Introduction
The National Research Centre for Foreign Language Education (NRCFLE) attached to Beijing Foreign Studies University (www.sinotefl.ac.cn/) is a key research institute in the humanities and social sciences in universities approved by the Ministry of Education (MOE) of the People's Republic of China. It was formally set up and approved in September 2000. After a decade of dedicated hard work, the centre has become an applied linguistics hub of research and training unrivalled in China, and co-hosted AILA2011, the 16th World Congress in Applied Linguistics in August 2011. The current director of the centre, WEN Qiufang, currently presides over the China English Language Education Association, another co-host of AILA2011. The centre publishes two journals, one of them, Foreign Language Teaching and Research, being pre-eminent in the field in every key journal index in China, as well as being the only journal in applied linguistics and foreign language education to feature in the MOE's 2010 Distinguished Journals in Humanities and Social Sciences.
Within the last five years, NRCFLE has been involved in 50 research projects sponsored at national, provincial/municipal, and university levels, and has published 453 articles. The centre has also hosted an array of international and national conferences, on topics ranging from CALL, Corpus, SLA and testing, to teacher education and language policy. As well as carrying out research, NRCFLE is a training centre for young scholars and researchers. Sixty-five doctoral candidates and 123 MA students have either graduated or are studying at the centre. Every year, NRCFLE staff members are involved in a number of summer-school type intensive training workshops for hundreds of young university lecturers from various regions of China on a host of topics ranging from learner strategies, research methods and corpus studies, to academic writing. The centre also welcomes more than 20 visiting scholars every year from both China and abroad.
1. Towards a coherent research strategy at the NRCFLE
Since its establishment in 2000, NRCFLE has gone through three stages of development in terms of finding and formalising its own research strategy: an exploratory stage, a formalised stage and a strategic stage.
As in many real or virtual research centres around the world, the first five years or so are best characterised as an exploratory stage, during which researchers worked on their own and brought their own funded projects into the centre. Major research projects completed during this stage included:
• Reform of foreign language teaching in Chinese universities
• Bilingual parallel corpora, their construction and applications
• University EFL teacher education and development
• New models and schemes for assessing university students’ English proficiency
• Application of Internet technology in English education
• Compiling an English learner's dictionary based on English–Chinese parallel corpora
• Models of development for teachers of English in Chinese universities
• Syntactic development of Chinese learners of English
• Development of Chinese university students’ English oral ability
• Modern Russian word-formation
• Translation teaching and studies based on large-scale bilingual parallel corpora.
These projects, while important on their own, were not coordinated efforts: the work of the team depended on who brought what projects into the centre. The centre was also in the process of exploring what expertise it could offer as a national research centre.
After 2006, individual research interests and strengths were rationalised into two groups: basic research and applied research, which in turn were later crystallised into the following five target areas, with a clear focus on applied research: (1) foreign language education policy; (2) curriculum and teaching resources; (3) teacher and teaching; (4) learner and learning; and (5) testing and assessment.
Major projects at this stage included:
• Foreign language teaching with Chinese characteristics: An empirical study of models for the training of foreign language talents over the last 60 years
• Foreign language education and socioeconomic development: A multinational comparative study of foreign language education policies
• Routes and methods for quality-education in EFL teaching in Chinese schools
• Critical thinking among university students majoring in foreign languages
• Teacher development models for EFL teachers at primary and secondary levels
• A teaching grammar of English
• EFL proficiency standards for Chinese students
• Automated rating system for subjective task-types in large-scale EFL examinations
• The construction and analysis of a Chinese EFL Treebank.
Some of these projects are on-going, and a few will be described in detail in the next section.
The third stage is still in its transition phase, and is becoming explicitly strategic, moving from ‘what we do best’ to ‘what we need to do’. As one of the two government-sponsored national research centres in foreign language education and applied linguistics, NRCFLE is beginning to reposition itself as a think tank, talent bank and information bank, prioritising national strategic interests, and targeting research that matters in both foreign language policy-making and in classroom teaching. In the process, three major research orientations have been outlined: (1) language policy and language planning in China and abroad; (2) reforming the foreign language education system; and (3) language resources and information application.
The three stages of development correspond to China's tenth, eleventh, and twelfth ‘five-year plan’ periodsFootnote 1, which provide opportunities for NRCFLE to step back from its individual projects and strategically reposition itself in the country's overall economic and social development as a ‘national research centre’. The patterns also parallel those of China's overall growth during this period of time, from isolated and free development to integrated, coordinated and sustained development.
2. Major research areas and projects
2.1 Language policy and language planning in China and abroad
One major project that has just started is ‘the linguistic yellow-book’ or ‘linguistics abroad year-book’, an annual monograph. It is intended to summarise most recent linguistic developments around the world, and to provide an expert and timely account of targeted linguistic developments for the purpose of informing policy-making in China.
Parallel to the yellow book project is a series of national language policy monographs that document language policies country by country. This series will be coordinated by the NRCFLE and will take advantage of the expertise of various departments at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. It is hoped that this and the yellow book will help put China's own language policies into perspective so that policy-makers will be able to make informed decisions.
