How did China’s English Policies from the year 2000 to 2022 Contribute to Poor Listening and Speaking skills in Secondary School?

Abstract

As a worldwide language, English plays a critical role in China’s development. Its most important purpose is communication. That is to say, listening and speaking are the most intuitive reflection of a person’s foreign language ability (Alzamil, 2021). However, after investigation, I have noticed that in China, after nearly 9 years of English language study in schools that meet national standards, there is still a situation that many students are still “unable to understand English, let alone speak” the language. That is why English education in China is “time-consuming but less effective” (Yi, 2010). Therefore, this paper selects four English teaching curriculum standards issued by the Ministry of education of China in the past 22 years, to analyze the potential correlation between the weak listening and speaking of secondary school students and these curriculum standards. This paper analyzes the chose English curriculum standards by adopting the policy analysis framework: Context, Text and Consequences formulated by Taylor et al. (1997). Through analysis, the author summarizes the following problems: 1) The listening and speaking evaluation standards in the curriculum standard are inconsistent with the actual pressure of entering a good school in society; 2) Secondary school teachers have low satisfaction with the curriculum standards which led to the results of policy implementation not positive. 3) The words used in these curriculum standards are theoretical, it is a challenge for users to accurately grasp and understand.