Foreign Language Policy Of Basic Education In China's New Era From The Perspective Of Multi-Streams Theory

Foreign language is a compulsory course that all the students among primary,junior and senior schools must take in China.This thesis is concerned with foreign languages planning at primary and secondary levels within China's official regulatory frameworks.The author focuses on different foreign languages provided as compulsory courses and core curriculum options in basic education of China.As a kind of social resource,foreign languages are becoming more and more widely used in social life.Informatization and intelligentization make foreign languages take on a multilingual,multimodal,and hypertextual appearance in worldwide language situation.The future-oriented education of foreign languages should cultivate the key competency of students and give play to the leading role of the main position of international understanding education,aiming to develop the national language capacity(NLC)as well as China's transformation into an internationalize society.Therefore,foreign language planning should be conducted on a scientific,modern and national track within a language-as-resource orientation during the China 's New Era.The Ministry of Education of China started to compile the national curriculum standards for six languages including English,Japanese,Russian,German,French and Spanish in the schools of secondary levels and began to implement.Students in secondary schools can choose the first foreign language freely from the languages above to study and take the examination of Gaokao or NMT(National Matriculation Test)in Chinese mainland.Since then,China's basic foreign language education has opened a new chapter of multilingual ecology.The author collected a wealth of literature data from the Qing Dynasty to the present and interviewed several experts of language planning who were the chief drafters of the national curriculum standards of foreign languages.Under the guidance of Multi-Streams Theory,this study adopts qualitative research paradigm and analyzes the policy agenda of language planning in the China 's New Era.It is found that China has established several mechanisms of High-Level People-to-People Dialogue with EU,France and Germany to further improve the two-way cooperation in education as well as in language and culture.There are three streams of driving factors to prioritized languages in basic foreign language education of China.The advantages of multilingualism highlighted by the multi-polarization in politics and globalization in economics,the further deepening of internationalization of China's basic education form the "problem stream" for foreign language planning.The "policy stream" contain the suggestions raised by the representatives of the "two sessions",experts and scholars of foreign languages,and the active practice of multilingual teaching from local schools.The construction of NLC and the trend of international understanding education under the guide of "Strengthening Morality in Education",which have contributed to promote the development of multilingualism in China's basic foreign language education.The value and functions of Germany,French and Spanish in cultural diplomacy,economic construction,knowledge dissemination,and information security,which are the fundamental considerations of language choice by China's foreign-language-policy makers.