Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, Vol 31, No 3 (2008)

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THE SPREAD OF ENGLISH IN CHINA AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

Wang Lidi

Abstract


The rise of English as a predominant foreign language in China in the past three decades driven by the force of globalisation coincided with China’s efforts to open up herself to the rest of the world. It is estimated that the number of learners of English in China exceeds 300 million, which takes up about a quarter of the country’s 1.3 billion people (Dai, 2007). At the turn of the century, the Ministry of Education implemented a scheme
that required English be taught in year three and, in some cases, in year one at all primary schools up through secondary and tertiary education. Well-off parents in big cities send
their pre-school children to bilingual or English-speaking kindergartens with the hope that this will give their children added strength in facing future competition. As a result,
more people have acquired English as a foreign language to varying degrees of competence, which facilitates their functioning in a globalised context. Nevertheless, the benefits
gleaned from using English as a foreign language also come at a price, to the detriment of the learning and use of other foreign languages. French, German, Russian, Japanese
and other foreign languages used to be taught in many secondary schools in the past; today they are almost non-existent at that level with the exception of a few schools specialising in foreign language teaching.

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