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Don't be puzzled if you visit a Chinese university campus and happen to hear a student speak in broken English to a computer about a first date.

He is just taking part in a multimedia course to sharpen his English-speaking skills.

Learning and teaching English, which has been popular in China for years as the country increases exchanges and trade with the rest of the world, got a high-tech face-lift yesterday when the Ministry of Education approved four multimedia systems aimed at improving university students' communication abilities.

The new systems, developed by the country's four leading publishing houses, will be on display at Tsinghua University in Beijing until December 25. Pilot programmes are planned at selected universities during the next semester which begins in the spring.

More universities are expected to adopt the systems next autumn as they try to meet new College English Curriculum Requirements expected to be released by the ministry soon.

The new requirements will serve as a guideline for teaching non-English major students in China and aims to cultivate comprehensive abilities, especially listening and speaking.

"The multimedia approach is expected to remove two major barriers in teaching college English listening and speaking: Lack of teaching professionals and students' reluctance to speak,'' said Zhang Yaoxue, director of the Department of Higher Education with the ministry.

With these systems, students will not only be able to select courses and study according to their own levels and free from time constraints, they will also have more chances to practice speaking and listening, two basic skills which are normally weak among university students even after studying English for more than 10 years.

The new systems are more tech-savvy, user-friendly and interactive than software developed in the past.

Use of new technologies, such as voice recognition and synthesization, allows more ease of use. Many foreign organizations, including Duke University and Middle Tennessee State University provided technical support.

"The software systems are much easier to operate,'' says Li Yinhua, chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Foreign Languages Teaching in China's Higher Education.

To provide most up-to-date and real life language materials and compete for a bigger market share, the four publishing houses, each with an investment of at least US$1 million, worked closely with foreign partners.

Tsinghua University Press, which developed "New Era Interactive English,'' bought source materials from Pearson Education and Thompson Learning.

For "New Perspective English Learning System," Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press got a licence to present short episodes from popular western TV shows such as "Friends."

Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, which produced "New Horizon College English,'' shot its own video clips in the US while Higher Education Press, which produced "English XP", bought rights from Pearson Education.

"It's good that the content exposes learners to up-to-date situation and language,'' said Liu Runqing, a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University who is part of the judging panel. "And it serves Chinese learners after being tailored.''

Meanwhile, although experts at yesterday's evaluation meeting agreed multimedia will help improve students' listening ability, some suggest that more progress is needed in speaking training materials since the limits of voice-recognition technology restricts the four new systems to role-play.

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