Gender and Attitudes towards English Language Teaching in China

Many researches have studied the gender differences in language learners’ attitudes towards language learning, but very few of them paid attention to their attitudes towards language teaching. Given that students were main part of the class and all teaching activities should be students-centered, thus the present study adopted a large-scale questionnaire survey to investigate Chinese English learners’ different perceptions of English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a Ling ual Franca (ELF) and gender differences in second language learners’ attitudes towards the English language teaching methods used in China’s university. In the study, a total of 50 students who just graduated from the university were asked to complete the questionnaires and 44 were valid (21males and 23 females). The results indicated that both male and female students had a clear recognition of the difference between EFL and ELF, and there was no significant difference between male and female students’ att itudes towards the English language teaching methods used in class. All of them thought that communicative language teaching and cooperative language learning, the two second language teaching methods were more suitable to English language teaching in Chin a’s university. This paper concludes by discussing the implications of L2 learners’ attitudes for English language education and the methods and approaches of English language teaching used in class.


Introduction 1
With the development of globalization, the use of English has been further promoted to the whole world, and the term English as a lingua franca is created to describe such a phenomenon, which attracts a great number of scholars to study the challenges and changes in English language teaching brought by such a new situation. To begin with, ELF simply refers to the communication produced by people who do not share the mother tongue. However, as English becomes an international language that does not restrict to the interactions between native speakers and non-native users, it has a more complex circumstances considering that its users are from around the world with different cultures, histories, occupations and so on, and this shift of ELF reminds us of the importance of owning ELF awareness, generally referring to the consciousness of the appropriate use of English in proper circumstances. With regard to English education, ELF awareness also gives some implications on ELT, and Sifakis defines three components of ELF awareness in ELT including awareness of language and language use, awareness of instructional practice, and awareness of learning (Sifakis 2017). The analysis of the components of ELF awareness provides us with a new perspective to think about the current situation of ELT.
For a very long time, English in classroom is always taught as a foreign language that rules that every word usage and pronunciation should conform to standard norms and every learner also takes pride in using and speaking perfect English as native speakers. Nevertheless, the fact that English is used by more and more people around the world for communication, leads to an integration of the standard English and local cultures which finally forms a new variant called localized English deviating from native standards. Thus, the truly standard Anglo-Saxon English is challenged and the question about whether classroom English teaching should shift from the orientation of EFL to ELF or not is raised. In addition, one point that needs to be noticed is that such a change shall happen only when learners and instructors possess of ELF awareness (Basturkmen 2017). Just as written above, ELF awareness plays an important role in the adjustment of the means of communication and ways of English language teaching.
China, as one of the expanding circle countries, has a pretty long history of English education and in a very long time, Chinese ELT is highly dependent on standard norms that all English knowledge impartments and examinations are strictly in accordance with standard English. As for the reason behind the native-like English worship, it can be attributed to the Chinese people's desire to boost China's international status and construct a positive Chinese image with their abilities to speak perfect English (Ren, Chen, Lin 2016). Moreover, standard English indeed is a great help for those learners engaged in international interactions. However, after a crazy enthusiasm for learning English, the current situation of English learning in China has been marginalised, and with the ascension of China's international status, many students even think that there is no need to learn English. Under the new background of ELF, Chinese ELT where to go and how to go further are the new challenges we face at the present stage.

Literature Review
The studies about the ELF in ELT, in terms of the research approaches, generally can be divided into two major categories. The first category focuses on the theoretical research of ELF, and the second category pays attention to the empirical study of ELF.

