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Perhaps there is no better illustration of Bourdieu's view that language can be converted to political or economic power (1991) than the success of the New Oriental School, which started as an English teaching organization, with the motto ‘Language is power’, mainly to prepare Chinese students for the TOFEL and the GRE tests. They have been so successful that they have now expanded into a full-scale educational institution, with English as its key component. Also, many people in China have prospered through English, including the world-famous teacher Li Yang, who achieved phenomenal success with his ‘Crazy English’ method, whose approach pushes a language-as-power message. In addition, the prosperity of the publishing houses selling English materials, the huge number of the teachers, and the enormous English-learning population in China all seem to contribute to the belief that English can enrich anyone who can find a way to capitalize on the language. However, despite the booming success of various English training agencies, it is ironic that English departments at Chinese universities now face an unprecedented crisis for survival. One major reason for this is that the recent craze for English in China has been accompanied by a parallel and steep decline of interest in the study of English as a ‘major’ at university level. In this article, I will address the problems that English departments in universities have in their response to the practical turn in English studies, with reference to the teaching of writing to English majors in particular.

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The discussions about the relations between different languages and different cultures tend to accept the concept difference as certainty. I will argue for all the presumptive assuredness of the concept, it cannot be easily accounted for theoretically and the difficulty has been aggravated by the identity politics. I will demonstrate although there is no definitive evidence for the claim that language dictates culture or vice versa, concepts that are to be expressed in specific languages are subject to the Procrustean operation of the semantic networks of the respective languages since the reality and the experiences are codified in specific languages and we think intersubjectively with their help. People from different cultures are capable of thinking in a similar manner when they break through the culturally habituated semantic networks of their languages.  Gumperz and Levinson: Rethinking Linguistic Relativity; Preston: Language and Thought; Niemeier and Dirven (eds.): Evidence for Linguistic Relativity; Jourdan and Tuite Language, Culture, and Society. Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 8/4/15 6:31 PM  Rorty: On ethnocentricism, p. 203.