Sunday, April 16, 2006

"English Beginning to Be Spoken Here"

Here's an article from the April 12 issue of the The Economist.


"MY MOTHER used to be an engineer, but now she's a housewife. I don't
like her job. I want to be a designer. I like to think up new ideas."
Not the words of a young British or American child, but a nine-year-old
Chinese girl in Shenzhen city, southern China. And Shun Yushun is no
prodigy. She is typical of her English First school, one of 68 on the
mainland started by a Swedish-owned language-teaching chain.

Yushun belongs to a new generation in a country where older folks,
deprived of education during the Cultural Revolution, speak almost no
English at all. Even young adults struggle, having passed through an
archaic school system that still insists on the brute memorisation of
words and grammar. Zhang Jin, a 24-year-old from remote Guizhou
province, studied English from the age of 12 and then for four years at
Huanan University. But she has trouble putting a sentence together.

Today the Chinese are obsessed with English. Anything up to a fifth of
the population is learning the language. As Gordon Brown, the British
finance minister, observed on a trip to China last year, in two decades
China's English speakers will already outnumber native English speakers
in the rest of the world. This is fuelling a market that comprises
everything from books, teaching materials and tests to teacher training
and language schools themselves. At $60 billion a year, China is
already the world's largest market for English-language services,
estimates Mari Pearlman at ETS, an American group that developed TOEFL,
a well-known test of English-language proficiency.

The bulk of this, she says, is spent on teaching materials:
dictionaries, language textbooks and classroom aids. Most of these are
supplied by the education arms of foreign companies in partnership with
local firms. Macmillan has sold more than 100m school textbooks in
China with its partner FLTRP, which has a fifth of the market and is
the leading Chinese publisher of English-language books. Longman (which
belongs to Pearson, part-owner of THE ECONOMIST), Oxford University
Press and HarperCollins have popular bilingual dictionaries, while
Thomson Learning has licensed its teaching materials to People's
Education Press.

Demand for textbooks has been boosted by the government's recent
lowering (from 12 to nine) of the age at which primary-school pupils
start to learn English, and many eastern cities have begun teaching it
at six. On some estimates, English texts now account for up to
one-fifth of the country's entire book sales. Though foreign publishers
must license books to Chinese publishers, almost half the
English-teaching market involves the purchase of foreign copyright.

There is also an increasing call for high-tech teaching. At its
kindergartens, Beijing's municipal government has just started testing
interactive whiteboards made by a British firm, Promethean. At 33,000
yuan ($4,125) a go, they enable teachers to integrate traditional
materials with movie clips, radio broadcasts and other internet
content. Nicole de Lalouviere, the director of learning at the British
Council in Beijing, claims its website[1], managed with a Chinese
partner and offering free tests, vocabulary and business English, has
become "the biggest online university in the world", with 2m students.

Testing is also growing fast, as students with overseas ambitions
practise for international college-entrance exams, and Chinese
employers seek proof of English ability. Once again, foreigners are in
pole position, though the two main suppliers, ETS and a venture between
the British Council and Cambridge Assessment, are run as not-for-profit
organisations. Teacher training promises to become another big market,
given the shortage of half a million English teachers in state schools
and Beijing's push to improve English ahead of the 2008 Olympics.

Finally, there are the private language schools themselves--some 50,000
of them, reckons Ms Pearlman, from family-run outfits to chains such as
English First, Wall Street English and New Oriental, a Chinese operator
that claims to be the biggest, with 2.5m enrolled students. While such
schools were established for adults, the demand today is from parents
willing to spend up to half their household income to boost their
offspring's chances. The 550 students at English First's Shenzhen
school used mostly to be adults; now more than 70% are children. And
they are getting younger. The rage at kindergarten these days is
English-speaking classes for four-year-olds.

Adults and college students, meanwhile, can choose from the many
business-English classes at foreign colleges, such as the universities
of Illinois, Maryland and Nottingham, which are establishing MBA
courses and even entire campuses in China to tap into the huge numbers
of potential students.

Yet not all this readily translates into profit. Education remains
highly regulated. It is no accident that the state propaganda
department controls the ministry of education, which only recently
allowed (heavily edited) English textbooks from foreign publishers into
the state system. Foreigners still cannot publish in China, receiving
only royalties on their content. Their partners (such as FLTRP) use
their materials to do a roaring business training teachers and running
conferences. Though selling books to private language-schools can be
more lucrative, these schools are also shackled. Foreign chains need a
Chinese partner and must have their teaching materials approved. The
difficulties and costs prompted English First to franchise all but four
of its 68 schools: after a decade in China it has yet to recoup its
investment.

The Chinese government is not entirely comfortable with western
teaching methods. China has no government drive to welcome native
English speakers, unlike Japan, where the ministry of education runs
the 19-year-old JET programme, which puts thousands of foreign teachers
to work in state schools. Indeed, until a few years ago, private
language schools in China could be fined for hiring foreign English
teachers.

Although China's passion for English is palpable, it will become a
lucrative and open market only if China's Communist Party allows it to.
It is reluctant because, along with English textbooks and teachers come
western ways of learning and thinking--ways that might one day threaten
the party's authority.

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