A few teachers have asked me where I got the statistics of 300 million for the

number of English Learners in China. I cant remember the original research

but recently came across this article by Joseph Boyle who teaches in the
Chinese University of HK who substantiates this figure. I have enclosed a
copy for those who may be interested.
Regards

Gordon

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
set-back 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 modern 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
Commission 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 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 the People's Republic of China.

Education had now to serve the proletarian

purpose. All textbooks became vehicles for
government propaganda, loaded with messages
of service to the people and the motherland. The
Ministry of Education issued a new "Scheme for
English Instruction in Secondary Schools" in
which the goal of English language learning was
clearly stated as being to serve the New Republic.
All capitalist thinking, especially educational ideas
from the United States and Britain, were
condemned as unpatriotic. The place of English
was taken in school syllabuses by Russian and by
1954 Russian had become the only foreign
language taught in Chinese schools.
This phase did not last long, however, since China
was already trying to extend her markets
throughout the world and immediately felt its lack
of English. Accordingly, in 1955 the Ministry of
Education announced that English teaching
should be restarted in secondary schools. In big
cities, like Shanghai, it was also reintroduced at
primary level. Initially the textbooks were based
on the former Russian models, which, like their
Japanese predecessors, were very traditional.
Methodology too was backward: the teacher was
seen as the provider of knowledge and the
students dutifully assimilated the teacher's words
of wisdom, working their way ploddingly through
the textbook.
However, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a
minor revolution in education took place in China,
as the need to open up to the international scene
became more urgent. The importance of English
was accepted and a significant step was taken in
1962 when English became part of the entrance
examination for colleges and universities. New
teaching materials appeared, with listening and
speaking again given prominence. The Ministry of
Education issued guidelines for textbook writers,
recommending that English textbooks should
include material on the culture of the English
speaking countries. It began to look as though
better days had come for ELT in China (Price,

1971).
But it was not to be. With distressing inevitability,
The Chinese pendulum swung, and the progress
made in the early 1960s was swept aside by the
Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and
lasted for ten dreadful years. English was again
banned from schools. Foreign language teachers
were branded as spies. Some universities were
closed, others were subjected to re-education
visits. Dow (1975:254) describes the situation
thus: "During the Cultural Revolution, when
workers' propaganda teams for the spreading of
Mao Tse-Tung's thoughts came to China's
colleges, classes were stopped altogether, and
the students travelled instead all over the country
in order to take part in criticism and debate and to
exchange revolutionary experiences".
By 1977 the Cultural Revolution had exhausted
itself and the country with it. There is an old
Yorkshire saying: "There's nowt like religion when
it's bent". Those who lived through the Cultural
Revolution in China would challenge that saying,
maintaining that distorted political ideology can be
much worse than bent religion.
However, happier times were ahead for China and
for ELT in China.
In 1978 the Ministry of Education held an
important conference on foreign language
teaching. English was given prominence again in
schools, on a par with Chinese and Maths. By the
early 1980s it had been restored as a compulsory
subject in the college entrance exam. It has not
looked back since then (Kang, 1999) and the
fervour for learning English has been fanned by
Teach Yourself English programmes on television,
watched by hundreds of millions of people.
As China opened up more and Chinese scholars
were allowed abroad, the need for both social and
academic English became apparent. As markets
also opened up and more foreigners were allowed
into the country to do business, the appetite for
Business English among all levels of Chinese
people has become insatiable. The Chinese are a

diligent and intelligent race and are surely

destined to make a significant mark on the history
of the twenty-first century.
On a personal note, one of my first ELT jobs, in
1979, was teaching a small group of excellent
Chinese students on an intensive summer course
in England. They were the pick of the Chinese
crop - scholars who had suffered under the
Cultural Revolution, but who were now being
given the chance of graduate studies in British
universities. I have never had keener, more hardworking students, and teaching them was one of
the most memorable experiences of my life
(Boyle, 1980).
We have seen, then, in this brief review how
English has twice come and gone in China in the
course of the twentieth century. To us now it
seems unlikely that such swings will happen again
and on present evidence the continued popularity
of English eems assured. However, history is full
of examples of the unpredictable.
For one thing, China's own language is liable to
become of more global importance in the future.
As Graddol (1997:3) advises: "We may find the
hegemony of English replaced by an oligarchy of
languages, including Spanish and Chinese".
Machine translation will also undoubtedly increase
in sophistication and perhaps make the learning of
English less essential. English may not be as
inevitably the lingua franca of the world as some
may like to think.
Nevertheless, at this stage in the last few years of
the millennium, it does looks as if China will
continue to want English, and want it badly. As
Maley (1995:47) says: "China is in a phase of
industrial, scientific and commercial expansion
which will make it the world's largest economy by
the early years of the next century. In order to
function efficiently in this role, it needs to bring
large numbers of its people to high levels of
proficiency in the use of English for a wide variety
of functions". English looks set to flourish in China
- at least for the next ten or twenty years. But

anyone who knows anything about the history of

China would be slow to predict much beyond that.
References

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Boyle,
J.
1980.
Teaching
English
as
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Cortazzi, M. and Jin, L. 1996. English teaching
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Cowan, J., Light, R., Mathews, B. and Tucker, G.
1979. English teaching in China: a recent survey.
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Crystal, D. 1985. How many millions? The
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Dow, M. 1975. The influence of the cultural
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