An Innovative Model in College English Teaching in China: the Case of NEIE

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An Innovative Model in College English Teaching in China: The Case of NEIE

Li GongMichael Rost

Abstract: This paper introduces an innovative model in College English Teaching called New Era Interactive English (NEIE), an interactively oriented, technologically enhanced teaching system. After reviewing the current situation of China’s College English course reform and arguing for the need for a progressively interactive language teaching model, the paper offers a detailed description of a core teaching philosophy, structured curriculum, supporting technology, practical application, and anticipated contribution of this “China-friendly” teaching model.

Key words: College English, course reform in China, interactive teaching model, NEIE (New Era Interactive English)

1. Problem Statement

The large-scale economic reform and open-door policy that has been instituted in China over the past two decades has affected all aspects of the Chinese life and education, including the teaching of English. The policy directly affixes great importance to the teaching of English as an international lingua franca, and not simply as a foreign language for academic study. This distinction explicitly acknowledges that the prevailing perception of deficient international communication has been a pivotal issue in China’s development, an issue that has impacted China’s national strength and international competitiveness (Zhang 2003).

The initial endorsement of this open-door linguistic policy was the inauguration of College English as a compulsory two-year course in every Chinese university in 1992. The necessarily quick enactment of the policy decision did not allow for sufficient examination of preferred teaching methodologies, definitions of viable classroom practice, or descriptions of valid assessment. After two decades of gradual installment of this requirement, predictably in irregular fashion through this vast country, the outcome was deemed undesirable in that it was, in then vice premier Li Lanqing’s words, “time-consuming and inefficient” (Li 1996 cited in Jing 1999). The consensus opinion was that, in spite of its positive intention and, for the most part, vigorous implementation, the mandatory College English program spawned a number of problems:

1. Based on historical precedents in higher education throughout China, content-control and teacher-centeredness dominated most teaching in the English classroom. As a result, the development of student learning strategies and autonomy had been neglected. Students essentially simply memorized written content and aimed to perform well on objective exams. Again based on historical models and standards, the teaching methodology and curricula that evolved post- 1992 were not able to address students’ needs for language proficiency in the four skills (speaking, listening, reading, writing) in any balanced sense (Ying et al 1998; Wang 2002; Yan 2002; Mao et al 2004; Liang 2004; Zhang et al 2004; Jia 2004).
2. Due to the absence of communication-oriented models of progress involving speaking and listening in particular, insufficient attention was paid to the cultivation of students’ ability to use English in a communicative way. The negative stereotype of “deaf English” and “dumb English” – that is, students being unable to deal with spoken language in actual use –was unwittingly reinforced during the intended transitiontoward use of English as a language for communication. (Cen 1999; Wang 2002; Zhang 2003; Zhang et al 2004; Wang 2009).
3. Even in the midst of this curricular shift, any open discussion of modern teaching ideology was “benignly neglected”, and methodology used in Chinese classrooms failed to evolve in any meaningful sense. In particular, the dominant teaching ideology remained as what is known in China as “the one-and-only standard”, that is, a single methodology that was expected to be adopted in every context: the one-and-only curriculum, one-and-only textbook, the one-and-only testing model, etc. There was no proactive plan was in place to phase out older ideologies and initiate newer approaches, which would certainly include elements of new media, social networking, and “edutainment.” In a sense, teachers were trapped in a kind of “Catch 22”: there was no system for experimenting with or moving toward more flexible de-centralized approaches in order to counteract the “one-and-only style” of thinking about instruction, so teachers had no choice but to continue outdated teaching methodologies. (Cen 1998; Zhang 2003; Wang 2002; Mao et al 2004; Shu 2005).
4. The evaluation and testing system was not suited to newer expectations that English could be a lingua franca, in which Chinese students would not be expected to communicate with native speakers from North America or the U.K or Australia, but they would be expected to communicate with other Asians and Chinese, in English, as a common language. To effect this change, by definition would involve agreement ondefinitions of communicative language proficiency. The maintenance of the time-honored examination-oriented education system (which tests language outside of usage contexts), especially with its emphasis on only reading and written grammar, remained an obdurate obstacle for educational change (Cen 1998, 1999; Zhang 2002; Wang 2002; Zhang et al 2004; Shu 2005).
5. On the ideological front, the theoretical research on language instruction and second language acquisition within China lagged well behind international standards. Specifically, there were no significant research initiatives exploring Chinese language learning contexts, which disadvantaged Chinese educators from engaging in significant discussions of teaching methodology in the global community (Shu 2005; Hu 2009).
6. Consistent with the neglect in the research arena, the investment in development of English teachers was also minimal. An underpinning of sustained educational change always involves allocating necessary investiture into teacher education, as it is the teachers who ultimately deliver the educational “product” to the students based on their understanding of the educational “process.” (Rost, 2011, Rubin, 2010, Zhang 2002).

