A Survey Into Sampled Students' Attitudes Towards China English At Shenzhen University

In response to the call for promoting local English varieties in English language education,China English has been promoted by World Englishes Sociolinguists as an appropriate and desirable variety alongside the current standard varieties for Chinese English learners in the context of China(Hu,2004;Jin,2005;Wen,2012a;Xu,2010).In China,English proficiency has long been promoted as indispensable for the nation's modernization and internationalization(Gao,2012).And the number of English learners and/or users in this country has well exceeded 400 million(Wei & Su,2012),thus the investigation of Chinese students‘ attitudes towards their indigenized English variety may have important implications for the localization of English education in China and similar contexts.This study investigated both English majors and non-English majors students‘ attitudes and attitudinal evaluations towards China English at Shenzhen University.In total 127 participants had taken part in this research,of them 62 were English majors and 65 were non-English majors students.Both questionnaires and interviews were adopted in the study.A quantitative questionnaire survey was conducted to look into participants‘ general acceptability of CE,and any possible difference between the two major populations(English majors and non-English majors students),while semi-structured interviews were made to induce the underlying reasons leading to participants' attitudinal responses in the questionnaire survey.The questionnaire was designed based on the one used in Wang‘s(2015)study.The questionnaire employed 18 language examples to elicit English majors and non-English majors students‘ attitudes towards CE and the examples covered four major aspects of CE features(i.e.features in phonology,lexes,syntax,and discourse pragmatics).The semi-structured interview had also been used in this study,as it was useful for capturing the complexities of participants‘ perceptions and experiences.So after the questionnaire survey,14 students had been chosen to take part in a semi-structured interview,6 of them were English majors students and the other 8 were non-English majors students.The study found that,on the whole,participants nearly had any difficulty in understanding the investigated CE features.Besides,participants were generally open to these features.The research results also showed that to some extent participants‘ acceptability of CE was related to their understandability of it.In addition,the writer found that there were mainly 6 factors that had affected participants‘ evaluations of CE: 1.Chinglish stigma,2.Difference between written and oral English,3.Standard English norms,4.Understandability,5.Social presence,and 6.Identity marker.Criteria 2,4,and 6 were closely related to participants‘ positive attitudes towards CE,while participants‘ negative evaluations of CE were mainly caused by factors 1,3,and 5.This survey also found that English majors and non-English majors students differed significantly in their evaluation of CE features in general,and that English majors participants were on the whole more tolerant of the investigated items,but non-English majors students were more willing to accept CE accents than English majors students.The research results suggested that it might not be suitable to add CE into classroom for the present time,since there were still many participants refusing to accept CE,and that the majority of sampled participants still considered the norms of Standard English as a target model.However,it might be possible to incorporate CE features,at least some most widely accepted ones,into English education someday.Besides,since many participants regarded CE as Chinglish,it may be necessary to move them out of the Chinglish stigma mindset to increase their acceptability of CE.Efforts should also be made to deal with the low social presence of CE so as to raise its acceptability.What is more,since participants held different attitudes to oral and written English,attention should also be paid to this difference.At last,considering that these two groups of participants had different considerations in evaluating CE,their different needs should also be considered when adding CE to English education.