The Foreign Language Education In China:An Empirical Study Based On The Rate Of Return To Language Skills

This dissertation is an empirical study on the rate of return to foreign language skills on China labor market, as well as factors that affect the acquirement and improvement of foreign language ability by exploiting OLS, Logit model, ordered Logit model, quantile regression and Propensity Scores Matching (PSM) with the micro data from China General Social Survey (CGSS2006,2008). Through this study, we try to answer a question that is to what extent is it worth having foreign language education in China, and based on which, to study the directions in which the foreign language education in China can take reforms. This is also a research topic that has been closely related to the Economics of Education and the Language of Economics.Education is a topic that has been concerned by many disciplines such as Pedagogy, Sociology and Economics. In China, the study of foreign language education has been affiliated with the Applied Linguistics and its researches are more centralized among the foreign language scholars. The involved researchers and invested scientific information are still very limited. Related researches are neither deep nor substantial enough. On the contrary, there have been scholars from multiple disciplines using a variety of methods from different angles to study foreign language education abroad. The Language of Economics is one of the accomplished researches of this kind. The Language of Economics originated at the end of1960s, though with a relatively short history, in the process of economic globalization, languages, especially foreign languages, are becoming more and more influential in the production of human social life. Thus, significance of the Language of Economics has been exalted. In turn, the economic researches on foreign language education started to gain more concern, among which, there appears to be more literature on the relationship between the language skills of those immigrants and their individual income (the returning rate of language ability). However, so far, there have been very few scholars in China who have tried to apply the economic approaches to the researches on foreign language education.1his dissertation attempts to make a breakthrough in this field.Specifically, we want to know, how well has the overall operation of the foreign language education in China been going on since the opening-up? What are the economic effects brought by the investment that the state has put into the foreign language education? In other words, is the citizens’ foreign language ability helpful to the increase of their income? If yes. how much is the increase and who will be benefited? Among such foreign language skills as reading, writing and speaking, which one plays the biggest role in the increase of the economic output in the labor market? Based on the investigations and answers to the questions above, we are able to make policy recommendations on the development of foreign language education.The contribution of this dissertation lies in the following aspects. Theoretically, it enriches and extends the studies of the foreign language education in China. Through quantifying the economic returns brought by foreign language ability, this research makes a great contribution to the evaluation studies of foreign language education in China. In practice, this dissertation provides a theoretical basis and a new way of thinking for the modifications and reforms of foreign language education in our country. In the meanwhile, the cross-disciplinary research approaches, taking the Language of Economics as the example, will contribute a great deal to the interaction between the language academic and economic circles in our country. The perspectives from the Language of Economics taken in this research, as well as methods such as econometrics and statistics, assist more power on the foreign language education researches. The results of this research also provide empirical support to the related studies of the economic analysis on language policy in China.The structure of this research is organized as follows. After a brief introduction, comes the second chapter, which centers on the survey of economic researches on the foreign language education and the returning rate of foreign language skills. The third chapter reviews the development of the foreign language education in China over the past30years, and describes its current status. Chapter Four studies the effects that foreign language skills have on the individual income in Chinese labor market. Then the fifth chapter has worked out the returning rate of each single English skill among three skills, which are speaking ability, reading ability and writing ability, and made comparisons. Chapter Six investigates empirieally the elements that have affected the increase of foreign language ability among the Chinese. Chapter Seven discusses the direction that the reforms on foreign language education in China can take and gives recommendations based on the research results. The last chapter. Chapter Eight, draws the conclusion.