2. Interventions

While these six issues could easily have been recognized as prevalent to some degree even before the College English course was established, it became clear that failure to address these issues in the current context would continue to hinder progress. It is the perspective of the authors of this paper that all of these six problems are fundamentally related to way in which we conceptualize teaching ideology. The thesis of this articles is that the incumbent, traditional educational ideology in Chinese tertiary education, with its long-established model of Confucian-style teaching and learning, needs to be replaced with a new ideology that is more sensitive to the modern context of global communication and the current needs of the Chinese educational system.

To address the identified problems in a tangible way, the State Ministry of Education (MOE) took action during the second decade of the reform movement, officially launching the College English course reform in 2002. This initiative focused on four major tasks:

1) a planned re-versioning of the teaching curriculum, with initiatives in 2004 and 2007, aiming to change the focus gradually from reading comprehension to overall language development with listening and speaking as its focal point;

2) the development of new College English teaching materials to reflect this shift in focus, commenced in 2003;

3) the reform of the teaching model, begun in 2004, including course contents and teaching methods, with the aim of changing the default textbook + chalk + blackboard + teacher’s lecturing pattern. In its place was proposed a constructivist approach working toward a more active communicative classroom teaching methodology, as well as integrating available computer networking, teaching software, and online interactivity;

4) the reform of the College English teaching testing and evaluating system, including the College English Test Band 4 and Band 6 (CET-4 and CET-6), initiated in two phases in 2005 and 2008, in order to set up a system in harmony with the pace of social and educational development.

All four parts of this plan were to be implemented in an overlapping and regulated step-by-step way (Wu 2005; Zhang 2008). The social significance and status of this reform was highlighted by its inclusion as one of the four most crucial reforms in China’s higher education system proposed and supervised by the MOE in its 2003 document The Teaching Quality and Reform Project in Institutions of Higher Learning (Wang 2006).

Of these four directional changes, the authors regard the reinvention of the teaching model as the core of the College English course reform, if the reform is to be sustained. The reconfiguration of the teaching model is based on a 2007 MOE document entitled College English Curriculum Requirements (a Tentative Version): “(A curriculum) has been drawn up to provide colleges and universities with the guidelines for English instruction to non-English major students.” This document addresses issues such as the character (which corresponds to what is often called “the look and feel” of a course in practice) of College English, objectives (or testable outcomes), teaching requirements, course design, teaching model, the evaluation system and the teaching administration (Department of Higher Education 2004; Department of Higher Education 2007).

To implement this plan, the MOE assigned four of the most prestigious publishers in China to develop simultaneously a computer network-based College English learning system. These publishers would in effect compete against each other. This competition, it was reasoned, would allow for a choice by higher institutions all around the nation rather than having a single system imposed upon everyone. Of these four publishers, Tsinghua University Press designed a computer-and-network-based teaching and learning system, based closely on what we call a theory of Interactive Language Teaching, with addresses the six recognized challenges in the national language education system: (1) teacher- vs. student- centered teaching models; (2) relative emphasis on communicative use of English; (3) decentralization of curriculum choices; (4) updating the assessment system; (5) research support; (6) development of teacher training.

3. Theoretical Support

In order to align with the leading international initiatives in language teaching, the Tsinghua group undertook historical research into global trends in the teaching of English. Our initial intention was identify focal points of establish teaching methodologies, and to try to understand how aspects of these various methodologies have made their way into the Chinese context. Until the 1960s, the dominant models for teaching languages in the West were the Grammar-Translation approach, involving training and transfer of native language (L1) thinking to the target language (L2), the Audio-Lingual method, involving repetition and transformations of small bits of language, and the Oral-situational approach, involving short guided conversations and minimalist role plays targeting mastery of target structures and vocabulary (Larsen-Freeman, 2001). Common elements among all of these approaches are a detailed a priori syllabus based on an analysis of the grammatical-lexical system of the target language, an underlying belief that adherence to correct models will lead to successful acquisition, and a demonstrated standard of mastery of grammatical items in production (writing or speaking, even in very controlled testing tasks) before moving on to the subsequent items in the syllabus. While these methods may have created successful users of L2s in the past, it is not clear that they are the most suitable methods for the current Chinese context, in which large numbers of students – in large classes of up to 100 or more students – have limited access to communicative situations, communicative partners, teaching materials featuring communicative tasks, and teachers who are trained to promote communicative use of the TL.

The so-called communicative revolution of the 1980s, crystallized in North America and western Europe, to shift these emphases and methods in order to prioritize student-centered communicative goal, with an emphasis on pragmatic success rather than linguistic correctness. The most influential approaches to language teaching in the past 30 years have been the Affective-humanistic Approach in first and second language education (Slavin, 1981; Celce-Murcia, 1991,2001) and the the Communicative Approach in second language education (Savingnon, 1987; Weir, 1990). These approaches differ from the language-mastery oriented approaches in that they place the learner, and his or her performance, at the center of the methodology, and values the concept that students must know themselves, express themselves, and actualize themselves. To this end, there are four emphases concerning these approaches that we wish to intergrate into the new teaching methodology:

1.Affect: an emphasis on feeling and thinking processes of the learner, recognizing their rolin learning and aiming to externalize these thinking and feeling processes and integrate them into the classroom activities.

