New Concept English, Old Fashion Lawsuit

A British widow filed a lawsuit last month in Beijing, charging several local publishing houses for copyright infringement of the book that her husband wrote 40 years ago. Her name is obscure, the case draws little publicity, but the book has been well-known among English learners in China for two decades.

The book is New Concept English, a four-volume textbook writen by L. G. Alexander.

I first bought the book out of curiosity while in high school. As I mentioned in “Karl Marx, Me and Learning English”, the standard textbooks mandated by the Ministry of Education were insanely boring. Then, as a “reform experiment of English teaching”, the Ministry sanctioned several elite schools in Beijing and Shanghai to introduce the New Concept English into their curriculums.

I smelled something goodie. In China, the elite schools—two dozens or so in total, called the National Key School—enroll not only the best and the brightest, but also those whose parents belong to the most privileged ruling class. If the authority was willing to risk them as guinea pigs to try out this textbook, it had to be something really special in it. Hence, I elected to be a guinea pig too on my own term—reading the book after school.

I skipped the first volume, First Things First, which covers the basic grammar, and took a plunge in the second in the series, Practice and Progress. It didn’t take me a long to apprehend that those guinea pigs in the elite schools indeed received a lot better treat, as they always did.

Comparing it to our mandatory English textbook was like comparing a butterfly to a fly. And in this case, the butterfly outshines the fly in a couple of aspects.

First, because it’s written by a native Brit, who didn’t seem to be overly obsessed with class struggle or revolution, the content was original and natural. I felt at home the first time since I studied English.

Second, it’s fun to read it. The second volume is made of many stories, usually about a hundred-word long, most of which are quite amusing and genuine. One story told of a young boy skipping school, taking a nap in a boat, and waking up to find himself on the other side of the English Channel. He became an instant hero of mine; I’d daydreamed of skipping school numerous times, each time being waken up in the middle of one class or another by the teacher.

The third installment, Developing Skills, proved to be challenging, as the stories were much longer and vocabularies grew significantly. But the materials were so fresh that I managed to read it through without the torturing feeling of reading “How Karl Mark Learn Foreign Language” alike. I had never finished the last installment, Fluency in English, which collects many long articles from British newspapers and magazines.

I don’t recall ever seeing L.G. Alexander’s name anywhere in the book that I bought. Was it a pirated copy published by a state-owned publishing house? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Back then, copyright in China means the right to copy. Since, the progress has been made; it’s not right to copy. But do it rightfully anyway. Good luck to her lawsuit.