The cornerstones of Holistic English are read more, listen more, write more and speak more English.
Students constantly inquire what they can or should read. It is a constant struggle to get students to read more English.
There are 4 news/magazine kiosks on the HIT campus that between them sell fewer than 50 English newspapers per week. There are approximately 20,000 students and 4,000 faculty on campus. All students are required to study English.
180 post-grad students admitted that they have never purchased an English newspaper at a school kiosk. When these students were provided a China Daily (English) in the Holistic English Lab; they started reading with as much vigor as an Olympian seeking a gold medal.
It was painful to ask the students to stop reading and put the paper away so class could proceed.
The point is that when English materials are available, students will avail themselves. At HIT, English materials are NOT readily available and the school is in no hurry to make them available.
Arrangements were made with the China Daily distributor in Harbin to deliver 40 copies of China Daily to the Holistic English Lab every morning before 8:00 a.m. Every student has the right to opt out and not purchase a copy. The first 15 minutes of the class the students are encouraged to read, read, read. Read more English!
So let’s cut to the chase. Why don’t Chinese students read more English? Simply because administrators do not see any value to themselves in making certain that English reading materials are readily available to the students.
. But if only it were that simple; the immediate administrative reaction to this China Daily plan was criticism for requiring the students to spend their own money to purchase a newspaper and a concern that some students may not wish to read more English. If students may not be required to read more English, why compel them to study English in the first place? Oh yes, to pass the National examinations but not to be able to use English.
Why are English majors at HIT required to read the classics including Shakespeare, but not an English newspaper? Could it be because both the Dean of the School of Foreign Languages and the Dean of the English Department majored in literature?
How will reading the classics prepare the students for future employment?
The following is an excerpt from THE LOWDONW ON HIGHER EDUCATION IN CHINA, (2011) Cambridge Scholars Publishing, London
Although “English Fever” is running rampant throughout China and is claimed to be “market driven,” the rush to institute English learning nationwide with more than a million Chinese teachers of English who are themselves, for the most part, unable to produce comprehensible oral or written English or teach in the target language, has failed miserably to meet market needs. The goal of universities and colleges throughout China is to have students pass national English competency examinations such as TEM 4, CET 4 and CET 6. Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that these national English competency examinations bear little or no relationship to comprehensible output, the pass rates have become the exclusive focus of administrative attention and false pride. This is due in part to demands of Chinese employers who are misinformed that passing CET 6 is evidence of an accomplished English speaker[1]. Wang Shugua, President of Harbin Institute of Technology, is quoted as saying: “I recognize CET as a good tool to promote English studies but I am against the practice of regarding a CET certificate as the prerequisite for graduation, which is totally misleading.” He tried to eliminate the requirement for a CET certificate in order to graduate from HIT, but gave up without success: “I had to reconsider the usefulness of CET certificates in job hunting for our graduates. Almost all employers want their recruits to have a CET certificate, so I had to push my students to pass the CET for their good, although it is against my will.”[2]
That the market needs graduates who can produce comprehensible English has been completely ignored. Consequently, foreign employers, Joint Venture employers and Chinese companies doing business abroad are hiring university graduates from India because they are better able to produce comprehensible oral and written English, than their Chinese counterparts. Imagine more than five million Chinese university graduates who have learned English for sixteen years, many of whom are being passed over for Chinese jobs in China. This is simply unacceptable! English is one of “the ten most popular disciplines that saw low rates of employment last year.”[3] Chinese universities are under tremendous pressure to change curriculums to meet the needs of the job market. But instead, they are simply reducing enrollments in certain majors.[4] “One of the reasons for the difficulty in university graduates finding employment is that they are unable to satisfy the needs of employers,” said Yang Weiguo, associate professor of Beijing-based Renmin University. He stated that the universities needed to quickly adjust their teaching methods and content to conform to social development and demand.[5]
Both “in house” and private corporate English training centers are proliferating throughout the business hubs of China. The curriculum is usually industry specific and amounts to ESP (English for a specific purpose), i.e. the teaching of technical language and phrases to meet the perceived need to limit communication in English to a formal or standard form, related to a specific discipline such as medicine, law, architecture or IT.
Holistic English is to English language learning what Chinese traditional medicine is to health care—a holistic approach. Holistic English moves away from the traditional focus on grammar and lexis.
While there is a need for specialist terminology, the greatest need of international employers is to have employees who can communicate successfully in English. Thus, communication and accommodation should be emphasized in language instruction; the mastering of perfect grammatical forms is an added bonus that can be reserved for later refinement. Flexibility is just as important as the mastering of prescribed forms, if not more so. In order to communicate to communicate across international boundaries, students must learn to adjust to their interlocutor in order to facilitate understanding. Moreover, because of the growing use of English as a global lingua franca, students of the language need to be exposed to a wide range of English accents in order to increase their abilities to understand the people they are likely to encounter in an international career. Furthermore, it is not only formal but informal language skills that should be practiced at university; students should be made aware of the different genres and registers in English, so that they can determine the appropriate use of the language in the various situations in which they are likely to find themselves …. Finally, students should be taught skills that allow them to mediate between languages and cultures. Thus an intercultural approach is needed in language teaching, so that future employees are ‘able to view different cultures from a perspective of informed understanding.’[6] An approach that has the goal of successful intercultural communication at its core will prepare students for the relatively unpredictable needs of language use in corporate Europe.[7]
[1] Yuankai, Tang, 9/6/07 Beijing Review, Education Feared to Raise Robots http://www.bjreview.com.cn/special/txt/2007-08/31/content_74644.htm (accessed July 10, 2008)
[2] Beijing Review, “Education Feared to Raise Robots,”
http://www.bjreview.com.cn/special/txt/2007-08/31/content_74644.htm (accessed July 10, 2008)
[3]China Daily, “Poll: Hot Majors of Past Not Getting Jobs,”
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-06/27/content_6799171.htm (accessed July 10, 2008)
[4] China.Org.Cn, “‘Hot courses’ won’t secure good jobs,”
http://www.china.org.cn/china/national/2008-01/12/content_1239129.htm (accessed October 10, 2008)
[5] China.Org.Cn, “20% university graduates fail to find jobs in 2007,”
http://www.china.org.cn/english/China/239233.htm (accessed October 1, 2008)
[6] John Corbett, An Intercultural Approach to English Language Teaching (Clevedon & Buffalo: Multilingial Matters, 2003).
[7] Elizabeth J. Erling and Alan Walton, “English at work in Berlin,” English Today 23 (1) (2007): 32–39, 64.
We need English materials which are necessary for English learning.Actually we got few reading materials outside classes during the past school years.That’s an usual phenomenon in China,I think.Looking forward to improvement.
I heard that China Daily is not an appropriate english learning material since it is a Chinese newspaper.It still tastes like Chinglish instead of English.And I admit that we students should read more english article.How about we get some english novel to read?