A Study Of Foreign Language Planning In The Educational Field For The Belt And Road Initiative

Language planning,which refers to language intervention measures or language control taken to implement language practices and management within specific communities,is often viewed as part of language policy.Foreign Language Planning,whose absence will lead to the blindness of foreign language education,is also a kind of language planning.Most research on foreign language planning tend to highlight the macro perspective,discussing the development history or implementation of language planning from the perspective of the whole nation.However,studies taking the micro perspective are quite few,and foreign language planning for certain field or domain is of little concern to the Chinese scholars.The present study,taking a micro perspective of language planning,presents a tentative foreign language planning in the educational field and reports on the current foreign language planning situation in order to guide language planners to work out effective plans to improve foreign language education and cultivate more necessary language talents in response to the Belt and Road Initiative.Based on Li's(2004)theory about field language planning and Shen's(2013)analytical framework of language planning research in the field of academic exchanges,the present study tried to put forward a new analytical framework of foreign language planning in the educational field.According to the framework,the foreign language planning in the educational field may include foreign language type planning,foreign language status planning and foreign language acquisition planning.Then,in this research,24 universities and 12 high schools from six parts of China were investigated to know about the current situation of foreign language planning in the educational field.Four universities and two high schools were selected from Northeast China,Northwest China,Southwest China,Central China,Eastern China and Northern China respectively.The course information was gathered through web and telephone investigation and the interviews with three university professors and four company employees were conducted to gather constructive suggestions on the formulation of foreign language planning.Results showed that 1)the current situation of foreign language planning could be divided into three aspects.Firstly,type planning.All the investigated universities and high schools have opened compulsory English course.Other welcomed foreign languages included French,Japanese,Russian and German;secondly,status planning.English still showed obvious advantages either in class hour or enrollment though different areas had different language preferences;thirdly,acquisition planning.There were few studies about the setting of non-English foreign language courses and lesser-known foreign language courses were faced with the lack of curriculum resources and teacher resources;2)the existing problems of foreign language planning also could be reflected in three aspects.Firstly,the type planning was unbalanced in that foreign language courses throughout the country mainly focused on common languages such as English,Japanese,Russian and French,while lesser-known languages were distributed in foreign-language institutions or specific regions;secondly,the foreign language status planning was unreasonable because there seemed to be no standards in the comparison of the importance of different foreign languages and much empirical research was waiting to be carried out;thirdly,the acquisition planning was still immature,the lack of studies about the setting of non-English foreign language courses led to the scarce of scientific theoretical guidance;3)the experts' views fell into three parts.Firstly,in terms of type planning,it is necessary to open elective courses of foreign languages besides English though English still should be the dominant language in high schools;secondly,as for status planning,almost all experts listed several key languages according to politics,geography,frequency of use and so on;thirdly,when it came to acquisition planning,it was agreed that the courses for foreign language majors should cover knowledge of other areas like economy,law,trade and so on.The combination of Chinese and foreign teachers was supported by almost all experts.It was hoped that this study might provide some implications for future foreign language planners.Implications may be given to later researchers to conduct more detailed studies on foreign language planning in the educational field.