2.Self-Concept: an emphasis on positive, self-concept for each student, so that each student maintains motivation and develops autonomy; all students, not just “the best”, are expected to succeed.

3. Communication: an emphasis on creating a vital role for student communication, including student’s own perspective; recognition of the value of self-expression and mutual respect for points of view.

4.Personal Values: an emphasis on the importance of personal values, and awareness of the role of education in facilitating the development of positive values.

It is important to note that a shift toward an affect-oriented and communication-oriented approach is not intended to replace a language-oriented or mastery-oriented approach to teaching. Because of the apparent benefits of both language-oriented and humanistic-oriented approaches, we sought a methodology that would include the best features of each orientation, while keeping learner-centeredness as the core of the methodology. We chose the Interactive Teaching Model (a term coined by Rivers, 1987, based on her own survey of teaching models), as the basis from which to build an ideology for English education, formulate a teaching methodology, and articulate instructional materials design. In addition to its ideological basis, we chose this model for practical reasons:

• ITM is an eclectic approach that incorporates the core beliefs of many successful methodological systems concerning language use, authenticity, and collaboration as the basis of learning.

Students achieve facility in using a language when their attention is focused on conveying and receiving authentic messages…This is interaction. Interaction involves not just expression of one’s own ideas but comprehension of those of others….All of these factors must be present as students learn to communicate: listening to others, talking with others, negotiating meaning in a shared context…Collaborative activity of this type should be the norm from the beginning of language study. (Rivers, 1987:3-4)

• ITM has a core belief system concerning student-centeredness that is accessible for new teachers, or teachers shifting from teacher-centered methodologies to understand and apply.

In interactive language teaching, comprehension and production retrieve their normal relationship as an interactive duo. To achieve this, we need an ambiance and relations among individuals that promote a desire for interaction. Teacher-directed and teacher-dominated classrooms cannot, by their nature, be interactive classrooms, and this is what language teachers need to be learn. Interaction can be two-way, three-way, or four-way, but never one-way. (Rivers, 1987:9)

•ILT is sensitive to the differences between ESL contexts, such as the U.S., UK and Australia and EFL contexts, such as China, Korea, and Japan (Celce-Murcia, 2001; Cook, 2002; He, 2000).

EFL and ESL context differences include a number of key pedagogic issues: cultural differences in learning styles; differences in gender expectations of behavior and achievement in cultural settings; learning style preferences based on cultural norms; relative tolerance of ambiguity and tolerance of experimentation in specific educational cultures (Reid, 1995:1-2).

4. Shifting the “look and feel” of a language program

At some point in the planning process, the discuss must shift from considerations of ideology and philosophical preferences, to how the language course will actually “look and feel” in practice. Because ITM is grounded in the cognitive psychology of constructivism(Piaget, 1950; Vygotsky 1978; Sweller, 2003) there are very specific forms of instruction that will characterize this teaching approach. Though constructivism does not constitute a specific form of pedagogy, it argues that humans generate knowledge and meaning from an interaction between their experiences and their ideas.

The Interactive Teaching Model, as an examplar of a constructivist approach, originated with math and science education, and was then extended for use in the language arts, particularly for reading comprehension. (Palinscar, 1984) The tenets of the approach – concerning student-centered tasks and discovery – a well-suited to language teaching as well, and it is our judgment that this approach particularly suitable for the education system in China.

In language teaching applications, constructivism emphasizes student-centeredness instead of teacher-centeredness: The student must be the active agent to construct his own knowledge while the teacher plays the role of a supervisor and coach (Harmer 2000; Brown, 2010; Littlewood, 2000).

Palinscar (1984) argued that the teaching and learning process is realized through the information exchange, collaborative activities, and reciprocal teaching-learning (learners take on the role of teaching content to other learners). In the ITL model, communication takes place at many levels and in numerous contexts: between teacher and students, as well as between students in dyads and small groups. This process is not unidirectional and determinate but rather multi-directional and non-determinate. The key theoretical shift for teachers to make is that in this model teachers are no longer merely providers of knowledge and students passive receivers; instead, it is argued that there are multiple ways for students to acquire knowledge, only one of which is the interaction between teacher and students.

A key component of the ILT approach, and one that makes it even more suitable to the China context is the notion that interaction extends beyond teacher-student and student-student interactions, indeed beyond the classroom. Rivers exhorts teachers to explore the possible expansion of the Interactive Language Teaching approach to into communities –social and online –to create contact situations in which the target language is used. She further discusses the need to exploit modern technologies –video equipment, computers, interactive software–to expand the students’ notion of interaction. We argue also that technological interaction, in which the student selects and plans activities, receives feedback, and revises, is a necessary bridge to more complex human interactions with the target language. This aspects of technological interaction is essential to exploit in the Chinese context, given the large numbers of students who must be accommodated by the educational system, and their relative inexperience with target language communication. With interaction that extends beyond the classroom and takes advantage of real-time interaction facilitated by software, even large numbers of students with different learning styles can be accommodated successfully.