China’s Education Ministry is working on a national English ability assessment scale and a national English test to establish a uniform standard of assessing Chinese people’s English skills.
The new assessment scale’s structure has been finalised and will be implemented next year, according to Lin Huiqing, a deputy minister in the Education Department. The related English test will be rolled out by 2020, according to a report in the Qianjiang Evening News on Sunday.
The new scale establishes a hierarchy of nine different levels of English users. Levels one and two correspond to primary school level. Levels three and four are equivalent to middle and high school, respectively. Levels five and six will be required for tertiary education.
College students majoring in English will need to reach level seven, while “high-end English professionals” must achieve level eight or nine.
In order to conform with international standards, the Chinese scale will correspond with established English evaluation systems abroad, according to Liu Jianda, the deputy principal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Widely accepted international English tests including IELTS, TOEFL and Cambridge English exams are expected to be integrated into the new system.
China has nearly 400 million English learners, according to Lin, from the Education Ministry, in a speech he made about plans for a national English test in April of last year.
Many of these have over 10 years experience of learning English but still fall short of meeting China’s increasing demand for English talent, she said, adding that this is partly due to absence of a structured English education system covering different stages and the lack of unified standards in assessing English ability.
It is true that most people learn better with specific targets to aim for. Exit assessment standards are one such target, and where huge numbers of people are involved institutional assessment is unavoidable. Institutional assessment is often a barrier to actual proficient language learning. One reason is that institutions involve layers of personnel, all with their own public and private ideas of what is “productive”. The hierarchy in a school or university is administrators > teachers > learners. A productive learner is one who learns, retains and is able to flexibly use a language within a viable time frame. A productive administrator is one who is able to shuffle through the maximum number of students tagged with having achieved a diploma. A diploma is a bit of magic paper which says little about the actual competency of its bearer, especially in China. In institutional hierarchies worldwide students have the least power (they come and go), so effectively their true productivity counts for least. Administrative values prevail and administrators want graduation statistics, whether or not the numbers mean anything. Just as wars have blowback, exit assessments have washback. Washback is the effect that formal assessment has on administrative, teaching and learning practices. The actual effects of washback are huge, and as things stand widely destructive of genuine language learning. The very big challenge then is to design assessment paradigms which are benign and accelerate true learning. That’s hard, beyond the conception or care of most administrations, and therefore little attempted. [This writer’s PhD was on language learning productivity. His spent 7 years in South Korea and 5 years in China. Further papers, some on this topic, can be seen at https://independent.academia.edu/ThorMay ] – Thor May