Teaching English with Chinese characteristics: A corpus analysis of changes in university curricula

Feng Kevin Jiang, Ken Hyland

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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 Our results show a focus on language skills has been replaced by employer-friendly communicative requirements, followed by greater student awareness of learning strategies, and most recently, a more culturally sensitive and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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalInternational Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teachings
Early online date14 Nov 2024
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 14 Nov 2024

Keywords

  • ELT in China
  • diachronic change
  • language policy
  • university curricula

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