The theoretical study of the ELF in ELT
ELF is not a term created out of nothing. Instead, it signifies the evolution of the intercultural communication and globalization. Thus, many researchers are devoted to finding the origins and reasons of the formation of ELF and the implications for ELT that ELF has brought to us. Through these theoretical studies, we can not only have a good knowledge of ELF, but also have a theoretical foundation for our empirical studies.
In the theoretical studies of ELF in English language teaching, there are several key points receiving attention. The first one is the process of ELF development; the second is the comparison between the EFL and ELF and the last one is how to apply ELF in ELT. First of all, the appearance of ELF is considered as a symbol of the formation of multi-variant of English that English has surpassed the traditional inner circle countries defined by Anglo-Saxon cultures (Mansouri 2018). With the spread of English used in different cultures and regions, the native speaker norms cannot serve as the only evaluation criterion to judge a person's proficiency of English usage. Moreover, as English is used worldwide, the public, including native speakers and nonnative speakers, seems to be growing increasingly tolerant of using and speaking English with local features as long as the message conveyed can be understood and the communication can go on. All these changes of English indicate a shift of English languages teaching from EFL to ELF (Sung 2016). Under the model of EFL, all English knowledge is norm-dependent and the communication objects of the learners are considered to be English native speakers, while the learners are interlanguage user that they do not have any potential to make an innovation of English usage beyond the native speaker norms. What more important lying behind the English norm-dependent teaching is the education system in China that "English plays a key role in schools as a major exam subject"(Ren, Chen, Lin 2016) which accounts for a significant amount in college entrance examination, Graduate Entrance Exam and other important examinations, and English examination is also regarded as the major way to test out students' mastery status of English. However, although a great deal of effort has been made to improve Chinese students' English proficiency, most of them just get a good knowledge of linguistics competence, but are lack of the knowledge of actual use of language in concrete situations (Gao, Xu 2015). Therefore, in consideration of the new request of ELF for the learners participating in the English interaction happening in different cultural backgrounds, the primary English teaching ideology changes from EFL to ELF that English learners must be considered as the legitimate bilinguals and the English accents as well as expressions with local features are not treated as errors any more, but the acceptable and legitimate localized variants (Bernaisch 2012). These theoretical studies although make great contribution to the research of ELF in ELT, they still remain at the theoretical level that cannot represent and illustrate adequately the stern and complex situation of the ELT reform brought on by ELF phenomenon. Thus, more empirical studies focusing on the concrete changes of ELT under the background of ELF are needed.

The empirical studies of the ELF in ELT
In recent years, the findings and productions about the impact of ELF on the ELT are very fruitful, and they are concerned about different parts in ELT. Generally, they can be divided into two categories: the first category cares about the attitudes of students and teachers towards the concrete teaching contents in ELF circumstances, such as the pronunciation correctness, lexical decision, discourse writing, communicative strategies and so on. For example, in the study of Wang, he made a comparison between the attitudes of students and teachers towards the phonology, lexis, syntax and discourse pragmatics by inquiring about their acceptability of the language examples covering the four major features. Although this study can make some simple promotion of some linguistic features in pedagogy and raise learners and teachers' awareness of the actual use of English (Wang 2015), it is still not powerful enough to help us recognize the real challenges of ELF in China we are facing and explain the problems existing in English teaching Methods. If the radical problems are not solved, it will be hard to make progress in ELT to keep pace with the changeable language environment.
The second category emphasizes the students and teachers' attitudes toward the overall ELF awareness and English variety, like China English. For instance, Jim Yee Him Chan once studied the gender differences in second language (L2) learners' attitudes towards different English varieties in secondary schools. In his study, he took many factors affecting students' attitudes to language into consideration including their affective feelings, cultural identity, awareness of language variations, experience of language use, situational language choices and these factors make this study different from Weihong Wang's study which just concerning about the Teaching contents happening in the classroom (Chan 2018). Although this kind of studies have the effect of improving our ELF awareness and help us learn more about the local context, the effect will be limited if we cannot blend it to the process of ELF. Thus, to improve ELT is always the final footing of our researches.
To sum up, through the analysis of the theoretical studies in recent years, we know that EFL and ELF are two different terms produced under the different language circumstances, but how students perceive the difference between the two situations is worthy of our empirical study because the shift of recognition of the English language determines whether our students are capable of dealing with the new challenges of ELT reform. Moreover, in light of these previous empirical studies, it is not difficult to find that in China, students' attitudes toward English learning and varieties have been studied and the findings prove that under the background of ELF, their attitudes have slightly changed (Galloway 2013). But most of the studies are general studies focusing on students' attitudes towards language learning and few studies pay attention to the students' attitudes towards ELT (McKenzie 2017). Given that all English teaching activities are students-oriented, students' feelings and thoughts about ELT deserve researchers' attention and their points can give implications for English education. In the present study, different gender learners' perception of the ELT will be studied. Finally, as stated by Sifakis, who is in favor of English norm-independent teaching, "it became clear that ELF raises implications for the English language teaching (ELT) classroom, in the sense that learners can benefit from developing into confident and efficient non-native users of English." (Sifakis 2017), so the present study will answer the following research questions: 1. How do Chinese students perceive the difference between English language teaching in EFL and ELF? 2. To what extent do male and female L2 learners' attitudes towards English language teaching differ from each other?

