, for a total of 165 credits in a BJE student’s four-year study. Except for the general courses, which are all conducted in Chinese and are required for all the Chinese students, regardless of their majors, the other three sections of courses at the BJE program of SISU consist of English courses or journalism courses conducted in English, accounting for 53% with a total of 88 credits if added together. Table Two: Curriculum of the BJE Program at SISU Course ArrangementCreditsPercentage General CoursesRequired3627.88Electives10Required English Courses5231.52Required Journalism CoursesIn Chinese106.06In English2213.33Elective Journalism CoursesIn Chinese137.88In English148.48Internship84.85Total165100While the journalism program in English include such courses as English News Writing and Reporting, English Feature Writing, English News Editing, Theories of Mass Media and Media Management, International Communication, History of Western Journalism and Western Culture, standing for 36 credits, about 21.8% of the total, the journalism courses in Chinese include such courses as History of Chinese Journalism, Chinese News Writing and Reporting and Media Law and account for 23 credits, about 14% of the course arrangement, only about half of the English journalism courses. Therefore, BJE students at SISU are expected to do their news writing and reporting in English upon their graduation. Besides, to demonstrate their proficiency in English, they can also participate in a national English examination known as TEM8, required for an English major undergraduate. According to Prof. ZHANG Jian who is in charge of the English training for BJE students at SISU, 98% of the BJE students at SISU passed TEM8 in the last three years. This means that the English ability of BJE students almost equals to that of an English major while they also have the training to be a reporter. Challenges to BJE in China However, the linguistic advantage of BJE programs in China is a two-edged sword as this linguistic advantage of BJE also had its limitation: as it resorts to the use of the English language in a Chinese-dominating society, BJE cannot get rid of its minority status in China even though English is dominating the international world. Almost all BJE programs in China are located in metropolitan cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou and are only available in (in fact limited to) those universities that can, first of all, help improve the English language skills for students before they turn to learn their journalistic skills in English. As a result, BJE programs have always faced the following challenges in its overall development in China: (1) Lack of an Effective BJE Teaching and Learning Environment To carry out effective BJE teaching in a Chinese context, it is extremely important to create a good BJE teaching and learning environment, in which professors and students should be both bilingual. Although BJE programs have some limited number of bilingual journalism professors who can give lectures on journalism in both English and Chinese, the fact is most BJE programs in China either employ only English-speaking journalism professors who know no Chinese, or Chinese-speaking professors who speak no English. This makes it difficult to create an effective BJE teaching and learning environment in that BJE students who are not yet proficient in English cannot fully understand the lectures by native English professors of journalism, let alone speak and write well in English, while English professors can feel very frustrated as students may literally translate from Chinese while they are doing their English news writing. James Scotton, a professor from Marquette University, USA, admitted that he sometimes had to turn to his Chinese colleagues to understand the English sentences written by students when he taught at SISU from 2002-2003 as a Fulbright professor. (2) Lack of Qualified Teaching Faculty When China embarked on a market economy, it became more and more difficult to keep the already limited number of bilingual professors on campus because journalism practitioners are paid much higher salaries than journalism professors. For instance, the BJE program at SISU had a faculty of 21 professors and lecturers when it was first established 1983. Now, that number is only 10 for the SISU program as many faculty members have either gone abroad or taken jobs with a foreign company in the past 15 years. Furthermore, BJE professors need to be “retrained” from time to time at a media organization or at a foreign university to update their professional knowledge about latest development of western journalism and media practices at home and abroad. But the heavy teaching load and universal lack of funding make it difficult to organize this kind of retraining at BJE programs in China, which, to some degree, can make qualified professors today unqualified tomorrow. (3) The Over-simplification of BJE Programs The fact that it is extremely to difficult to keep a qualified bilingual journalism professor has led to an over-simplification of BJE programs, during which some universities simply invite Chinese professors to teach Chinese journalism courses and English teachers to teach English classes. This is more translation than BJE, instead of a nice combination between linguistic and journalistic skills. Evidence has showed this kind of over-simplification may result in students who can neither learn journalism nor acquire linguistic skills. Or graduates can communicate in English but are not adequate for news writing and reporting in English. They still have to be trained at their media institution for a long time to become a qualified reporter. (4) Lack of Updated Teaching Materials and Resources. Teaching materials for BJE always have to be updated for effective teaching, however, most BJE programs in China lack effective access to update their teaching materials from English-speaking countries. Students could hardl

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