China's Education Ministry has just announced some new reforms for primary and high schools. All pupils will take English courses beginning in September and high school students must take part in community service for at least one week each year.

Teaching methods in English classes in primary schools aim to raise pupils' interests in the English language and help them to be able to communicate through simple sentences. The pupils don't have to understand English grammar and phonetic symbols, and teachers will use listening, speaking, singing and performing methods to teach them.

Pupils will begin to study English in the third grade, and they will learn to write in English in the fifth grade. This new measure will firstly be adopted by urban primary schools this September.

New community service and computer lessons are added to the compulsory lessons for senior high school students.

The aim of the community service is to help students become more independent. They will resolve problems by themselves and study the results of experiments, under the supervision of teachers.

The new measures will be adopted by first grade senior high school students from September next year. And after translation into minority languages, those high schools in minority areas will adopt the new measures in 2003.