[lg policy] ENGLISH CRAZE HIGHLIGHTS CHINESE AMBITIONS

[Harold Schiffman]

ENGLISH CRAZE HIGHLIGHTS CHINESE AMBITIONS

China is full of booming consumer markets, from car sales growing at
50 per cent a year to top-end apartments that developers sell within
days of putting them on the market.  But one of the most interesting
is urban China's craze for the English language, says the Financial
Times. According to industry analysts, there are as many as 30,000
organizations or companies that offer English lessons outside school
in China and the market has nearly doubled in the last five years to
around $3.5 billion.  The proliferation of language schools says a lot
about the ambitions of modern China, says the Times:

For many individual Chinese, mastering English is a central part of
their seemingly boundless aspirations, a tool to engage with the rest
of the world in a way that their parents could never imagine and a
path to a more interesting and lucrative career. China's government,
meanwhile, has made teaching English in primary schools one of its
priorities - a reflection of its desire for China to play a much
bigger role in the global economy.

According to the British Council:

The primary school emphasis on English means that there are 20 million
new English speakers in the country each year. More remarkably still,
it estimated in a recent report that China may already have more
English speakers than India.
Source: Geoff Dyer, "English craze highlights Chinese ambitions,"
Financial Times, January 20, 2010.



http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/96eb7c64-0516-11df-aa2c-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=a6dfcf08-9c79-11da-8762-0000779e2340.html

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