English language education has been accorded much importance in the People’s Republic of China in the last quarter century. This paper presents an overview of basic English language education in the Chinese education system. It is intended to serve two purposes: (1) to provide background information for situating and interpreting the findings reported by Silver and Skuja-Steele in this issue and (2) to survey progress and problems in the development of basic English language education in China. The paper is structured in three parts. The first part examines national policies on the expansion of English provision in basic education since the late 1970s. The second part focuses on policy efforts directed towards improving the quality of English instruction. The last part sketches the major progress that has been made and identifies several thorny issues in English language education that deserve serious attention from policymakers.

English Language Education in China: Policies, Progress, and Problems

EFA discourse has moved from a commitment to quality to its measurement without adequate consideration of what quality entails, particularly in the vital domain of pedagogy. Meanwhile, the demand for quality indicators has left important methodological questions unanswered. This paper provides a critique of typical quality indicator frameworks from international and EFA sources. It notes a concern with input and context at the expense of process, an arbitrariness in what is focused upon, an excessive use of proxies, neglect of international pedagogical research, and fundamental confusions about the key terms ‘quality’, ‘indicators’ and ‘measures’. After considering one of the more promising Indian frameworks, from NCERT, the paper proposes criteria for assessing all such initiatives, central to which are comprehensiveness, evidential basis, validity, reliability, impact, manageability and appositeness to level and context of use. In respect of the latter, the paper presses the need for the question ‘Who needs to know what?’ to be asked at each level of the system from national to local. The paper then investigates the empirical and conceptual basis for accounts and indicators or quality, arguing the importance of national culture and circumstance alongside international pedagogical research. The paper finds that the interface between the latter and the EFA literature is extremely weak; and that school effectiveness research is given a prominence in EFA contexts which it is not accorded elsewhere and which its flawed methodology and cultural insensitivity do not justify. Underlying the selective use of evidence is a more general failure adequately to conceptualise what is being researched, and the paper sets out a map of the territory of pedagogy at the levels of ideas and action to remedy this deficiency, illustrating its value by considering just one of the various aspects of teaching identified, classroom interaction. Pressing home the concern about the conceptual problems of the field as it currently stands, the paper points to the tendency to treat indicators and measures as synonymous, and to the distortion which follows an excessive preoccupation with measures. It argues that to jettison indicators on the grounds that they are non-measurable is to ignore much of what matters most in the quality of learning and teaching. This exclusivity also contradicts claims that the dangers of trying to represent quality as quantity are fully understood. Finally, the paper proposes principles of procedure to guide future work on quality indicators and measures in the EFA context, together with priorities for action and four practical initiatives to take the debate forward in the particular context of India’s EFA programme, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan. As a whole, the paper both engages with the current EFA discourse on quality and indicators and steps outside it. The author is an educationist and researcher, though one with substantial international and EFA experience, including India, DPEP and SSA. He makes no apologies for the fact that his perspective may not sit readily with that which has dominated the EFA quality debate up to now. Indeed, a collision of perspectives may be just what is needed by way of ‘incitement to discourse’. Correspondence: Professor Robin Alexander, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ, UK, or rja40@cam.ac.uk. See also www.robinalexander.org.uk.

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Education For All, The Quality Imperative and the Problem of Pedagogy. CREATE Pathways to Access. Research Monograph No. 20.

This article uses the Comparative Education millennium special issue and the author's recently published five-nation comparative study of primary education to argue the case for a new comparative pedagogy. Pedagogy is defined as both the act of teaching and the discourse in which it is embedded. The comparative analysis of pedagogy requires that we have a viable framework for the empirical study of classroom transactions and that we locate these transactions historically and culturally at the levels of classroom, school and system. The postulated analytical framework maps the key elements in the act of teaching and links them with the processes of curriculum transformation from state to classroom. Comparative pedagogy reveals, alongside each country's unique mix of values, ideas and practices, powerful continuities in these which transcend time and space. In so doing, it helps us to pinpoint those universals in teaching and learning to which, in any context, we need most closely to attend if we are to improve the quality of education.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3099559.pdf

Border Crossings: Towards a comparative pedagogy

Revue internationale d'éducation de Sèvres

Since China initiated its modernization program in the late 1970s, professional development of secondary teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) has been given much prominence because of the perceived important role that English can play in the modernization drive. This article provides a critical overview of secondary EFL teacher education in China with the intent of offering useful lessons to foreign language teacher education in other parts of the world. The critique is made within a framework that draws on theoretical and empirical research on teacher education in four areas: (a) the knowledge base for teaching, (b) pedagogical effectiveness in fostering knowledge acquisition and intellectual qualities that support continuing professional development, (c) professional development in the community of practice, and (d) the coherence of professional development work. Through the analytical lenses provided by the framework, the article scrutinizes two curriculums for secondary EFL teacher preparation programs and the instructional practices prevalent in these programs. It also examines secondary EFL teachers’ continuing professional development in the workplace and through formally organized in-service programs. Based on the critical examination, suggestions are made for addressing identified problems and improving the effectiveness and relevance of the EFL teacher education system.

Professional Development of Secondary EFL Teachers: Lessons From China

Research studies have shown clear and persistent differences between the French and English systems of education. Given that England and France are in many ways very similar societies, sharing a European heritage, of approximately the same population profile, with comparable levels of socioeconomic and technological development and facing the same financial imperatives in a global market, the question arises as to why their educational arrangements should be so different. In this paper it is argued that the differences arise out of deeply embedded cultural traditions through which contrasting fundamental value orientations are mediated and that these fundamental value orientations can be traced back to and now represent secularised educational versions of French Catholicism and English Protestantism. Evidence is put forward to suggest that structures of consciousness and forms of social organisation which originally developed in an ecclesiastical context for religious purposes have been transform...

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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Catholicism: ideological and institutional constraints on system change in English and French primary schooling

(1992). Catechistic Teaching Style in French Primary Education: analysis of a grammar lesson with seven‐year olds. Comparative Education: Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 249-268.

Catechistic Teaching Style in French Primary Education: analysis of a grammar lesson with seven‐year olds

This paper reports evidence from an ethnographic study of two primary schools in a large town in Northern France. The schools are located in markedly different socio‐economic settings. One is in an affluent area near the centre while the other is situated on a run down municipal housing estate on the outskirts in an officially designated educational priority zone. Despite their widely divergent social situations the two schools are strikingly similar and can be seen to be providing homogeneous educational experience for two socially heterogeneous populations. In the second half of the paper the notion of ‘national context’ is explored and its usefulness as an explanatory theoretical concept for analysing this educational homogeneity is suggested.

Educational homogeneity in French primary education: a double case-study

The Training of Secondary Modern Languages Teachers in England and China: a comparative analysis

(1992). Communication, culture, context, confidence: the four Cs of primary modern language teaching. The Language Learning Journal: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 13-14.

Keith Sharpe

Papers

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Catholicism: ideological and institutional constraints on system change in English and French primary schooling

Catechistic Teaching Style in French Primary Education: analysis of a grammar lesson with seven‐year olds

Educational homogeneity in French primary education: a double case-study

The Training of Secondary Modern Languages Teachers in England and China: a comparative analysis

Communication, culture, context, confidence: the four Cs of primary modern language teaching