This book examines Chinese tertiary students' experiences of learning English in Sino-Australian programs in China. Using an institutional ethnography, the book examines one well-established Sino-Australian program based at a Chinese university. The book explores the ways that participant students used the Chinese words, tropes and their meanings to describe their English learning experiences with both local Chinese and foreign English teachers. This book introduces an innovative theoretical framework, “representation theory with a multilingual perspective”, to analyse how Chinese students' everyday experiences are constructed and mediated through language, discourse and identity. This framework also highlights graphic examples of how concepts are created in both Chinese and English, and thus serves as a powerful tool for deconstructing dichotomies between China and the West. The aim of this book is, then, two-fold: to show how a novel theoretical lens can help us to develop more nuanced understandings of Chinese students, and to propose a new methodological and theoretical framework through which one can challenge the monolingual subjectivity and parochial views of both Chinese and Western conceptions.
1 Is this your idea of English teaching.- 2 Setting the scene: The Qunxi program.- 3 Foreign friends.- 4 Headless flies.- 5 Precious golden sentences.- 6 Confined lively little butterflies.- 7 'We are similar to Western youngsters'.
Dr Luo Yingmei is interested in analysing how peoples experiences are framed and mediated within local sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts. She has adopted and adapted a theoretical framework that allows her to explore the intricate relationship between language, culture and peoples perceptions of the world. This framework enables her to see how alternate perceptions of the world can be embodied differently in different languages. Conceptualisations that are conveyed through different languages have great potential to augment current understandings of social realities, and to counter polarised cultural viewpoints in this globalised world. Taking a socially-oriented approach to researching teachers, learners and pedagogy, she is passionate about questioning the dominance of Western conceptions and theories in non-Western communities. This framework is particularly useful to examine the complexity of social realities in multicultural and multilingual contexts.
