Foreign Language Teaching In China Research Articles

A Study on the Impact of the “Seven-Year Planning Outline for Foreign Language Education” on Foreign Language Education in China

The implementation of the “Seven-Year Planning Outline for Foreign Language Education” has ushered in new development opportunities for foreign language education in China and made positive contributions to cultivating well-rounded foreign language talents and promoting international exchanges and cooperation among countries. This paper analyzes the planning outline to probe into its function, status, and impact in the field of foreign language education in China, in a bid to clarify the importance of formulating reasonable language education policies and plans. It reflects upon China’s English education policies and planning in the context of the current era so as to provide relevant experience and enlightenment for the development of foreign language education in China.

从师范出发: 论普通高中多语种教师培养的必要性

Foreign language education in ordinary high schools is an important part of China’s foreign language education ecosystem and also the cornerstone of higher foreign language education in China. Since the new century, foreign language education in high schools in China has gradually become more diversified. In addition, with the increasing scale of Chinese middle school students studying abroad, it has led to significant development in multilingual education such as Japanese, Russian, French, German, Spanish, and Korean during the high school stage. As a result, the demand for multilingual teacher teams in high school is also increasing year by year, but at present, the construction of multilingual teacher education systems in China's normal universities cannot keep up with the call of the basic education industry in the future. This article believes that in cultivating multilingual teaching talents for secondary schools, normal universities should fully leverage the exemplary role of teacher training and strive to provide more excellent multilingual teaching talents for basic education.

Study on the Contribution of Pragmatics to the Development of Communicative Competence from the Perspective of Applied Linguistics

This article explores the contribution of pragmatics in the cultivation of communicative competence from the perspective of applied linguistics. Firstly, the development and definitions of applied linguistics and pragmatics were reviewed, and the theoretical system and core concepts of pragmatics were elaborated. Furthermore, the role of pragmatics in cultivating communicative competence was analyzed, including the cultivation of pragmatic awareness, learning of pragmatic knowledge, application of pragmatic strategies, enhancement of pragmatic competence, enhancement of language appropriateness, and cultivation of cross-cultural communicative competence. On this basis, the application of pragmatics in teaching practice was explored, such as the principles and methods of pragmatic teaching, the development and selection of pragmatic textbooks, and the design and implementation of pragmatic assessment. Finally, the challenges and coping strategies faced in cultivating communicative competence were analyzed. This article aims to provide theoretical guidance and practical reference for the cultivation of communicative competence in the field of foreign language education in China.

The Present Research and Prospects on Alignment Effects in the Continuation Task

Wang (2012) proposed the “Continuation Task” method to second language learning, which is based on alignment effects that closely integrate language comprehension and output to promote foreign language learning. According to research results, the effect of second language learning is mainly due to alignment effects, and the alignment output is the key to effective language learning. Through searching the keyword “continuation task” of the Foreign Languages and Literatures from 2018 to 2022 in the CNKI, there are 155 journal papers at home and abroad. Based on these journals, this paper makes a review and evaluation of alignment effects in the continuation task from its theoretical research and present research status. It divides the research status into two categories: the continuation task research for Chinese learners of English and foreign learners of Chinese. Besides, this paper looks into the research prospect of alignment effects in the continuation task, especially its implications for second language teaching, which can provide new ideas and directions for foreign language teaching in China.

Critical Period Hypothesis of Second Language Acquisition and Its Implications on the Optimal Starting Age of Foreign Language Teaching in China

There is a widely‐recognized belief held by a vast majority of people to learn a foreign language, that is, “the younger, the better”. However, in the field of SLA, researchers have been debating on the existence of the critical period. This paper firstly introduces what is the critical period hypothesis. Then, this paper summarizes the controversies about the critical period of SLA among different scholars at home and abroad. Finally, according to the different research results at home and abroad and the practice of foreign language teaching in China, this paper puts forward some enlightenment of the critical period hypothesis for SLA to the optimal starting age of foreign language teaching in China.

