A New Representation of Chinese Learners: Experiences of Chinese Learners of English in Tertiary Sino-Australian Programs in China (Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, 13) [1st ed. 2021] 9811621519, 9789811621512

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Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13 Series Editors: Aaron Koh · Victoria Carrington

Yingmei Luo

A New Representation of Chinese Learners Experiences of Chinese Learners of English in Tertiary Sino-Australian Programs in China

Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education Volume 13

Series Editors Aaron Koh, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong Victoria Carrington, School of Education, University of Tasmania, Launceston, TAS, Australia

We live in a time where the complex nature and implications of social, political and cultural issues for individuals and groups is increasingly clear. While this may lead some to focus on smaller and smaller units of analysis in the hope that by understanding the parts we may begin to understand the whole, this book series is premised on the strongly held view that researchers, practitioners and policy makers interested in education will increasingly need to integrate knowledge gained from a range of disciplinary and theoretical sources in order to frame and address these complex issues. A transdisciplinary approach takes account the uncertainty of knowledge and the complexity of social and cultural issues relevant to education. It acknowledges that there will be unresolved tensions and that these should be seen as productive. With this in mind, the reflexive and critical nature of cultural studies and its focus on the processes and currents that construct our daily lives has made it a central point of reference for many working in the contemporary social sciences and education. This book series seeks to foreground transdisciplinary and cultural studies influenced scholarship with a view to building conversations, ideas and sustainable networks of knowledge that may prove crucial to the ongoing development and relevance of the field of educational studies. The series will place a premium on manuscripts that critically engage with key educational issues from a position that draws from cultural studies or demonstrates a transdisciplinary approach. This can take the form of reports of new empirical research, critical discussions and/or theoretical pieces. In addition, the series editors are particularly keen to accept work that takes as its focus issues that draw from the wider Asia Pacific region but that may have relevance more globally, however all proposals that reflect the diversity of contemporary educational research will be considered. Series Editors: Aaron Koh (The Chinese University of Hong Kong) Victoria Carrington (University of Tasmania) Editorial Board: Angel Lin (Simon Fraser University, Canada), Angelia Poon (National Institute of Education, Singapore), Anna Hickey-Moody (RMIT, Australia),Barbara Comber (University of South Australia, Australia), Catherine Beavis (Deakin University, Australia), Cameron McCarthy (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA), Chen Kuan-Hsing (National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan), C.  J. W.-L.  Wee (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Daniel Goh (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Jackie Marsh (University of Sheffield, UK), Jane Kenway (Monash University, Australia), Jennifer A Sandlin (Arizona State University, Tempe, USA), Jennifer Rowsell (University of Bristol, UK), Jo-Anne Dillabough, (University of Cambridge, UK), Megan Watkins (University of Western Sydney, Australia), Mary Lou Rasmussen (Australia National University, Australia), Terence Chong (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore) Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Associate Editor: Lay Peng Ang E-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11200

Yingmei Luo

A New Representation of Chinese Learners Experiences of Chinese Learners of English in Tertiary Sino-Australian Programs in China

Yingmei Luo School of International Education Henan University Kaifeng, Henan, China

ISSN 2345-7708     ISSN 2345-7716 (electronic) Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education ISBN 978-981-16-2151-2    ISBN 978-981-16-2152-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

To Yuqun Huang and Yunxi Song

Acknowledgements

I am most indebted to Doctors Rod Neilsen and Ruth Arber, for their consistent guidance, support and encouragement at various stages of this project. They gave me detailed instructions on how to dig deeper in data analysis and inspired me to construct an innovative theoretical framework. Special thanks also to Aaron Koh, the book series editor, for his consistent encouragement and invaluable advice about writing a monograph. I also thank the anonymous reviewers who made constructive suggestions about how to turn a PhD thesis into a readable book. I am grateful to many people who supported me in preparing the manuscript. Dr Fiona Henderson has always been generous with her time. She read through the book proposal and the whole manuscript and made useful comments and editorial suggestions. I thank Chris Chaffe and Dr Nick Carre for their encouraging and helpful comments on my writing. Dr Fang Cao shared her publication experience and gave me advice when I needed it. Thanks, too, to my friends: Chuchu Long, John Lin, Xiaoyan Xu, Lamu Chu and Dr Lindy Norris, and to my beloved family members, who provided me tremendous mental and life support. I thank the Dean of the research program who received me warmly and supported me during the data collection. I am also very grateful to all the participants in the study who shared their experiences with me, which made my data so rich and insightful. I am also very grateful for the Deakin full scholarship. Without it, I would not have had the opportunity to conduct this study.

