A top university in northwest China has scrapped English tests as a prerequisite for graduation, rekindling a heated debate about the role of the world’s lingua franca in the country’s education system after years of rising nationalist sentiment under leader Xi Jinping.
In a notice Wednesday, the Xi’an Jiaotong University in the capital city of Shaanxi province said students will no longer need to pass a nationwide standardized English test – nor any other English exams – to be able to graduate with bachelor’s degrees.
The announcement caused a stir on social media, with many praising the decision and calling for more universities to do the same.
“Very good. I hope other universities will follow suit. It’s ridiculous that Chinese people’s academic degrees need to be validated by a foreign language (test),” said a comment with more than 24,000 likes on microblogging site Weibo, where a related hashtag attracted more than 350 million views Thursday.
Passing the College English Test, a national standardized exam first held in 1987, has been a graduation requirement at the majority of Chinese universities for decades – although the government has never made it an official policy.
The common practice underlined the importance Chinese universities placed on English – the world’s predominant academic and scientific language – especially when the once-insular and impoverished country was opening up and eager to catch up with the developed world after the turbulence of the Mao Zedong era.
But in recent years, some universities have downgraded the importance of English, either by replacing the national College English Test with their own exams or – as in the case of the Xi’an Jiaotong University – dropping English qualifications altogether as a graduation criteria.
I learned Zhuyin (注音) in Taiwan when I was younger, but then stopped using it when I immigrated to the US. At some point, I wanted to type Chinese on smartphones, so I started to learn Pinyin and used Pinyin for a while to type Chinese. The issue with Pinyin is that it uses the alphabets and that collides with English too much, I think as a English speaker, you naturally would try to use English’s way of pronunciation to try to sound out words in Chinese, and that creates problems for me because its a mismatch.
But recently, I started to use the Zhuyin system again, and it is just a lot more natural. Of course for me, I’ve learned it before as a kid, so it wasn’t that difficult to pick it up again. But it would be a steep learning curve for someone new to Chinese. But I still recommend it, it would be like someone needing to learn Hiragana and Katakana when learning Japanese. I’ve also learned from some of the older Chinese people from China that Zhuyin used to be taught in China as well, which was surprising to me. I guess that was the system in use before Mao decided that China needs to “westernize” and go with roman alphabets with Pinyin.