In addition to the messenger role that introduces the world to China in terms of language development, the NRCFLE will also take on a more proactive role in China's linguistic scene and embark on a national language development strategy project. It is currently coordinating a trans-disciplinary and trans-institutional cooperation project and bidding for a Ministry of Education Major R&D Program in Humanities and Social Sciences. This project aims for a complete strategic review of language policies in the Chinese language, Chinese dialects, national minority languages, language issues in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and Chinese as a foreign language, as well as foreign languages in China.
The NRCFLE is aware of what it does best, and is actively involved in rethinking the country's national foreign language strategy. In addition to the ‘foreign language education and socioeconomic development’ project, which is reaching its final stage, in June 2010 the centre started a monthly newsletter, the Global Language Strategy Monitor, which is circulated among language-related government policy-making bodies, and in November 2010 hosted a national conference, ‘Policy and Planning in Foreign Language Education’.
2.2 Reforming the foreign language education system
As one of the top foreign language research centres in the country, the NRCFLE is striving to make research more useful, not just for policy-making at the very top, but also for curriculum design, and even for teaching practice within the foreign language classroom.
The key link between macro and conceptual innovations and classroom reality is the teacher. Whether there are enough teachers, whether these teachers are ready for the innovations proposed, and how innovations can be put into practice are issues of primary concern. Teacher education has therefore remained one of the key areas of research since the beginning of the NRCFLE. Three major types of teacher education research have been carried out at the centre. The bulk of this effort has been exploratory and descriptive, focusing on fact-finding projects aimed at outlining targets for teacher education, charting the current state of teacher knowledge and teacher expertise, and determining what to do next (e.g. Liu & Dai Reference Liu and Dai2004; Wu Reference Wu2007). The second type of research on teacher education explores models of classroom-based, interventionist participatory action research. NRCFLE staff and Ph.D. students have formed close ties with classroom teachers at both secondary and tertiary levels, and are regularly visiting classes and conferencing with teacher groups before and after classes. Despite their different themes, these on-going projects all stress the practical usefulness of this research, and emphasise their desired outcome: that of turning in-service teachers into reflective agents for change and autonomous teaching researchers. The third type of teacher-development research represents a unique Chinese model, in which large numbers of teachers go through short and intensive training workshops on various negotiated topics. These workshops started as teacher training camps during the summer holiday period, and have developed into regular training sessions, with longer sessions (three days) for holidays and shorter sessions (two days) for weekends, and an audience of 100–350 classroom teachers for each workshop. An intensive, large-scale, high-calibre and very popular model has been explored as a basis for the development of half a million in-service English-language teachers (e.g., Zhang, Wu, Cao & Wang Reference Zhang, Wu, Cao, Wang and Wu2007). More research efforts are now going into the fuller development and propagation of such a model.
In addition to teacher education, other major projects in this category are worth mentioning. Under the ‘teacher/teaching’ heading, the ‘English education with Chinese characteristics’ project tries to map out the ‘Chineseness’ of EFL teaching in China along vertical (historical) and horizontal (international) dimensions. A case study of Beijing Foreign Studies University has produced some very revealing findings. Under the ‘learner/learning’ heading, learning targets and learner language have also received research attention at the NRCFLE. The ‘Competency Standards for Chinese EFL Learners’ project aims to pin down, in theoretical terms, ideal learning targets for Chinese students. Based on the Common European Framework of Reference, Bachman and Palmer's latest conception of language competence (in press), and an analysis of the Chinese learning context, this framework proposes a cognition-oriented approach that views language as a conduit of ideas. The framework has so far produced a theme-based ‘pool of descriptors’ that includes both receptive and productive competences. Such a conceptual framework should have strong curriculum and assessment implications. In addition, research that focuses on micro acquisition issues is also actively conducted at the centre, including the ‘Chinese EFL learners’ interlanguage’ project and the ‘acquisition of English syntax by Chinese learners’ project.
2.3 Language resources and information application
The NRCFLE boasts a strong team of corpus linguists. Three major project groups will be of interest to applied linguist colleagues outside China. The first of these began with the compilation of a 10-million-word parallel corpus of Chinese and English. Follow-up projects include the compilation of a learner dictionary based on the parallel corpus and a standard Chinese–English dictionary for a machine translation system of organisational codes. The second group of projects is related to the compilation of learner corpora of Chinese EFL students, consisting of both spoken and written samples of English majors. On-going or recently completed projects based on these corpora include ‘a corpus-based study of Chinese EFL speech patterns’ and ‘the developmental patterns of Chinese EFL learners’ oral English’. The third group of projects is related to the second, but these are not exclusively dependent on learner corpora. They include the ‘large-scale automated rating system of English compositions’ and the ‘large-scale automated rating system of translated texts’.
3. Summary
A decade after its formal establishment, research at the NRCFLE has gone from random, through formal and, finally, to strategic. Researchers at the centre are increasingly aware of their social and educational responsibilities and keen on making their applied linguistics research useful at policy-making and classroom levels.