vii

Contents

1 Is This Your Idea of English Teaching?��������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 The Beginnings of the Study: From My Insider Perspective����������������������������������������������������������������������������    5 1.2 Representations of Chinese Students������������������������������������������������    7 1.2.1 “Large Culture” Versus “Small Culture” Approach��������������    8 1.2.2 Representation Theory with a Multilingual Perspective: A Nuanced Approach����������������������������������������   12 1.3 Western TESOL in Non-Western Contexts��������������������������������������   13 1.4 Foreign Teachers of English in China����������������������������������������������   15 1.4.1 The Role and Status of English Education in China��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   15 1.4.2 Foreign Teachers of English in China����������������������������������   16 1.5 Experiences of Chinese Learners in Transnational Higher Education Programs in China ����������������������������������������������   19 1.5.1 The Rise of Transnational Higher Education in China��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   19 1.5.2 Intercultural Learning Experiences of Chinese Learners in Transnational Programs ������������������������������������   21 1.6 Overview of This Study��������������������������������������������������������������������   22 1.7 Structure of the Book������������������������������������������������������������������������   24 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   26 2 Setting the Scene: The Qunxi Program��������������������������������������������������   33 2.1 Introducing English Language Education to the Qunxi Program������������������������������������������������������������������������   34 2.2 Chinese Students������������������������������������������������������������������������������   36 2.2.1 Chuan—a Privileged Boy and His “Ideal” English Classes ��������������������������������������������������������������������   37 2.2.2 Fang—A Highly-Motivated Young Woman and Her “Waste of Time” English Lessons��������������������������   38 2.2.3 Lessons From Fang and Chuan—Changing Motivations of Learning English������������������������������������������   39 ix

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Contents

2.3 English Teachers ������������������������������������������������������������������������������   39 2.3.1 Local English Teachers Versus Foreign English Teachers ������������������������������������������������������������������   41 Appendix: Participating Student Profiles��������������������������������������������������   44 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   45 3 Headless Flies ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   47 3.1 Representation Theory—The Overarching Theoretical Framework��������������������������������������������������������������������   48 3.1.1 Language and Culture in Representation������������������������������   51 3.1.2 Discursive Approaches to Representation����������������������������   53 3.2 Culture: Orderly and Exam-Oriented Education in China ��������������   55 3.3 Discourse of English Language Pedagogy ��������������������������������������   57 3.3.1 shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (Substantive Knowledge)������������������������������������������������������   58 3.3.2 yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑 (Logic of English Lessons) ��������������������������������������������������   61 3.4 Students’ Learning Experiences in Foreign English Teachers’ Lessons����������������������������������������������������������������   63 3.4.1 Foreign English Teachers: “Students as Whole Persons”����������������������������������������������������������������   63 3.4.2 Students: Disoriented Lessons����������������������������������������������   65 3.5 Students’ Learning Experiences in Local English Teachers’ Lessons����������������������������������������������������������������   67 3.5.1 Local English Teachers: jiāo kè bě, 教课本 (Teaching of the Textbook) ��������������������������������������������������   67 3.5.2 Students: zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (Real Learning) ��������������������������������������������������������������������   68 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   71 4 Foreign Friends����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   73 4.1 Identity and Representation��������������������������������������������������������������   74 4.1.1 Stereotyping—“the Spectacle of the Other” ������������������������   74 4.1.2 Identity in Representational Practices����������������������������������   76 4.2 The “Foreign Teachers as Foreign Friends” Discourse��������������������   77 4.3 Students’ Learning Experiences in Foreign English Teachers’ Classes������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 4.3.1 Foreign English Teachers: “Teachers as Facilitators”����������   81 4.3.2 Students: wán, 玩 (Play) ������������������������������������������������������   83 4.3.3 Students’ Negotiation of Foreign Others������������������������������   86 4.4 Students’ Learning Experiences in Local English Teachers’ Classes����������������������������������������������������������������   89 4.4.1 Local English Teachers: “the Learner as a Whole Person” and “Teachers as Facilitators”��������������   89 4.4.2 Students: wēng wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡响的课堂活动 (Buzzing Class Activities)����������   91 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   93

