Interculturality in Learning Mandarin Chinese in British Universities

Tinghe Jin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315392882
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

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.

1
Introduction

Interculturality and the learning of Mandarin Chinese

This book is about understandings of interculturality from the perspectives of students of Mandarin Chinese in British universities. I draw on data from in-depth interviews with 26 undergraduate and postgraduate students of Mandarin from seven universities across the UK, some of whom were campus-based in the UK while others were in China on their study placements. Discussion is also based on interviews with eight lecturers of Chinese language from four of the British universities attended by these students. Other sources of information from policy documents, textbooks and course outlines support insights into the intercultural learning journeys of Chinese language learners. Through interactions with students of Mandarin, I asked who these individuals were and probed their varied international upbringings and experiences. For myself, coming as I have to the UK after a village childhood in China before moving to the city of Wenzhou to pursue my studies, our journeys are markedly different. What is similar, though, is the impact that such moves have upon senses of identity. In particular, London is possibly the foremost multilingual, multiethnic and multicultural city in the world, where I met some of my student interviewees. When I interacted with students of Mandarin, I found my interest moving from the study of language to the study of identity and came to realize that these could not easily be separated as the study of language also involves the developments of intercultural understanding.

Through listening to these students of Mandarin, the understanding of interculturality in the context of learning Mandarin in British universities can be developed. Relatively few studies have been conducted relating to how students of Chinese respond to their higher education experiences. Recent exceptions are studies from Jin and Dervin (2017) and Dervin, Du, and Hä rkö nen (2018). There are, for instance, few student voices to be found within studies using the intercultural competence models of Byram (1997) and Deardorff (2006), which are concerned with developing criteria for assessing or measuring learning outcomes rather than exploring experiences of students. This research-based book discusses students’ perspectives through their intercultural experiences and focuses also upon their reflections in relation to their studies of Chinese in its wider social ecology. The book both contextualizes the statements of these students by offering information about their individual backgrounds and includes other sources of data from lecturer interviewees, university course outlines and a range of policy documents.

The book has three objectives. The first is to identify a specific field of study—that is, interculturality in Chinese language education. As the demand for learning Mandarin increases globally, there is a need for Chinese language education to invest in teaching that is influenced by the interculturality arising from connections between China, Chinese language and cultural aspects and the rest of the world. The second objective is to provide a critical discussion on the complexity of ‘culture’ and the idea of ‘Chinese culture’ so that the teaching of cultural aspects in Chinese language courses moves beyond teaching about simplified and often stereotypical cultural ‘facts’. Third, the book aims to present a critical inter-cultural approach towards the teaching and learning of Mandarin Chinese. The book will be of interest to academics, teachers, students, course designers and writers of policies who would like to explore ‘interculturality’ in relation to the teaching and learning of Chinese and also to general readers who are similarly interested in Chinese languages and their related cultural aspects. This introductory chapter provides an overview about the key issues this book explores and the research undertaken which the book has drawn upon.

Key themes and perspectives of interculturality

This book has been written at a point in time when the field of Chinese language studies has expanded in the UK and globally. As China and Chinese change in status and value, older ways of teaching will need to give way to approaches that resonate more clearly with new circumstances and new generations of learners.

In this book the concept of ‘interculturality’ is interpreted as the ever-dynamic ‘inter-’relationship and process between the self and the other where difference and sameness are embodied and constructed (cf. Holliday, 2016; Jin & Dervin, 2017; Lévinas, 1990; MacDonald & O’Regan, 2017; Young & Sercombe, 2010; Zhu, 2014). In particular in the learning of languages, interculturality refers to the processes involved in language learners engaging and exchanging with each other and with the wider world, involving learners’ own resources as intercultural beings and how they learn (or have learned) to ‘become’, as well as how they ‘are’ within their encounters. A range of perspectives has informed this critical survey and review of interculturality in Chinese language teaching and learning. Each of the chapters considers particular perspectives and themes in a daisy-wheel style, treating interrelated aspects and concepts in turn, seeking to understand interculturality through students’ perspectives. What follows in this section provides a brief introduction to these key themes and perspectives which inform the structure of the book.

