Potential Cultural Resistance to Pedagogical Imports: The Case of Communicative Language Teaching in China

Since the late 1980s there has been a top-down movement to reform English language teaching (ELT) in the People's Republic of China (PRC). An important component of this reform has been an effort to import communicative language teaching (CLT) in the Chinese context. CLT, however, has failed to make the expected impact on ELT in the PRC. This paper examines one of the most important potential constraints on the adoption of CLT in the Chinese classroom, namely, the Chinese culture of learning. It argues that CLT and the Chinese culture of learning are in conflict in several important respects, including philosophical assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning, perceptions of the respective roles and…

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  Fok Ying Tong Education Foundation