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.
“but Chinese feels rougher” From what I’ve seen so far (correct me if I’m wrong) it’s a very intonation-dependent language, which must be hell to learn, I can hardly get the pronunciation or intonation right speaking a language other than my native one. “Also, other Chinese people can be bloody rude when I’m trying to speak Chinese” they say that French people have this attitude too, and I don’t understand the logic of it, I’m happy when someone is at least trying to speak my language.
The French attitude is generally sympathetic, so long as you’re at least trying.
I’ve often had shopkeepers etc. correct obvious mistakes, “non, c’est 'blabla bla '” “ah, blabla bla ?” “oui”.
Except in Paris. Paris, people just want an excuse to be a dick to you.
Lmao. A twitch streamer I watch took a trip to Europe a few weeks ago and Paris was the one place he hated because everyone there were assholes
Paris, the Philadelphia of France
Paris is a terrible city and I am sad it is what most people think of france
I kinda cheated, I’m slightly below conversational Cantonese … which is another dialect of Chinese. I picked up Mandarin because Cantonese is so damned hard to learn on its own rather than Mandarin’s vast learning material out there. The intonation is definitely difficult. I’m still not great at it … the key for me is not really getting bogged down with perfection so far. I just correct myself and move on. It’s easy to get paralysis due to wanting to be perfect.
A lot of Chinese people come to me to speak English and I grew up in London and lots of Eastern Europeans would struggle speaking English as well. I’m more than happy to work with them and practice. Never saw it as an issue, myself as well.
As someone who used to be so flat in their verbal communication that they were nicknamed Daria (my hero at the time so I wasn’t too upset), and worked really hard to change that so they could function in society, I am certain I would struggle hard with Chinese language if that’s the case.