Introduction

English is taught from the third year in primary schools in major cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, and is compulsory in all secondary schools, colleges and universities, except that a few students take Japanese and Russian as their first foreign language in high schools and colleges. At tertiary level, many non-English major students who learn English as their first foreign language have to pass the nationwide College English Test (CET), Band-4 (henceforth, CET-4 in this book), in order to obtain their degree. Many non-English major postgraduate students who learn English as their first foreign language must pass the nationwide CET, Band-6 (henceforth, CET-6 in this book), in order to gain their final degree. The two tests, the CET-4 and the CET-6, are taken by an annual average of more than two million students1 (Cen, 1998; Yang, 1998). Up till April 2015, the cumulative number of students who have passed CET-4 and CET-6 is more than 42 million. In addition to the two nationwide tests, there are other English tests such as TOEFL, GRE and IELTS held on a large scale in China.