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Introduction
In the past two decades, there have been two important events in English as a Foreign Language (hereafter, EFL) teaching in Chinese universities throughout the country. The first event was a gradual growth in student enrolment in universities, and the second was the EFL teaching reform that aimed to introduce Communicative Language Teaching (hereafter, CLT) into the English classroom (Rao, 2010). There is an apparent conflict between the increase in student numbers in each class and the use of CLT in the language classroom, thus resulting in a series of problems for current EFL teaching in Chinese universities. On the one hand, frequent contact with foreigners speaking English nowadays makes it necessary for English teachers to develop students' communicative competence. On the other hand, some problems such as large classes, high demands on English teachers and a lack of financial resources prevent teachers from getting their students involved in the communicative activities in their teaching process (Rao, 1996; Yu, 2001; Hu, 2002).
There are two types of EFL teaching at the tertiary level in China. One is for English majors and the other is for non-English majors. As non-English majors account for a great majority of Chinese university students (more than 90%; Jin & Cortazzi, 2006), we devote this paper to describing EFL teaching for non-English majors only. Three aspects are considered here, i.e. issues revolving around teachers, issues revolving around students, and the English Intensive Reading Course in Chinese universities. Following this, we explore the prospects for EFL teaching in Chinese universities in the 21st century.
Teachers
EFL teaching in Chinese universities is conducted by a contingent of teachers who are indigenous Chinese and have been basically trained at home institutions where there are only a few native speakers of English. It is estimated that there are approximately 60,000 university English teachers, but only a privileged minority of teachers have the opportunity of studying in English-speaking countries (Zhang, 2010). Many university English teachers in China have not had any formal teacher training, but have been fully occupied with a heavy teaching load because the number of university students is gradually increasing (Borg & Liu, 2013). On the whole, English teachers at the tertiary level are proficient in...