The contextual perspective

One important theme in the book concerns the wider context of Chinese language studies in British universities in order to understand interculturality in learning Mandarin Chinese. Understanding interculturality is about drawing attention to the wider social, cultural, historical, economic and political contexts and examining the ideological assumptions in which it is embedded.

The concept of interculturality describes a social reality of people and communities which are characterized by high degrees of co-existence and mixing of cultural elements. Interculturality is not some abstract or intellectualized concept but is instead a commonly encountered aspect of our everyday life. Frequently occurring examples of interculturality are to be found in those clothes shops, restaurants and people in cities such as London and Shanghai that are associated with trans-national and interactive processes. The chain store Monsoon, for example, sells clothes and accessories to women based on eclectic designs that combine cultural fashions drawn mostly from North African, South Asian and East Asian influences. A visitor from England visiting Shanghai goes into a KFC franchise and orders zhou 粥, a Chinese rice porridge (see also Kirkebæk, Du, & Jensen, 2013). A student from China, week after week, watches the quintessentially English television series Downton Abbey. The same student comes to London to study education, and in their class are students, for example, from Nigeria, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Spain and France. The student’s lecturers are, for instance, from India, Sweden, Croatia, Singapore and England. The same student discovers that they have come to a globalized university in a globalized city, which is far from the nostalgic Downton Abbey image of England brought with the student. A range of examples of multilingual identities of Londoners are explored in Block’s (2006) study. Interculturality in the senses provided here is not only interactions beyond national boundaries but also processes by which different styles, habits and interests come together (sometimes collide) at the same time, in the same place, co-existing and, over time, becoming normalized. This movement towards an intercultural experience and reality can be seen worldwide. All encounters between all people are intercultural—something that has been suggested by the idea of ‘small cultures’, which I discuss in the next section. Intercultural encounters have become part of the texture of everyday life, just as ‘language competence and intercultural understanding are not optional extras in the 21st century’ (Nuffield Language Programme, 2003: 1). Given the nature of this intercultural world, it becomes necessary for the teaching of languages to reflect interculturality.

There is a long history of the development of teaching and learning Chinese in the UK, and in recent years there has been a transforming context for modern foreign language studies in the UK. For example, former British Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to China in December 2013 represented a step-change in interest in learning Mandarin across the UK. Cameron’s widely reported and controversial statement that students should ‘ditch’ the learning of French and German in favour of Mandarin helped to raise the public profile of studying Mandarin in the UK (The Guardian, 5/12/2013). The then Prime Minister Theresa May’s visit to China in 2018 was an extension of the commitments and initiatives sealed by Cameron. She was present at the launch of the ‘English is GREAT’ campaign during her visit (GOV.UK, 2018). This campaign echoes the UK-Mandarin Excellence Programme, which was a result of George Osborne’s (a former Chancellor of the Exchequer under Cameron) visit to China during September 2015. He announced £10 million in support for teaching Mandarin in English schools, aiming to attract 5,000 more students of Mandarin by 2020 (BBC News, 22/9/2015). This process led to courses being conducted by the Confucius Institute at the University College London (UCL) Institute of Education in co-operation with the British Council. These political aspirations illustrate how what might have seemed a relatively minor matter within academic language teaching in the UK, became a matter directly involving politicians of the highest political rank. This expanding public and political interest in Mandarin is also reflected in the increasing number of people learning Mandarin globally. According to the Chinese National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, commonly referred to as Hanban (2019), there were 1.86 million face-to-face and 810,000 online learners of all kinds registered in Confucius Institutes and classrooms around the world by the end of 2018. Although such estimates should be considered with caution, they nevertheless demonstrate the increasing importance of teaching and learning Chinese, which is a phenomenon worth investigation.

