Bringing English to Chinese rural communities

Zhan.com, a Shanghai-based company that offers online English courses, has launched a series of philanthropic distance-training platforms to provide language training to teachers in rural China.

The company, which also prepares students for entrance exams for overseas universities and offers English-language testing training courses, has provided 500,000 yuan ($76,300) in funding to the China Youth Development Foundation, and the two will work together on delivering the training.

Many rural communities still lack qualified English teachers, and the skill levels that do exist among staff have often fallen well behind those in the country's major cities.

Zhan.com's main customer base is third- and fourth-tiered cities, with many of its clients reporting they are still unable to find English training classes, said Zhan's CEO Wang Haoping.

"Rural students should not have to miss out on the chance to broaden their horizons, or even study abroad, as a result of their geographical restrictions.

"To help them do this, we aim to lift the level of English teaching in rural schools by offering their teachers online courses."

The Youth Development Foundation is the founder of Project Hope, one of the country's most successful charities that has made a difference to the lives of students from impoverished families for more than 20 years.

Created in 1989, the Project Hope has collected donations worth more than 11.8 billion yuan ($1.79 billion), which has been used to help around 5.35 million rural students. The foundation currently claims to work with seven in every 100 rural primary schools.

Yang Chunlei, deputy secretary of China Youth Development Foundation, said: "Promoting rural education through internet is a great model, which will certainly help continue the great work Project Hope has carried out in recent years."

Since 2002, most rural primary schools in China started to launch English courses, and the government requires students of third grade and above to take English lessons.

Lan Chen, a student now at the Beijing Dandelion Migrant Workers' Children School, said her English was weak, after she entered the middle school.

"I didn't know how to combine words in a sentence, and was confused by grammar," she said. "But I certainly hope to get more English training in the future."