The Challenges and Prospects of English in China Under the Belt and Road Initiative

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.211025.023How to use a DOI?

Keywords

English, The Belt & Road Initiative, Challenges, Prospects, Language policy

Abstract

Over four decades English has been empowered as the dominant foreign language in China since the Reform and opening-up in 1978. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) launched in 2013 has had profound linguistic transformations on China’s foreign language policy and has brought observable challenges as well as considerable prospects on English. The paper is intended to justify and evidence the major challenges of English under BRI from the three aspects: (1) China’s substantial demand of foreign language resources bringing about an urgent need for enhancing national language capacity; (2) the increasing languages of the countries along the Belt and Road (BR countries) offered in China’s universities; (3) English-dominated translation service going together with the escalating BR languages. Besides, the paper underpins the two major future prospects of English, namely, the ongoing trend of improving English proficiency of the Chinese nationals and a heavy demand of competent international talents leading to the imperative reform on English education. It is hoped that the paper is helpful to understand the current status of English and foreign language policy in China.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jinjun Wang
AU  - Jinyi Huang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/10/26
TI  - The Challenges and Prospects of English in China Under the Belt and Road Initiative
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Language, Communication and Culture Studies (ICLCCS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 134
EP  - 140
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.211025.023
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.211025.023
ID  - Wang2021
ER  -