

Beijing. Nevertheless, there are sufficient general characteristics about the history of the learning of

English in different parts of China to justify a brief review, if only to remind us of the pendulum

swings of China's history this century. Those who wish to find the story more fully told may consult

Dzau (1990) and Cortazzi and Jin (1996). Although there is mention of English language teaching

(ELT) in China in the mid nineteenth century during the Ching Dynasty, it first figured in the

syllabus of schools in 1902 in "His Majesty's Teaching Standards for Primary and Secondary

Institutions". In those early days the model for education in China was that of Japan. The method of

ELT was traditional, with emphasis on reading and translation. There was much grammar and

vocabulary learning, with pronunciation learned by imitation and repetition. This was the norm for

about the first twenty years of the century.

In 1922 there was a change of direction, with a swing away from the Japanese system of education,

and towards more Western models. Schools were obliged to follow the "Outlines for School