Page 146 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

WOMEN AND TECHNOLOGY IN TEACHING 133
The technologies of teaching are most apparent in language learning. The curriculum
reform requires language tuition to start younger than in previous years. In major cities
(Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou), students start at Grade One. More usually, they begin in
Grade Three. To support these guidelines, new textbooks have been produced at
Tsinghua University and trial-tested across twenty-two provinces. The textbooks were
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designed by a young illustrator, and written by a professor of education. The aim of the
books is to professionalise the teaching of English through carefully graduated modules,
which will eventually stretch from Grade One up to Grade Nine. The series also makes
language learning fun and meaningful for urban and rural students, by drawing on easily
(TV) accessed contemporary youth culture to support the experience of ‘English’ in the
classroom. Therefore the design of the books is funky, animé themed and loosely aligned
to the fairy-tale world of Japanese cartoons on children’s TV and Disney stories on
commercial English learning VCD series. The textbook programme feeds into a broader
set of initiatives. Current proposals at Ministry of Education level seek to establish bases in
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institutes of higher education to train masters of foreign language education. The
training culminates in an examination process and a one-year placement.
Ministry of Education guidelines also set out the expectation that universities prepare
language laboratories and multimedia facilities able to ‘meet the needs’ of their students.
The number of classes conducted in the language lab should amount to at least 30 per cent
of language teaching overall, and it is also expected that the on-campus Intranet be fully
used to support out-of-class learning
Given that postgraduate study is still fairly limited in Chinese universities in contrast to
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the numbers entering undergraduate programmes, the specific focus on training and
technology for language serves to underline the explicit link between education policy and
modernisation, between modernisation and communication, and between communication
and citizen development. Citizenship in the Chinese context is a debated term (Keane
2001), but it does gesture towards a subjective norm in the personal quality (suzhi)
necessary for embodied modernity The modern education subject thus combines scientific
enquiry with a spirit of humanism. The educational theorist Gu Mingyuan has summed
this up explicitly—‘The essence of education is to improve the quality of the citizen’
(Gu 2001:23)—and uses the slogan to underline a core concern with education of the
whole citizen. The quality (suzhi) of the citizen encompasses skills of communication that
feed directly into China’s immediate and long-term needs in regard to trade and
commercial performance. Foreign language learning is therefore a desirable aspect of
‘quality’, and highly prioritised policy-driven pursuit in contemporary education.
However, Gu worries that these priorities can easily be misdirected into pure
functionalism, taking vocational training for some and strategic subject choices for others
to a point where the moral discipline of jiaoyu is utterly bypassed in a rush for domestic
jobs and cosmopolitan experience: ‘if you master mathematics, physics and chemistry,
you can travel the world’.
In this regulatory context, at universities, and at some middle and high schools,
traditional language laboratories are still in use. Teachers use them for listening and oral
repetition in language classes. Increasingly, however, teachers also access the computers
in language labs to prepare other teaching aids for other subjects: PowerPoint