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1、A Brief History of English Language Teaching in ChinaJoseph 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 Chi
2、na, 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,
3、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
4、 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, w
5、ho 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
6、 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).
7、But there are probably in the region of three hundred million actively engaged in the job of learning English. Chinas 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 instituti
8、ons 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 Peoples Republic of China and countries where English is a major language (C
9、owan 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 Peoples Republic of China, in which reasons for the learning of English by Chinese
10、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 sof
11、tware 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
12、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
13、in different parts of China to justify a brief review, if only to remind us of the pendulum swings of Chinas 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 Chi
14、na in the mid nineteenth century during the Ching Dynasty, it first figured in the syllabus of schools in 1902 in His Majestys 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 em
15、phasis 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 educati
16、on, and towards more Western models. Schools were obliged to follow the Outlines for School Syllabuses of the New Teaching System. These put more emphasis on listening and speaking skills. There was more use of the target language and of the new teaching resources offered by the mass media. The best schools tended to be Christian missionary schools, which gave more class-hours to English than other schools. 1949 was a crucial date in the history of China - the founding of t
