The RCEF Blog 博客

Hu Laoshi, a rural middle school English teacher of over six years, is at Guan Ai School this week. (Guan Ai is one of RCEF’s long term sites). He is a great, lively English teacher and has won awards for his teaching. I asked him why he thinks it’s important for rural Chinese kids to learn English when there seems to be so little practical use for it in their lives. His answers adds new information to the question of whether and how much to focus on English teaching in our rural education work:

1. Globalization and Economic Advantage: English is spoken in most countries of the world and people from different countries are intermingling more, whether in-person or online. While most rural kids today still haven’t met a native English speaker, that is likely to change in the next decade as more and more foreigners come to China. English will become an increasingly essential communication tool even for those sections of the Chinese population that have little immediate use for it now. Then as now, those who can speak English may have more economic advantages than those who cannot, not just in jobs serving foreigners, but in initiating business deals or presenting one’s ideas to a wider audience and thereby gaining access to more opportunities.

2. Practical Use: Hu Laoshi gave some examples of how English can come in handy for rural people in daily life. Many rural adults today have cell phones. Sometimes they accidentally set the language function on the phone to English and then have to ask Hu Laoshi to set it back to Chinese. Other times, his neighbors are unsure about what kind of medicine to use and find the packaging has some English letters on it. They come to him to ask for explanations.

3. Self-protection: He described a scam going around in his rural hometown in the mountains of Shaanxi. A con artist will pose as a migrant worker recently returned from overseas. He will ask people to help him out by changing his foreign money for RMB, telling them that it is US Dollars. Unable to read the words on the currency, some people (including acquaintances of Hu Laoshi) have fallen for the trick and bought “US Dollars” that were actually Peruvian or Thai currency worth very little.

4. Rigorous thinking and reflection: Learning a new language and reflecting back on one’s mistakes in speaking is very challenging but exercises the mind’s attention to detail and gives it reason to reflect on one’s words.

5. Richer understanding of the world: Even if students remember almost none of the English words they learn in school, if raising awareness about other cultures is part of the curriculum, then at the very least, they will have a broadened perspective on the world, different kinds of people in it, and some factors that influence their thinking and behavior.

What do you think? Is receiving quality English instruction a life need of rural students?