ABSTRACT
Introduction The People’s Republic of China (China) has more than 1.3 billion people. As the world’s most populous country, China has the world’s largest population of college students, with an estimated total of about 25 million students enrolling in post-secondary institutions in 2009 (Bolton and Graddol, 2012). The number reached 27.63 million in 2014 (Ministry of Education of China, 2015). Almost all of these students study English. For this reason, China has been recognized as “a major site of TESOL [teaching English to speakers of other languages] activity,” and College English teaching in China has attracted the attention of scholars from China and abroad (e.g., Borg and Liu, 2013, p. 271; You and Dörnyei, in press).
