Individual agency and changing language education policy in China: reactions to the new ‘Guidelines on College English Teaching’

Abstract

Cooper’s (1989) LPP framework focuses on ‘who’ the policy planner is and ‘who’ implements the policy to ‘whom.’ These are particularly significant factors in a highly centralized education system such as China’s, where the effect of different individuals as actors in LPP remains largely unexplored. This article examines the controversy around the predominant status of College English and the resulting adjustments that have been made in a new English education policy – Guidelines on College English Teaching (GCET) – in 2017, and categorizes the relevant stakeholders into five groups from macro to micro levels and examines their agency roles through investigating their attitudes, interpretations and reactions towards the change in the status of College English in the GCET. The results show that multiple layers of individuals have been endowed with disproportionate powers in status planning. Compared with English teachers and people with expertise, people with influence in society and university administrators constitute the more powerful forces in effecting language policy making.