‘Small cultures’

The use of the word ‘culture’ in this book relates to the concept developed by Holliday (1999, 2018) of ‘small cultures’. These ‘small cultures’ are cohesive social groupings or activities described as being social settings or authentic cultural formations and contexts. ‘Small cultures’ differ from the idea of ‘large culture’, which is usually associated with national, ethnic and international stereotypes and characterized by artificial constructions and reifications of abstract values that are associated with particular social groups who exercise power. Thus, the concept of ‘culture’ is perceived as being fluid and evolving as opposed to consisting of fixed social institutions or artefacts. The book challenges essentialist conceptions of ‘Chinese culture’ and argues that many courses taught in universities could benefit from adopting an intercultural approach in their teaching of Chinese and subjecting their current practices to critical reflection.

The idea of ‘small culture formation on the go’ (Amadasi & Holliday, 2017: 2–3) suggests that all encounters between all people are intercultural, because human interaction is a process of negotiating meanings between people as well as of reproducing cultures. A ‘small culture formation on the go’ can be illustrated by many examples in our daily life, as shown in the prior section. Another example is based on my own observation of players in a corner of a football field one day while I was working at a university in Shanghai.

Figure 1.1 shows two boys in their football kits receiving instruction from a goalkeeping coach. The coach is from Cameroon in West Africa and would in all probability speak one of that country’s many local languages. Both German and French have been established European languages for Cameroonians, with French predominating. At this football school the coaches communicate in English, which is an expanding language across Cameroon. The two boys attend an English-language international school in Shanghai. Both boys have ethnically Chinese parents. The coach is giving the boys fairly intensive training in goal-keeping techniques. So here on a sports field in Shanghai, a male athlete is working alongside two boys sharing their common interest in football. This is a salient example of interculturality. Boundaries of race, language, age, status and social background have become blurred or dissolved. Intercultural interaction becomes a mechanism for bringing people together around something they share with each other (Rathje, 2007). The students of Chinese included in this book demonstrate interculturality through their involvement with their families and other social experiences in small culture formation on the go.

Figure 1.1 Goalkeeping coaching session in Shanghai

Source: (Taken by the author)

Therefore, another key theme that the book discusses is ‘identities’. One of the key propositions made in this book is that through learning a language, people’s senses of their identities can be developed. The concept of interculturality presented in this book is about ‘doing cultural identities’ (Zhu, 2019) through ‘small culture formation on the go’ (Holliday, 2018) by students while engaging with people from varied linguistic, social and cultural backgrounds. People’s lives take place in intercultural social spaces where they develop an understanding of the relationship between each other and with themselves. The process of teaching and learning languages has implications not only for learners’ development of linguistic knowledge, awareness and sensitivity, but also for certain subjective needs such as engaging ‘one’s sense of self and one’s place in the world’ (Kramsch, 2002a: 12). From the outset I stress that my use of the term identities is in the plural. Such a perspective argues that students encounter varied ways of feeling and looking at the world and that these experiences shape their lives and help constitute the identities that have become aspects of themselves.

A critical turn

Understanding ‘interculturality’ is also about moving beyond essentialist views and concepts. For example, one of the critical shifts encountered in the book is my challenging of the term ‘modern foreign languages’ as a way of describing language teaching. Instead, I adopt ‘modern world languages’ to challenge the casual use of the term ‘foreign’, especially when applied to learning lang...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: interculturality and the learning of Mandarin Chinese
• 2 Changing ideologies, institutions and contexts: the rise of Chinese and ‘foreign’ language policy
• 3 Changing ideologies, institutions and contexts: university students, courses and textbooks
• 4 Moving towards interculturality: students’ understandings of ‘culture’
• 5 Emerging identities: students as ‘intercultural individuals’
• 6 Moving beyond ‘intercultural competence’: students talk about their learning experience
• 7 An intercultural approach to teaching and learning Chinese
• 8 Conclusion: looking to the future
• List of abbreviations
• Appendix: biographical details of student interviewees
• Index