Coherence and coordination are crucial for successful change

China Daily: Chinese people spend a lot of time and money studying English, but many still have problems comprehending and speaking English outside the classroom.

Sam Ayton: What I find impressive is the passion for education in China, and how serious parents are in their commitment to their children's education. There are similar challenges across this region, not only in China.

I hope they devote the time and money to quality learning, because you want people to make progress. You don't want children locked in the classrooms for weeks learning an academic or a theoretical knowledge of the language. They need to learn how to use it.

However, there is a shift - we are certainly getting more and more interest from provincial bodies and education authorities - around teaching and testing skills. I think that there it's moving in the right direction.

China Daily: What do you think of the proposed reform of the gaokao (China's national university entrance exam)?

SA: The most important thing for me in any reform of the education system is that you really need to make sure that it's coherent and coordinated across the system. If you change the assessment, does the curriculum and the classroom teaching support this? If we look at the assessment reform, what we are interested in is whether the teachers are ready. Are they prepared and informed about what this means to their style of teaching? I believe the reform has undergone thorough consideration. I am looking forward to a more reliable system.

China Daily: The large number of students per class seems to be a challenge for teachers in China.

SA: Large classes are a challenge, definitely. But there are techniques that you can employ to make sure people get practice in large classes. For example, move away from having the teacher as the center of attention and have students engage with each other.

It's really daunting to start practicing a foreign language, and it is the teacher's job to create an encouraging environment where students feel comfortable to make mistakes. It is quite a basic requirement for practicing.

China Daily: What else concerns you about English language education and English learning in developing countries?

SA: In many countries across Asia, we are not looking at developing access to education anymore, but at supporting and developing the quality of the education, and supporting government moves toward a "knowledge economy".

However, likewise across the region there is still a challenge in addressing the rural and urban divide.

In 1982, we were invited here by the Chinese government to help them with the reform of English language teaching and learning; we've been here for quite a long time now. More recently, we signed an agreement between the UK and China to support the development of the teaching of English and Mandarin in both countries. That's because our prime minister has an ambition to double the number of people teaching Mandarin by 2020 in the UK. So we see this area of our work as very much a two-way collaboration.