Contents

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5 Precious Golden Sentences����������������������������������������������������������������������   95 5.1 Habitus����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   96 5.2 Discourse of English Writing ����������������������������������������������������������   97 5.3 Students’ Learning Experiences in Academic Writing Lessons��������������������������������������������������������������������������������  100 5.3.1 Foreign English Teachers: Procedural Teaching of the Textbook������������������������������������������������������  100 5.3.2 Students’ Negotiation of the Academic Writing Lessons��������������������������������������������������������������������  103 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  106 6 Confined Lively Butterflies ��������������������������������������������������������������������  107 6.1 Representation with a Multilingual Perspective ������������������������������  108 6.1.1 Multilingual Perspectives������������������������������������������������������  108 6.1.2 Post-Monolingual Methodology ������������������������������������������  109 6.2 Discursive Construction of Chinese Students’ English Learning Experiences����������������������������������������������������������  111 6.3 “We Are Similar to Western Youngsters”������������������������������������������  114 6.3.1 The Concept of bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (Passive Learning)����������������������������������������������������������������  115 6.3.2 The Concept of chén mò, 沉默 (Silence)������������������������������  117 6.3.3 The Concept of pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判思维能力 (Critical Thinking Skills)������������������������������������������������������  119 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  123 7 “Making Biscuits or Milkshakes”: Towards More Nuanced Understandings of Chinese Learners ����������������������������������������������������  125 7.1 My Multilingual Journey������������������������������������������������������������������  126 7.2 “We Are Not the So-called Obedient Boys and Girls” ��������������������  127 7.2.1 Students’ Negotiation Between Local Teachers and Western Teachers������������������������������������������������������������  127 7.2.2 Students’ Negotiations of English Learning in the Qunxi Program������������������������������������������������������������  130 7.2.3 The Underlying Discourses of Students’ Learning Experiences�����������������������������������������������������������  132 7.3 Moving Beyond the China/West Dichotomy in Theory and Knowledge Construction ������������������������������������������  134 7.4 Significance and Policy Implications������������������������������������������������  134 7.5 Towards a More Profound View ������������������������������������������������������  136 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  136

List of Abbreviations

AU CDA CELTA CET CFCRS CHC CLT CU EAP ELICOS MoE NNS NS PGCE SIE SLA TAFE TESOL TNHE UK

Australian University [pseudonym] Critical Discourse Analysis Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults College English Test Chinese–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools Confucian Heritage Culture Communicative Language Teaching Central University [pseudonym] English for Academic Purposes English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students China’s Ministry of Education Non-Native Speaker Native Speaker Postgraduate Certificate of Education [UK] School of International Education Second Language Acquisition Technical and Further Education Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages Trans-National Higher Education United Kingdom

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 The application of the theoretical framework in this study NB: 1. Discourse 1-Discourse of English language pedagogy (embodied in méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇) 2. Discourse 2-Discourse of foreign teachers as foreign friends (embodied in wài guó yǒu rén, 外国友人) 3. Discourse 3-Discourse of English writing (embodied in huáng jīn jù, 黄金句) 4. Languages and peoples’ experiences: Languages are the principle means through which students’ everyday lives and learning are experienced and performed.................................... 54 Fig. 3.2 PowerPoint slides in the participant Chinese English teachers’ classes................................................................................70 Fig. 4.1 Students’ expectations of foreign English teachers (1)..................... 79 Fig. 4.2 Students expectations of foreign English teachers (2)...................... 79

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List of Tables

Table 1.1 Binary opposites of Western and Confucian learners..................... 9 Table 2.1 The cooperation in delivery of English language courses between Chinese and Australian universities................................. 34 Table 2.2 Biographical data of students participating in interviews.............. 36 Table 2.3 Biographical data, qualifications and experience of Chinese English teacher participants......................................... 40 Table 2.4 Background information about foreign teacher participants.......... 40

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Chapter 1

Is This Your Idea of English Teaching?