The Situation, Policies, and Development of Foreign Language Education in Contemporary China

Foreign language education is an important part of Chinese education, but the overall foreign language education in China is still relatively underdeveloped. Foreign language education and policies in contemporary China are closely related to China’s political, economic, and social development. The contemporary Chinese foreign language education and policies, since the establishment of New China in 1949, can be divided into four periods. The first period is a period of domination by the Russian language (1949–1956), the second period is a period of exploration and transformation (1956–1966), the third period is a period of interruption (1966–1978), and the fourth period is a period of development and improvement (1978 to present). Understanding foreign language education and policies in contemporary Chinese universities can contribute to the future development of foreign language education and policies in China.

Comparative Research of Foreign Language Teaching of Primary and Secondary Schools in China and Russia

The world today is undergoing a period of fast development and big changes, with the emergence of a more and more multi-polarization world and the in-depth development of economic globalization, the rapid advancement of science and technology, and the increasingly fierce competition for talents. Therefore, all countries in the world regard creating a world-first-class education system and enhancing their competitiveness in education as their strategic goals. Among that, foreign language education is especially important as the basis for building a bridge of communication between countries in the era of globalization. China and Russia have always maintained close cooperation in the fields of politics, economy, culture, and education. The two countries are always communicating and learning from each other. This article focuses on foreign language teaching in primary and secondary schools in China and Russia. By analyzing important documents, teaching materials, and teaching methods in the field of foreign language education in China and Russia since the beginning of the 21st century, it compares and summarizes the similarities and differences, advantages and disadvantages of foreign language teaching in the two countries. The results show that the fertility of foreign language course settings and the literature-oriented learning material promote foreign language teaching in Russia. This helps provide some experiences for future policy designers, textbook writers, and teachers in primary and secondary schools' foreign language teaching fields in other countries.

Research on Corpus-based Foreign Language Teaching in China: A Bibliometric Analysis

Based on the data published in major journals, this study examines the research articles on China's corpus-based foreign language teaching published from 2000 to 2023. In order to thoroughly explore the development status, the number of articles published, the journals involved, keywords, authors, institutions, and research trends are analyzed. It is suggested that corpus-based foreign language teaching research in China has yielded fruitful results, supported by diverse research perspectives, micro and macro research focus, and virtual foreign language teaching practice. At the same time, the study also reveals weaknesses. These include less cooperation among authors and institutions, uneven research resources, and unbalanced development of teachers' information literacy.

Foreign Language Education for Sustainable Development in China: A Case Study of German Language Education

Sustainable development is a widely discussed topic. English language education plays the dominant role in China, but the education of languages other than English (LOTEs) is more important for sustainable development. Based on a case study of German language education, this paper draws SWOT analysis to discuss the current foreign language education in China associated with sustainable development. We find that there are four current trends in the sustainable development of foreign language education in China: promotion of sustainable multilingual education, cultivation of sustainable citizens, integration of cultural values for sustainable development and digitalization for sustainable foreign language education. There are also challenges and new perspectives. A rational and systematic policy of multilingualism should be planned. In order to cultivate sustainable citizens who are able to respond to various global problems, the curricula, teaching materials and examinations for LOTE teaching at secondary schools and universities should be co-designed to work with each other. In order to integrate cultural values effectively, more suitable teaching materials should be developed and published, and teachers need to be trained for practicing these contents in class. Digitization in teaching, research and learning should be promoted.

Macro-Structure of Argumentative Text as Manifestation of Chinese EFL Students' Critical Thinking Skills

Critical thinking cultivation has been regarded as one of the key objectives of tertiary education, which has drawn attention from the field of foreign language teaching in China. In contrast, the deficiency of critical thinking among English-major college students has become a heated-discussed issue in the past two decades. This study endeavored to combine two dimensions of argumentation: the nature of content and how it is organized, thus investigating the association between critical thinking skills manifested in each rhetorical move and EFL students' macro-structure of argumentative text. Both the move-structure approach based on Toulmin's model of argumentation and the text analysis approach were utilized to explore critical thinking skills manifested in each move. The findings show that participants had grasped the basic argumentative pattern (claim+ground) though lacking sufficient elaboration on evidence. But for secondary argumentative elements like counterargument and rebuttal, both quantity and quality lag the former. The most evident moves in the macro-structure of argumentative texts were introduction, claim, subclaim, ground, warrant, backing, counterargument, rebuttal, and conclusion. All in all, evaluation and inference critical thinking skills were the most evident in terms of composing a quality argumentation.

