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Farmers in Shicheng Village Learn English at Own Expenses
An "English school" run by farmers of Shicheng Village, Putian county, east China's Fujian Province, has been becoming increasingly popular.
Lin Fuchun, 44, a student of the school, said that he has been engaged in farming and fishing for 30 years. "Over the past few months, however, learning English has been a major part of my life," he said.
He works and rests strictly according to schedule: get up at half past five in the morning to learn English words by heart, go to school on time in daytime and listen to English tapes and go over lessons from 6 o'clock to 9 o'clock in the evening.
Studying English together with Lin Fuchun are 90 fellow villagers, whose age ranges from 20 to 50 and many of whom have a primary school education only.
The school was renovated from an old-style compound, with two classrooms. It has run ten English training courses for nearly 1,000 farmers so far. Lin Fuchun is a trainee of the 11th training course.
Shicheng, the site of English school, is a coastal fishing village. With the steady development of exchanges with the rest of the world, more and more villagers have been going abroad to provide labor services in recent years. For example, 1,000 villagers have served as seamen for a Singaporean shipping company.
Over the past few years the international labor market has posed an increasingly higher requirements for the quality of workers. For instance, sailors are required to speak everyday English.
With no knowledge of English, seamen from Shicheng could only make money by doing physical labor on foreign ships in the past and sometimes made stupid mistakes.
In order to surmount the language barrier and improve the quality of workers, with the support of township and village leaders, the English training course was sponsored in December of 1998, with funds raised by the villagers. Professional teachers are invited to teach the villagers.
Huang Wenjin, a teacher, said that the training course stresses oral English, focusing on everyday English and terms related to labor services offered by the villagers.
During the eight-week course, teachers spend one week teaching farmers simple English related to foreign affairs. Officials from a Singaporean ocean shipping company conduct oral tests. With a lower educational level, villagers have to learn from the beginning such as letters, phonetics and grammar. Yet they all learn conscientiously.
Village heads have pledged to improve study conditions for the farmers such as adding necessary teaching equipment. With the development of a market economy, more and more farmers will learn English. Village heads are also considering inviting more teachers to teach the farmers.
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