Summary of an Article: Native Speaker Norms and China English

He, D. & Zhang, Q (2010). Native Speaker Norms and China English: From the Perspective of Learners and Teachers in China. TESOL Quarterly. 44(4)

Based on a qualitative and quantitative research, this article shows how Chinese students and teachers perceive "China English" in pedagogical context. At the beginning, it provides three models of English as an international language: na native speaker model, a nativised model, and a lingua franca model. These models being applied, they started conducting the research on the pedagogical model of English in China, with focusing on grammar and pronunciation.

The research was conducted with 820 students whose major is not English, and 210 English teachers from four universities in China. Distribution of the subjects on the factors such as gender, grade, age, and their major are considered so that the study can attain object results. Questionnaire survey, matched-guise technique (MGT), and focused interview were adopted for the research.

From the results of the three methods, it was revealed that both university students and teachers consider English as a means of communication, so they accept the China English in terms of pronunciation. Also, their perception on "China English" pronunciation was far from negative, though it was significantly lower than those on "Native-like English". At the same time, however, it turned out that they have different view on grammar, since less subjects accepted the "China English" grammatical features. This was because they assume that if they have more knowledge of grammar, they can communicate more fluently.

Reflecting all the result, the authors concluded that "teaching of college English in China should still adopt Standard Englishes as the teaching model" because of its social-cultural richness. At the same time, they showed one comment on the questionnaire: "we can also accept students' Chinese way of English speaking", since "it is really hard for them to speak English totally free from the cross-linguistic influences of the Chinese language." Lastly, they acknowledged that further research for specification of the pronunciational and grammatical features for "China English" is needed for deeper understanding of this issue.