Reflection on Theory and Practice of Foreign Language Education from the Perspective of National Cultural Security

As a language tool for international communication, foreign languages are not only a unique means of competition among social fields, but also an important demand of national security strategy. This paper reconsiders the problems of Chinese foreign language education under national cultural security in theory and practice, and leads the organic integration of national cultural security and ideological and political education of foreign language curriculum through value guidance. It intends to propose a new era of national cultural security concept of foreign language education in China, in which the ontological humanistic value demand of Chinese culture is in line with the national development strategic goal, and the cultivation of international vision in cross-cultural communication is in line with the construction of national cultural security concept. The research on this topic highlights the awareness of national cultural security in foreign language education, which has certain research value and important practical guiding significance.

Developing College Students’ Intercultural Competence in the Context of Chinese Culture Inheritance and Dissemination—A Case Study of the Intercultural Communication Course Design for ESL Students

Inheriting Chinese cultural genes and disseminating excellent Chinese culture has nowadays become important moral education goals of the new liberal arts in China’s colleges and universities, and intercultural competence is the prerequisite for inheriting and spreading the excellent Chinese culture. The development of intercultural competence among college students, therefore, becomes the contemporary mission of foreign language education in China’s colleges and universities. Moral education, or the ideological and political education construction of foreign language courses mainly involves the following aspects: the analysis of the course’s basic situation, the setting of teaching aims and objectives, the design of teaching philosophies and ideological and political contents, the application of teaching materials and technologies, the design of the teaching process and instructional strategies, and the assessment and reflection of teaching. This paper, by taking the design of an Intercultural Communication course from the above aspects for ESL students in a Chinese university as an example, discusses the development of college students’ intercultural competence in the context of Chinese cultural inheritance and dissemination.

English Tense Teaching in Secondary Schools Based on the Perspective of Embodied-Cognitive Linguistics

As a new research focus, ECL has been applied to translation, contrastive study between English and Chinese, rhetoric and other fields, and also has provided a new perspective for language teaching. In junior middle school English teaching, tenses have always been one of the most important part. However, the traditional teaching mode of English tenses is hard to arouse students’ interest in learning, and also reduces the efficiency of teaching. Therefore, on the basis of reviewing and summarizing the development of ECL and its current researches in the field of English teaching, this paper aims to explore the strategies of English tense teaching in junior middle school, to provide some new ideas and directions for foreign language teaching in China.

Issues of English Teaching Practices and Their Implications for Teaching Strategies

Foreign language education in China has evolved significantly in response to the economic, political and cultural changes in China - Chinese foreign language education has entered a new era. There is no shortage of old and new problems presented in the process of foreign language teaching practice. The problems can be divided into three categories: those of language application, those of combining theoretical and practical methods, and those of evaluating the effectiveness of methods and models. Although instructional strategies do not solve all problems, they provide ideas for teaching practices that go a long way toward avoiding problems and bringing positive results to the entire teaching system

A collaborative autoethnography of developing a ‘Cultural Stories’ exercise for intercultural teaching in China

ABSTRACT Intercultural teaching often emphasizes exposure to and understanding of cultural differences. Although it acknowledges the importance of cultural self-awareness, little research has been done to explore how such a goal is achieved. This article adopts collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to explore the creation, development, and use of variations of the ‘Cultural Stories’ exercise to enhance cultural self-awareness in intercultural education. Three culturally diverse instructors (in background, generations, contact/integrated cultures) narrate developments of this process for foreign language teaching in China as creators, teachers, and researchers. Analysis focuses on: (1) transformative learning process and experience of using the ‘Cultural Stories’ exercise; and (2) enhanced pedagogical understanding of intercultural teaching in China gained through developing and using this exercise. Results indicate that: (1) cultural stories have the potential to shape or start transforming students’ originally essentialized understanding of culture and identity, and (2) contextualized pedagogical implementation and reflective professional commitment help inspire and bring greater reflection or transformation to the teachers’ understanding of intercultural teaching. Implications of this instructional intervention and the research process are also discussed.

