A top university in northwest China has scrapped English tests as a prerequisite for graduation, rekindling a heated debate about the role of the world’s lingua franca in the country’s education system after years of rising nationalist sentiment under leader Xi Jinping.
In a notice Wednesday, the Xi’an Jiaotong University in the capital city of Shaanxi province said students will no longer need to pass a nationwide standardized English test – nor any other English exams – to be able to graduate with bachelor’s degrees.
The announcement caused a stir on social media, with many praising the decision and calling for more universities to do the same.
“Very good. I hope other universities will follow suit. It’s ridiculous that Chinese people’s academic degrees need to be validated by a foreign language (test),” said a comment with more than 24,000 likes on microblogging site Weibo, where a related hashtag attracted more than 350 million views Thursday.
Passing the College English Test, a national standardized exam first held in 1987, has been a graduation requirement at the majority of Chinese universities for decades – although the government has never made it an official policy.
The common practice underlined the importance Chinese universities placed on English – the world’s predominant academic and scientific language – especially when the once-insular and impoverished country was opening up and eager to catch up with the developed world after the turbulence of the Mao Zedong era.
But in recent years, some universities have downgraded the importance of English, either by replacing the national College English Test with their own exams or – as in the case of the Xi’an Jiaotong University – dropping English qualifications altogether as a graduation criteria.
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People forget, but China itself has a population of 1.4 billion people. That’s at least 4 times the population of the US, you never run out of people to talk to in Chinese. Not to mention, there is also Taiwan and Hong Kong, and several countries around Asia that host significantly large racially Chinese diaspora, such as Malaysia or Singapore. I’m not talking about recent Chinese immigrants, but people who have been living there for generations and have never stepped foot in China.
Language is for communicating with people, it’s a rather narrow view to only see the business use for languages. If anyone wants to pick up a second language, Chinese is as good as it’s going to get. You aren’t limited to 1.4 billion communists to talk to with your Chinese skills, try a Taiwanese or Chinese Malaysian or smth.
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I’m clearly approaching this from the point of view of language as a means to communicate and connect with people, while you see language as something that has to bring you clear benefits. I went to the trouble of writing a whole ass paragraph about how Chinese is not a single country language and there are several countries worth of people outside the firewall using it. Of course no other language under the sun will ever compare to English in terms of practical usefulness, but it’s as good as it’s going to be for a second language, up there with French and Spanish maybe. You don’t have to assume everyone who disagrees is offended.