Assembly promotes China’s education experiences abroad

By helping young Chinese English educators publish their research in international English journals, the Global English Education China Assembly has provided insight into China's wisdom and experiences in global English education.

The assembly, which just completed its fifth gathering, has worked with several global English journals to publish special issues for young Chinese scholars who attend to promote the latest research developments and contemporary Chinese values.

The assembly also invites experts to review and edit the papers to make sure they are up to standards.

Wu Huizhen, associate professor in business English at Shanghai Business School, said she submitted to the assembly an empirical classroom-based research article about technology-enhanced language learning in 2020, which was published by the International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching in June.

The guest editors of the journal provided lots of constructive feedback to help hone and improve her work, and the experience helped her better understand what a good, rigorous research paper should be and thus motivated her to pursue high-quality research in the future, she said.

Zhang Ying, an English language scholar who has attended the assembly three times, said her passion for researching learning a second language has grown after listening to talks from world-renowned scholars from home and abroad at the assembly.

Her study on technology-assisted English learning and teaching was accepted and published in the Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics this year.

"The assembly has established a valuable platform for young scholars to learn from each other and share studies with other scholars from home and abroad via academic presentations at the assembly and publishing opportunities in highly influential journals," she said.

Li Heng, a professor of linguistics at Southwest University, said the assembly has offered young English language scholars important opportunities to find peers with mutual research interests and to share inspiration.

Li, 36, who has published more than 100 papers in first-rate journals domestically and abroad, said young scholars need to read extensively to know what kind of papers are of high quality.

"More importantly, doing research can be lonely, so we need to have genuine passion and base our research on our lives."

Wu Peng, a professor at the school of foreign languages at Jiangsu University, said publishing research in international journals is a good way to tell the Chinese academic story to a global audience.

English proficiency remains one of the biggest hurdles for Chinese scholars in publishing their work in English language journals, and they should avoid incorrect grammar, misspellings and "Chinglish" expressions — poor translations of Chinese into English.

They need also to write in ways that are easily understood by global readers, and analytical and logical thinking is crucially important, he said.