Abstract  In this chapter, I describe the inspiration of this book and propose a theoretical framework, Hall’s (1997) “representation theory with a multilingual perspective”, in order to understand Chinese students’ learning experiences in an intercultural education program in China. Through this theoretical lens, I explore how people’s everyday experiences are constructed and mediated through language, discourse and identity, bringing to light the nuances of students’ “situated” learning experiences. This theoretical framework highlights graphic examples of how concepts are created in both Chinese and English, and is also a powerful tool for deconstructing dichotomies between China and the West. The aim of this book is, then, twofold: to show how a novel theoretical lens can help us to understand Chinese university students’ English language learning experiences in Sino-Australian programs in China, and to propose a new methodological and theoretical framework to explore how concepts and theories are constructed in Mandarin Chinese other than English. Thus the book expands research that challenges the supremacy of Western theories and knowledge.

The inspiration for this book about Chinese students’ lived experiences arose from my own experience as an ethnically Chinese (“local”) English teacher in a well-­ established Sino-Australian program (the Qunxi program, a pseudonym) at a “double first-class”1 Chinese university. Chinese students in Qunxi have access to both Chinese and foreign2 English teachers (wài jiào, 外教). Foreign English teachers 1  “Double first-class” refers to first-class university and first class disciplines. In an effort to make China an international higher education power, the Chinese authorities released “double-first class” initiative, which aims to ultimately build a number of world class universities and disciplines by the end of 2050. 2  Through the book, I use the term “foreign teachers” where necessary, because this is the title that Chinese participants use to refer to non-Chinese and English-speaking teachers from elsewhere. The literal translation from Chinese is “teachers from a country outside China”. This is also the term used in the Unit Guide and workbook compiled by the Australian partner university in the Qunxi program. The use of the word “foreign” does not mean I agree with its negative connotations.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_1

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1  Is This Your Idea of English Teaching?

teach in English speaking and writing courses, while locals teach English reading and listening courses. During my 10  years of working in the Qunxi program, I observed that Chinese university students often experience a sense of confusion in the classrooms of foreign English teachers; they seem to be motivated to learn but feel that they obtain little from these classes. In contrast, students in Qunxi make few comments on their local English teachers’ lessons, which may be because they regard these lessons as “normal”. The perplexity experienced by students in the Qunxi program is illustrated by stories of two participant students (Hua and Juan). Hua, a first-year university student, said that she could not make yīng yǔ zhēn zhèng de jìn bù, 英语真正的进步 (genuine improvements in English) in foreign English teachers’ lessons. She imagined that those lessons were for “making biscuits or milkshakes”, that is, for casual and play-like class activities. It appears that Hua had certain perceptions of foreign teachers that stem from her previous experiences with them: she had attended a foreign language junior middle school3 where Western4 English teachers organised light-hearted class activities and specific cultural activities (for instance, around Halloween and Christmas celebrations). For Hua, identification of foreign teachers’ as “lively” foreigners determined the pedagogical behaviours they were supposed to perform. Hua’s characterisations of the foreign English teachers raises the question of the definition of academic English writing as zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 正式的英语课 (formal English course). Here, “formal” means that academic writing classes are normal and serious classes without many in-class activities, which, according to Hua, should be delivered by Chinese English teachers. Although casual foreign English teachers teach fēi zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 非正式的英语课 (informal English speaking courses), Hua said that her spoken English did not improve much because these teachers did not give students specific tips on how to improve their spoken English. Juan, a second-year university student, was also dissatisfied with her foreign English teachers, because she believed that their classes are for wán ,玩 (play) and thus students cannot make shí zhì de jìn bù, 实质的进步 (substantive improvements) in them. The construction of foreign English teachers’ lessons as “play” is based on casual and game-centred methods of teaching. Juan said that foreign teachers used games to teach vocabulary and randomly chose individual students to practice speaking with. These lessons were not serious and no “real learning” (zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学) took place there, she could not make shí zhì de jìn bù, 实 质的进步 (substantive improvements) in these lessons. Juan explained that she spoke little in class and the teacher gave no constructive advice on how to improve her oral English, so her speaking skills scarcely improved. For English writing, Juan said that foreign teachers “do not teach enough” about how to write an essay, 3  In China, secondary school (or middle school, zhōng xué, 中学) is divided into two periods (3 years each): junior middle school (chū zhōng, 初中) and senior middle school (gāo zhōng, 高中). 4  I use “Western” to refer to people from cultures whose philosophies and educational principles are based on European Enlightenment traditions. The term “Western English teachers” is used to emphasise the different English teaching pedagogies and philosophies implemented by “foreign teachers”.

