Language Culture And Identity In Two Chinese Community Schools

This book investigates the social, political and educational role of community language education in migratory contexts. It draws on an ethnographic study that investigates the significance of Mandarin-Chinese community schooling in Britain as an intercultural space for those involved. To understand the interrelation of ‘language’, ‘culture’ and ‘identity’, the book adopts a ‘bricolage’ approach that brings together a range of theoretical perspectives. This book challenges homogenous and stereotypical constructions of Chinese language, culture and identity – such as the image of Chinese pupils as conformist and deferent learners – that are often repeated both in the media and in academic discussion.

This edited book offers a new look at community and heritage languages schools around the world, providing a comprehensive and nuanced portrait of language education and cultural understanding in and beyond school contexts. Covering research and practice, the contributors survey the global landscape of community and heritage language schools and explore new developments in the field to understand the challenges the schools face and discuss the impact they have on their students and surrounding communities. Chapters address key topics including language development, academic achievement, professional development, learner identity and agency, online learning and teaching disruptions. Contributors highlight learners’ voices throughout, with special attention to overlooked minority language communities and Indigenous voices. Through this wealth of thorough and insightful analysis, the contributors of this book position students of community/heritage languages schools as citizens of a plurilingual world who are central to global change. Abounding with original research, innovative ideas and cutting-edge teaching practices, this book is ideal for courses on multilingualism and language and culture.

Immigrants from China started settling in Calcutta, the British capital of colonial India, from the late eighteenth century. Initially, the immigrant community comprised of male workers, many of whom sojourned between China and India. Only in the early twentieth century was there a large influx of women and children from China. To address the educational needs of the children - both immigrant and locally-born - several Chinese-medium primary and middle schools were established in Calcutta by the community in the 1920s and 1930s. Using many hitherto unexplored textual sources and interviews in India, China, and Canada, this detailed and unprecedented study examines the history and significance of these Chinese-medium schools. It focuses on the role they played in preserving Chinese cultural identity not only through the use of educational curricula and textbooks imported from China, but also with the emphasis on the need to return to the ancestral homeland for higher education. This study also breaks new ground by examining the impact of political and other factionalism within the community as well as the India-China conflict of 1962 that resulted in the closure of most of the Chinese-medium schools in Calcutta by the 1980s.

This book explores multilingual practices such as translanguaging, code-switching and stylization in secondary classrooms in Hawai’i. Using linguistic ethnography, it investigates how students in a linguistically diverse class, including those who speak less commonly taught languages, deal with learning tasks and the social life of the class when using these languages alongside English as a lingua franca. It discusses implications for teachers, from balancing student needs in lesson planning and instruction to classroom management, where the language use of one individual or group can create challenges of understanding, participation or deficit identity positionings for another. The book argues that students must not only be allowed to flex their whole language repertoires to learn and communicate but also be aware of how to build bridges across differences in individual repertoires. It offers suggestions for teachers to consider within their own contexts, highlighting the need for teacher autonomy to cultivate the classroom community’s critical language awareness and create conducive environments for learning. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, researchers and academics working in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography as well as pre-service and in-service teachers in linguistically diverse secondary school contexts.

Bringing together scholarship on issues relating to language, culture, and identity, with a special focus on Asian countries, this volume makes an important contribution in terms of analyzing and demonstrating how language is closely linked with crucial social, political, and economic forces, particularly the tensions between the demands of globalization and local identity. A particular feature is the inclusion of countries that have been under-represented in the research literature, such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Brunei Darussalam, Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Korea. The book is organized in three sections: Globalization and its Impact on Language Policies, Culture, and Identity Language Policy and the Social (Re)construction of National Cultural Identity Language Policy and Language Politics: The Role of English. Unique in its attention to how the domination of English is being addressed in relation to cultural values and identity by non-English speaking countries in a range of sociopolitical contexts, this volume will help readers to understand the impact of globalization on non-English speaking countries, particularly developing countries, which differ significantly from contexts in the West in their cultural orientations and the way identities are being constructed. Language Policy, Culture, and Identity in Asian Contexts will interest scholars and research students in the areas of language policy, education, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, and critical linguistics. It can be adopted in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on language policy, language in society, and language education.

As China and Chinese language learning moves centre stage economically and politically, questions of interculturality assume even greater significance. In this book interculturality draws attention to the processes involved in people engaging and exchanging with each other across languages, nationalities and ethnicities. The study, which adopts an ecological perspective, critically examines a range of issues and uses a variety of sources to conduct a multifaceted investigation. Data gathered from interviews with students of Mandarin sit alongside a critical discussion of a wide range of sources. Interculturality in Learning Mandarin Chinese in British Universities will be of interest to students and academics studying and researching Chinese language education, and academics working in the fields of language and intercultural communication, intercultural education and language education in general.

Seeking to uncover underlying epistemic invisibilities in generating intercultural communication education and research knowledge and to open up space for envisaging interculturality alternatively, this book reexamines and problematizes the assumptions and ontologies in the conceptual systems of interculturality. In enunciating and critiquing what has been largely endorsed, normalized and taken for granted, this volume brings to the fore different, changing and situated understandings of intercultural ontologies and epistemologies in terms of premises, workings and objectives, unveiling the entangled factors and contexts that have delimited and circumscribed the realm. The authors believe that the field would benefit from some cognitive and sensory dissonance while reengaging effectively with notions to move forward. In particular, they endeavour to de-monumentalize and disrupt the very conceptual tenets that may have rendered interculturality myopic, repetitive, monolithic and aseptic in expanding the epistemic concerns of the “intercultural”, especially in the English language. This book will be an essential read for scholars and students of the sociology of education, educational philosophy and intercultural education and also for all readers interested in the broad field of interculturality.