English Language Education Planning In China A Language Attitude Pespective

Language policy and planning is an important sub-field within sociolinguistics. Language policy is a governmental behavior, reflecting a country or a social community’s essential attitude to language problems, while language planning is an attempt to interfere deliberately with the function, structure, or acquisition of language and language varieties, which countries all over the world attach great importance to. Although language planning in China has achieved great successes in both status planning and corpus planning by making a clearly delineated policy on the dominant Mandarin and minority languages, a serious deficiency exists in terms of systematic and coherent foreign language education planning.The present study attempts to make a bottom-up analysis of Chinese school students’ language attitudes towards English, namely, the English language per se, English teaching and learning at school, as well as the national English education policy. To be more specific, the study is aimed at answering the three research questions: 1) What attitudes do Chinese senior high school students hold towards English language, English learning, as well as English education? 2) What problems exist in English education planning at present in China? 3) What implications may the language attitudes investigated suggest for English education planning in China?To answer these questions, a questionnaire survey was designed and distributed to 120 senior high school students in Guyuan No.1 Middle School in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The results of data analysis show that 1) students have very high evaluation of the practical values and benefits that English would bring to both the country and the individual and, 2) the surveyed students are dissatisfied with the status quo of English education in China, especially in exam-oriented education, poor learning environment, utilitarianism in English learning, low communicative competence, teachers-centered classroom instruction, and unreasonable assessment, etc. Such existing deficiencies of English education reveal the necessity of scientific and systematic English language education planning in China.The research avails to enrich English education planning studies as well as to contribute to the field of research of language planning at large. The investigation of language attitude of English learners may shed some light on the relationship between language attitude and language planning, and further reveal the necessity to have a proper English education planning so as to improve English education in China.