1  Is This Your Idea of English Teaching?

3

and what students were able to write was based on their previous stock of knowledge (referring mainly to grammar and vocabulary). The foreign English teachers’ instructions about academic essay writing did not meet Juan’s expectations and in comparison, she believed that substantive improvements of English could be achieved only through the accumulation of tangible knowledge in  local English teachers’ lessons. Hua and Juan’s comments on their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program are not uncommon among participant students. Most students are self-described motivated learners of English like Hua and Juan: Hua had a plan to pursue further study abroad and to experience life in an English-speaking country; Juan dreamed of working in an international corporation. However, many students in the Qunxi were lost in “milkshake teachers’ lessons” and disappointed about the effectiveness of the English-language teaching. Multiple questions arose for me: Why did students have such feelings about their foreign English teachers’ classes? How did they negotiate their English learning when faced with the different teaching styles of local Chinese and foreign English teachers? What could be improved in Chinese–foreign cooperative English education programs in China? These questions led me towards a formal study of Chinese learners of English at a tertiary-level Sino-Australian program in China. In transnational higher education programs, Chinese learners who are exposed to both Chinese and foreign cultures of teaching and learning, form a unique intercultural community in China. They are unique in two ways. First, though they are enrolled in transnational programs, they are still studying at a Chinese university and thus regulated by local institutions and social and educational realities. The most obvious trait of this reality is an exam-oriented pedagogy. It means that students, embedded in the local sociocultural and educational contexts, form their own perceptions of what makes good English pedagogy. Second, students in the joint programs can study with foreign English teachers, an opportunity not available to most university students in China. That is, they are exposed to Western English teaching methods that have been produced in different sociocultural contexts. Studying in an education setting with two different pedagogical cultures, this group of Chinese students is a rich resource for intercultural education study, but to date little is known about their lived experiences. I sought to understand the complex ways in which students perceive, construct and negotiate their English learning experiences in a transnational higher education program in China. Hua’s and Juan’s stories indicate that their English learning experiences were mediated through a number of Chinese pedagogical concepts about English language learning, such as yīng yǔ zhēn zhèng de jìn bù, 英语真正的进步 (genuine improvements in English), shì de yīng yǔ kè, 正式的英语课 (formal English courses), shí zhì de jìn bù, 实质的进步 (substantive improvements) zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (real learning) and wán,玩 (play). These Chinese concepts of English language pedagogy were produced within local sociocultural and educational contexts and provide the principle means through which students’ everyday learning is experienced and performed. By exploring how Chinese university students in Sino-­ Australian programs negotiate and mediate their English learning experiences

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1  Is This Your Idea of English Teaching?

