With universities looking to cross-border higher education (CBHE) in China to boost enrollment, it remains vital that we who work in China for foreign educational entities reflect on what we wish to offer students and what we actually achieve. CBHE in China has already received its fair share of criticism. According to Zhou (2009), issues worth attention include (1) money-driven “low-level local” foreign universities teaming up with little-known Chinese schools and, in that way, giving Chinese students low-quality education (p. 98); (2) partners breaking Chinese laws by running programs and issuing diplomas without going through proper legal channels first; (3) educators and administrators failing to negotiate “a well-functioning internal governance system” to remedy different cultural ideas about how to teach and who is responsible for what areas of administration (p. 99); and (4) foreign partners beginning programs in China for quick capital, without really laying the groundwork for long-lasting benefits for the students or region. At its worst, CBHE that fails to meet quality standards in the foreign partner’s own home country, but that somehow manages to reach classrooms abroad, risks reflecting and sustaining international inequalities in wealth and access to knowledge (Martin & Peim, 2011). Clearly, this topic warrants continued discussion.

The purpose here is not to censure any particular educational institution; without doubt, my U.S. and Chinese employers have made and continue to make efforts to improve the quality of our East-plus-West education, even funding my action-research efforts and purchasing costly CALL materials for learners in an ongoing study. They fly all of us to the U.S. campus each summer for training, which has included workshops with a linguist from the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) and other experts in educational fields.

Instead, I aim here to draw on my personal experience as senior faculty member in a CBHE program between a state comprehensive university (SCU) in the United States and a private third-tier international university in mainland China in order to raise awareness of two salient challenges: (1) dissonance between administrative goals formulated in the United States and the actual practices carried out in Chinese classrooms; and (2) misunderstandings of second language acquisition (SLA) and the resulting repercussions. Learners abroad deserve sustained attention from the TESOL community.

Program Goals vs On-the-Ground Practice

In terms of program goals, the U.S. university for which I work aims to offer U.S. bachelor degrees to learners in China who may not have the means or inclinations to study abroad. Learners wishing to study at the U.S. campus have out-of-state tuition fees waived. The partnership requires approval from a U.S. state board of regents and the Chinese Ministry of Education. As a result, in this case, the conferring of U.S. degrees necessitates that U.S. faculty use the same syllabi and textbooks used in the United States. In addition, the U.S. partner controls the hiring and renewing of contracts of full-time faculty members who teach core courses in China. Overall, then, program goals mirror those stated in the same courses delivered on the U.S. campus. This contributes to a sense of face validity for the U.S. degrees earned in China. Nonetheless, some incongruities exist between stated goals and actual practices abroad.

Unfortunately, the SCU for which I work allows teaching models in China not used back home. The most obvious deviation concerns classroom size and emphasis on lecturing. The integrated-skills English Composition classes I teach represent the exceptions. My classes allow no more than 25 learners to enroll. (In contrast, the same classes taught for Chinese-degree-seeking students may contain 50 to 60.) Though perhaps still too large for an EFL writing context, this relatively small class size allows me to hold each learner accountable for his or her performance and to offer frequent formative and summative feedback. After my sophomore-level classes, however, learners in their junior and senior years find themselves in English-taught lecture-style content courses with as many as 100 other learners.

Cummins (2000) has warned that, without active and authentic exchanges with comprehensible input between students and authentic audiences in both written and spoken forms, “students’ grasp of academic (and conversational) English is likely to remain shallow and passive” (p. 544). This describes what happens in the program for which I work. Gains we English composition instructors make in our integrated-skills writing classes seem undermined when learners are allowed in their next two and final academic years to become passive learners of English, placed in lecture halls where foreign language learning fossilizes.

Lecture classes allow administration to hire fewer instructors. Should we conclude, then, that in the end we resemble just another money-focused foreign school, one that ends up giving Chinese learners second-rate education and, instead of empowering them, actually keeps them disadvantaged on a global level?

Misunderstandings of SLA

Lecture classes in which Chinese EFL learners are expected to acquire low-frequency vocabulary and challenging course concepts imply perhaps the more important, subsuming concern educators in CBHE should continue to discuss. Li (2014) recently found important differences between Chinese ESL and Chinese EFL learners’ motivation: Large lecture-style English classrooms in China, Li found, might have resulted in Chinese EFL participants forming less favorable attitudes toward learning English and in spending less time trying to learn. This is vital because, according to Li (2014), both Chinese ESL and EFL learners’ intrinsic motivation most reliably predicted how much effort learners put forth in studying English, which also had a bearing on English proficiency measures.

If a prevalence of lecture-style classes in China (where that same class, taught in the United States, might be capped at 20) represents one repercussion of misunderstanding SLA, another involves English-teacher denial. That is, some content-course professors teaching in China, most without TESOL training, eschew the term English teacher or deny responsibility of reinforcing or motivating English learning. Ads on job-post sites for visiting professor positions through the School of Business, for instance, focus on the teaching of content in the CBHE program and on the access to valued research sites in China to aid professors’ original research. Although a linguist from CAL led workshops at the U.S. campus last summer to inform all teaching faculty how to make even lecture-style classes conducive with language learning, administration did not hold professors accountable for actually using best practices in Chinese classrooms. Content-course faculty dismissed suggestions for incorporating informed instruction as arduous and timewasting.

As Cummins (2000) has pointed out, the acquisition of language enables the expansion of thought. Language acquisition involves social situations where the language is used meaningfully and where students can show their intelligence and identity through negotiation of meaning with authentic audiences. CBHE in China needs faculty who accept that teaching target concepts abroad equals teaching language, and that some classroom activities, especially ones that allow negotiation of meaning and two-way exchange, may best aid language development (Cummins, 2000).

Conclusion

Inadequate classroom setups, misunderstandings of what we do, and dismissive attitudes abroad seem most dissonant when reflecting on an SCU’s student-centered and context-shaped mission statement. Professors who assume Chinese students alone must conform to an abstract sense of an American style of teaching hold an attitude that seems irresponsible in any educational setting, and one that may diminish the quality of CBHE. Worse, they might reflect shades of colonialist attitudes and perpetuate geopolitical and economic inequalities among the individuals we are supposed to be crossing borders to learn from and to empower (Martin & Peim, 2011). Relevant language theory (as well as ethical, emotional, and logical appeals) urges those of us involved in CBHE to be wary of classroom models that make money at the cost of limiting students’ chances of authentic two-way communication with teachers and other students, in that way diminishing interest in learning English (Li, 2014). More discussion and critical-constructive teacher reflections like this one need to continue and to be encouraged.

References

Cummins, J. (2000). Academic language learning, transformative pedagogy, and information technology: Towards a critical balance. TESOL Quarterly, 34, 537–548. doi: 10.2307/3587742

Li, Q. (2014). Differences in the motivation of Chinese learners of English in a foreign and second language context. System, 42, 451–461. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2014.01.011

Martin, G., & Peim, N. (2011). Cross-border higher education, who profits? Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, 9(1), 126–148. Retrieved from http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-1-06.pdf

Zhou, C. C. (2009). Analysis of three frameworks for quality assurance in Sino-foreign cooperation for running