This study investigates washback effects of IELTS test on university teachers' adoption of teaching materials in the classroom in China and see how a high-stake language exam affects their teaching practices and how they and their students perceive the effectiveness of the pedagogic adjustments. To this end, individual interview to five teacher…

Purpose: This study analyzes the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, revealing that the test itself reflects China's educational problems as well as the resultant effect of digital governance. Examining the root cause of these problems, this study demonstrates that the education reforms implemented in response to the PISA…

Access to higher education is essential to the achievement of social justice and economic development of a society. This study examines differences in the status quo of the equity of college admission examinations between China and the US by comparing news reports in the two countries. Interesting differences were revealed between the two media.…

The Chinese government has implemented a series of special admission policies in recent years to increase access to elite universities for disadvantaged students from rural areas and less developed inland regions. Using administrative data of 1996-2015 freshman cohorts and survey data of a 2014 freshman cohort at X University in the eastern China,…

In 1977, the Chinese government reinstated the national unified college entrance exam enrollment system. As a part of this system, the government also implemented preferential policies on the enrollment of minorities that authorized the increase or decrease of exam scores and enrollment cutoff points; the policies were therefore seen as…

Analysis of in-depth, qualitative interviews with students, faculty, and administrators shows that Chinese minorities face substantial obstacles in higher education access. The article identifies several factors that limit ethnic minority student access--including background education, limited government funding, and low entrance examination…

This study explores middle-level administrators' perceptions of the implementation of English as a foreign language curriculum policies in the Chinese tertiary context. Drawing on data collected from interviews with the department heads of six universities in a north-western city in China, the article examines their perspectives on the national…

Health and education are two important issues in developing economies. Field and natural experiments provided me with great opportunities for identifying the effects of health insurance and incentive on doctors' prescribing behaviors and the peer influences among students. The first chapter examines whether doctors write more expensive…

This paper starts with an overview of the sociolinguistic context and a series of policy documents concerning English language education promulgated recently in China. It moves on to an analysis of disparities in English language education policies practised in different regions, differences between urban and rural areas, between social classes…

To know the age effects in foreign language learning for children in China, we made both qualitative survey on the English teachers, the students and their parents by means of questionnaire; and quantitative survey on the students' scores from junior 1 to senior 2 (5 years) in the secondary school by analyses between those (over 30 students) who…

The College English Test (CET), designed in accordance with the requirements of the National College English Teaching Syllabus and as a result of the need for China's reform and its open-door policy in the 1980s, is the world's largest language test administered nationwide. Owing to its scientific approach, consistent marking, rigorous…