Participants
In this study, a total of 50 students take part in the questionnaire survey, but only 44 questionnaires are valid (21 males and 23 females). All these participants just graduated from the university majoring in different disciplines including physics, economics, businesses management, computer science and food engineering, and some of them even take a further study in graduate study. All of them speak Mandarin Chinese as their native language and have learned English at least for 14 years as their second language. In addition, all these subjects passed the college English test band 4 and some of them even passed the test for English majors band 8, so these students are high proficiency English learners capable of presenting their own opinions about the current English teaching situation in Chinese universities.

Instruments and procedures
The participants are asked to complete the questionnaire consisting of 21 questions (Appendix A). Among these questions, two questions aim to investigate the participants' gender and English learning level, another two questions are designed to explore the attitudes of the participants towards the current status of English and English learning under the globalization context, and the other seventeen questions aim to ask about their expectations and attitudes towards the English language teaching in Chinese university. For the 3 to 19 questions, the participants are asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with a statement on a five-point Likert-type scale, from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), and for the last two questions, five options are offered. What's more, given that some questions involve some linguistic academic knowledge unfamiliar to the students in other majors, all questions are bilingual in English and Chinese and some explanations are added to make these questions understandable for them.

Data analysis
All of the returned questionnaires were treated anonymously. The survey results were analyzed using SPSS (version 16.0). Since the present study aims to study the difference between the male and female groups, an independent sampled t-test was used to analyze quantitative data and the t-test significance values were taken as indicators of significant differences. Table 1 presents the two groups' (female group and male group) results of the independent sampled t-test of the question 2 and 3 which are designed to elicit females and males' different attitudes towards the current status of English, including how they perceive the importance of the English learning. The mean scores of the male and female students' responses for each sample were determined and the value of Levene's Test for Equality of Variances showed there were no difference between the Variance of the two groups (sig.=0.980>0.05). Thus, the independent sampled t-tests were allowed to conduct to evaluate if there were any statistical differences between groups. Through the table, the values of Sig. shows that there is no significance between the two groups (P=0.83>0.05). The table demonstrates the numbers of males and females who are in favor of the importance of English learning. From the data of figure1, it is safe to draw a conclusion that female students have a stronger preference of English learning than male students, even though it is not obvious in the results of independent ttest.  Question 5 to 19 are designed to investigate students' expectations and attitudes towards the current English teaching situations in Chinese university including how they like the English teaching and what methods English language teaching should apply to the teaching activities. As table2. shows that females and males in this part get the roughly same mean score. The mean of females is slightly higher than males. The critical value of independent sampled t-test in this part still shows no significance existing between the two groups (p=0.69>0.05).  In addition, the last two questions are different from the other nineteen questions because they are designed directly to ask about students' opinions about the English teaching methods they once received and the most ideal English teaching methods they endorse. Both of the two questions are offered with five options respectively representing five different second language teaching methods, namely The Audiolingual Method, Communicative Language Teaching, Content-Based Instruction, Task-Based Language Teaching, Cooperative Language Learning. According to the answer of Q19, figure2, we can know that nowadays in Chinese universities, content-based instruction and task-based language teaching are two major English language teaching methods used by instructors, from which we can infer that English language knowledge still takes a dominant place in class. Communicative language teaching and cooperative language learning just account for a small proportion which means only a small number of universities begin to focus on the cultivation of students' communicative competence and cooperation consciousness. In the last question, the same five options are provided for participants to choose the most ideal English teaching method in their minds. Figure 3 shows the choices of these participants that communicative language teaching and cooperative language learning are considered as the most suitable English teaching methods, which is the exact opposite of the current status of English language teaching in China. Moreover, the independent sampled t-test about this question also showed that there is no significant difference between females and males (p=0.12>0.05), which means that both groups reach an agreement on the choice of English teaching methods.  In this study, the first research question explored how Chinese students perceive the difference between English language teaching in EFL and ELF. Actually, in this questionnaire, questions are not deliberately designed to ask them about what EFL and ELF are, but to elicit their awareness of the difference between EFL and ELF through their choices of options about the different features of EFL and ELF. The results showed both male and female students think that English is used as a world language and English learning is still very important. Moreover, there is no difference between the two groups and most of the students show that they are willing to accept the English with local features, which means that both the female and male students are beginning to possess the ELF awareness. According to the results, the most significance between EFL and ELF lies in their awareness of the current status of English. Most of the students have realized that English language teaching should not only focus on the grammar, lexical, syntax, and other linguistic knowledge, but also pay more attention to the cultivation of communicative competence, including strategic competence, sociocultural competence, and other competence capable of improving their performance (Tokumoto et al. 2011). Thus, the English language teaching methods must make a difference.