Action Research in Foreign Language Teaching in China

This paper begins by outlining the history of action research before arguing about the workability of action research in China’s foreign language teaching and research. It reveals the challenges that front-line teachers in China face, such as high research pressure, heavy teaching tasks, a lack of research guidelines, and insufficient teamwork, based on a survey of 273 foreign language teachers in colleges and universities from 24 provinces (/autonomous regions/municipalities directly under the central government) in China. After that, 37 papers published in CSSCI publications about foreign language teaching between 1994 and 2018 are reviewed, and recommendations for future action research in China are offered. Finally, the action-research model of “classroom-oriented research and research-based classroom teaching” is proposed as an achievable research framework for front-line teachers, incorporating information technology, multimodal teaching materials, and curriculum and course reforms under the guidelines of pedagogy, psychology, and linguistics.

Research on Construction of Advanced English Teaching Based on Production-Oriented Approach

In view of the separation of learning and application in foreign language teaching in China, a Production-Oriented Approach theory (POA theory) of integrating learning and application in foreign language teaching is proposed. The theory takes unit tasks with potential communicative value as the teaching target, and students selectively learn input materials under the guidance of teachers, and finally achieve effective output and complete communicative tasks. This paper tries to apply POA theory to Advanced English Teaching by decomposing the overall goal to sub-goals within a unit task, so as to stimulate students’ enthusiasm for learning and willingness to produce.

Innovation research on foreign language teaching theory with Chinese characteristics based on Whitehead\u2019s process philosophy

Since China’s reform and opening up, foreign language teaching (FLT) in China has achieved rapid development under the guidance of foreign language teaching theories both at home and abroad. However, problems such as ‘time-consuming and inefficient foreign language learning’ and the presence of ‘dumb foreign languages’ in FLT in China have not been fundamentally solved. Based on Whitehead’s process philosophy, this research aims to put forward feasible solutions to the existing problems in FLT in China so that the level of FLT in China can be promoted by discussing the purpose, contents, processes and stages of FLT and the relationship between teachers and students in both FLT and FLT evaluation systems.

BLENDED TEACHING OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN CHINA FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ECOLOGY

It has been 15 years since the theories in ecology had been introduced to foreign language education in China. Researches from the ecological perspective on blended teaching of a foreign language are also thriving as the educational technologies are ever enhanced. In this study, the related CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) literature from 2010-2020 was collected, and CiteSpace was employed to review the exploration of the research hot-spots, trends, and limitations in this area. The results indicate that 1. in China, the main methods to realize the blended teaching are flipped classroom and MOOC; 2. a majority of the macroscopic researches are conducted to build an ecological mode for college English and higher vocational English while the microscopic researches are for teachers’ and students’ ecological niches; 3. with the advent of “Internet Plus” age, researches in China will march on to the “smart” ecology of blended foreign language education.; 4. though the studies are involved in diverse directions, there are limitations in this field due to a late start.

Theories and Practices of Language Education: An Interview with Prof. Zhuanglin Hu

In this interview, Professor Hu showed his insights in the linguistic basis of language education. Among the various schools of linguistic theories, he lays special emphasis on the influence of communicative grammar, systemic functional linguistics, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics on language education, in particular on foreign language teaching and learning in China. According to him, language education should fall within the scope of applied linguistics, and there should be a combination of the narrow-sense applied linguistics and the machine-oriented applied linguistics for better development of language education research and practice. Educational linguistics is considered as able to integrate language studies that focuses on the way to teach first, second or foreign language and education studies that emphasizes how to use a language in teaching different courses. Professor Hu highlighted the important role of functional linguistics in foreign language education in China, and drew our attention to the positive role of social semiotics in language teaching at all levels of education. He advocated to apply to language education the principle of Halliday’s “appliable linguistics”, according to which we should learn to find out for what purpose, under what condition and with what result a theory is better than other theories in practices in general and in language teaching in particular, while the task of an experienced teacher is to choose an appropriate approach to cope with a particular problem and the teacher himself/herself is expected to be a resource in language teaching. Professor Hu summarized the major stages of foreign language education since the founding of new China, and highlighted the shift of the objective in foreign language education in China from literature to language. He reminded us of the major challenges to foreign language education in China in the new century: including those due to the need of cross-discipline and crossspecialty personnel, the new development of technology, and the increasing importance of multiple intelligence and Internet education in foreign language learning. He also advocated the adoption of new teaching approaches in teaching Chinese as foreign language.