The Beginnings of English Language Teaching in China

Abstract

This article examines the teaching and learning of English on the south China coast in the first half of the nineteenth century. The article, which draws on a range of unpublished primary sources, is divided into two main sections. The first section explores the acquisition and use of pidgin English in the Pearl River Delta in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This section also briefly describes more formal initiatives in English Language Teaching (ELT) by various Protestant missionaries in Canton and Macao during the 1830s. The second section examines the beginnings of ELT in early colonial Hong Kong. This section begins by analysing English-language initiatives in the colony’s mission schools during the 1840s, focusing particularly on the work of the Morrison Education Society School, which was the first English-teaching institution in China, and then moves on to examine the causes and consequences of the introduction of ELT in the government vernacular schools during the 1850s.