Perception of the status of English
Compared to the previous studies, the present study does not find the significance between female and male students. It female male may be that the previous researches study the female and male students' different attitudes towards the accent, grammar, and lexical rather than general English awareness.
As for the second research question to what extent male and female L2 learners' attitudes towards English language teaching differ from each other, the results show that there is no significance between the female and male students' attitudes towards English language teaching methods. Both of the two groups believe that communicative language teaching and cooperative language learning are the most suitable methods for English education which are different form the traditional English language teaching methods used in class including the audiolingual method, content-based instruction and task-based language teaching (Murphy 2014). The difference between the expectation of students and the reality lies in the current education system. English always plays a great role in all kinds of examinations, so that the impartment of linguistic knowledge such as the rules of grammar, lexicon, syntax and discourse takes a dominant place in class. While under the background of ELF, these methods can not satisfy the needs of students. Thus, new English teaching methods must be applied to the class. Communicative language teaching stresses the importance of providing learners with opportunities to use their English for communicative purposes and characteristically, attempts to integrate such activities into a wider program of language teaching. Cooperative language learning is an approach of teaching that makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in the classroom. Through these two distinctive teaching methods, students can strengthen their communicative competence and at the same time improve their critical thinking skills which are the true competence that students need under the background of ELF.

Conclusion
This study investigated the female and male students' perceptions of the difference between EFL and ELF, and to what extent male and female L2 learners' attitudes towards English language teaching differ from each other. Although female students outnumber male students on the preference for the current English language teaching circumstance, both of them have a clear recognition of the difference between EFL and ELF. In addition, in terms of the current English language teaching methods used in China's university, the results show that content-based instruction and task-based language teaching are still the two major teaching methods in English class; while in both female and male students' opinion, communicative language teaching and cooperative language learning are their ideal second language teaching methods for these two approaches under the new background of ELF and globalization can truly provide them with the opportunities to cultivate their communicative competence, which could promise them a good performance in certain occasions.
This study has a good implication for English instructors on their choice of the teaching methods. Compared with the studentcentered class focusing on meeting students' real learning needs, the traditional teaching model, teacher-centered class, only focuses on teaching linguistic knowledge impartment such as grammar, lexical, syntax are no longer suitable for the development for students in the new environment. Thus, according to the results of the present study, English instructors could choose to adopt new second language teaching methods in their class.
Although this study contributes to the English language teaching to some extent, it still has a few limitations. For example, this study just adopts a large-scale questionnaire survey, further interviews are not carried out through which a more precise result can be obtained. In addition, this study only investigates the general attitudes of students towards English language methods. Therefore, further studies are needed to explore the real effects of these methods and only in this way can we find the right methods fitting in well with the demands of students.

About the author
Liping Shan is a graduate student majoring in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, College of Foreign Languages, Ocean University of China, is interested in English Teaching and Second Language Learning research. Xukui Li is professor teaching in College of Foreign languages, Ocean University of China, have obtained great achievements in applied linguistics, second language acquisition and foreign language teaching.