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INTRODUCTION
For at least the past 20 years, Chinese employers have utilized the national English examination, CET 6, as the benchmark for employment of Chinese university graduates with English L2 capabilities. Recently, some Chinese educators have begun to question the validity of CET 6 as an appropriate benchmark because it measures knowledge learned about English but does not adequately measure comprehensible output.
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 1,000,000 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 miserably failed 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 in part due to demands of Chinese employers who are misinformed that passing CET 6 is the evidence of an accomplished English speaker
. . 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,"[ii]
The market need to have graduates who can produce comprehensible English output 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 able to produce comprehensible oral and written English. Imagine more than 5 million Chinese university graduates, who have learned English for 16 years, being passed over for Chinese jobs in China . This is simply unacceptable! English is one of “the 10 most popular disciplines that saw low rates of employment last year.” [iii]
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 English communication to a standard or formal form of English.
In August 2008, China Petroleum Guangzhou Training Center, (TC) the educational arm of PetroChina,[iv] implemented the Holistic English Program[v] in an attempt to rectify the recognized deficiencies of the CET 6 certification. Holistic English is to English language learning what Chinese traditional medicine is to health care. 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’ (Corbett 2003:2)[vi] 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.”[vii]
All of the trainees of the center had passed the national CET 6 but were unable to produce adequate comprehensible English output, to meet the needs of their overseas assignments. This paper presents the data collected and the conclusions drawn regarding the efficacy of the Holistic English Program in assisting the TC trainees with English acquisition sufficient to prepare them for their work assignments abroad where English L2 will be the primary mode of communication with other L2 speakers of English.
The guy has a lot of good points. Raoul and I used to teach with him about 5 years ago. He is a dead set full on individual.
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