through such local perceptions, this book aims to provide a novel theoretical lens through which to view the interrelationships between Chinese and Western concepts. I begin the first chapter with a description of my professional and personal perspectives on Chinese students’ intercultural learning experiences in China. My experiences gained first through learning English as a student myself and then through teaching English as a member of the academic staff in the Qunxi program, gave rise to my research question I explored: How do Chinese university students experience their English language education in joint Sino-Australian programs? Research to date into Chinese students’ intercultural learning experiences focuses mainly on factors that affect their learning behaviours and outcomes, particularly the large and obvious cultural factors. Thus, I present here two approaches to Chinese students: a “large culture approach” and a “small culture approach.” In the first, Chinese students have often been studied and compared with their Western counterparts, with reference to educational ideas developed in Western contexts. This approach leads to stereotyping of student responses. Despite continued appeals for small-culture based studies that investigate the situatedness of individual learners, scholars have not sufficiently discussed the methodological and theoretical approaches required to dismantle the prevailing “China/the West” dichotomy in the understanding of Chinese students’ learning behaviours. To address this, I use an approach based on Hall’s (1997a, 1997b, 1997c) “representation theory with a multilingual perspective”, to understand Chinese students’ learning experiences in an intercultural education program in China. This theoretical lens allows an exploration of how people’s everyday experiences are constructed and mediated through language, discourse and identity, bringing to light the nuances of situated learning. Representation theory with a multilingual perspective also provides graphic examples of how concepts are created in both languages (Chinese/English) and serves as a powerful tool for the deconstruction of the binarisms between China and the West. The aim of this book is, then, twofold: to show how a novel theoretical lens can be employed to understand Chinese university students’ English language learning experiences; and to propose a new methodological and theoretical framework that can be used to explore how concepts and theories are constructed in languages other than English. Thus the book contributes to the challenge to the supremacy of Western theories and knowledge. The dominance of Western TESOL theory in non-Western contexts is especially criticised because of its relevance to the research topic. Other studies of foreign English teachers in China, the research area of my study, have questioned the appropriateness of Western English language pedagogies in Chinese cultural and educational contexts (discussed in Sect. 1.4 below). I go further, to discuss how Chinese students’ intercultural learning experiences have been analysed in transnational higher education programs.

1.1  The Beginnings of the Study: From My Insider Perspective

5

1.1  T  he Beginnings of the Study: From My Insider Perspective The story begins with my recruitment into the Qunxi program as a tenured staff member in July 2005 after being awarded a Bachelor’s degree in English language from the same university. This was unusual, because a Master’s degree was usually required for teaching in Chinese universities at that time. My appointment was possible partly thanks to the rapid expansion of the Sino–Australian program, which created more demand for English teachers, and partly because my English proficiency was judged to be high enough to teach English language.5 This aptitude seems to have been the sole requirement for being an English teacher in the local context although my training was done in English, I did not learn how to teach it (I had attended only a few courses related to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages [TESOL] or pedagogy), and I had little field knowledge of language pedagogy. In the academic years6 between 2005 and 2009, I taught Year 1 students in the English reading course. In the same period, I studied for a Master’s degree in English Literature at the same university and was awarded the degree in July 2012. In March 2015, when I commenced my PhD study, I taught in the Year 2 English reading course. In retrospect, I see that my teaching followed the traditional approach to English teaching in China. My lessons focused on the transmission of yǔ yán diǎn, 语言点 (linguistic points)7 from the mandatory textbooks, including vocabulary, grammar and difficult linguistic expressions. Occasionally, I attempted to incorporate more interactive activities to make the lessons livelier. A large proportion of the students were highly motivated, but, for various reasons, including tedious class procedures, uninteresting texts and the high frequency of generally dull English lessons, their motivation did not always translate into appropriate learning behaviours. My experience was that my Chinese colleagues’ teaching practices, and their students’ responses, were more or less the same as mine. My role of as bān zhǔ rèn, 班主任8 gave me greater access to students’ thinking and opinions about English education in the Qunxi program. The local English 5  The testing regime for English proficiency was rigorous. First, all applicants were required to write a themed English essay; in my selection round, half of the applicants were dismissed after this test. The remaining half (about 20) were invited to a face-to-face interview with a native English-speaking program manager from the partner Australian university. The top three candidates (including me), ranked according to proficiency, were recruited into the program as tenured staff members. 6  In China, the university academic year starts on the 1st of September and ends on the 1st of July. One academic year normally consists of two semesters. 7  This is the expression commonly used among local English teachers. It refers to the discrete language knowledge that English teachers impart. 8  “bān zhǔ rèn” (班主任) means “head teachers”. The main difference between head teacher and subject teacher lies in the head teacher’s extra responsibility for monitoring and managing students.

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reading teachers are also bān zhǔ rèn, 班主任 of their groups, which means that in addition to teaching the subject, they must keep an eye on student’ learning behaviour, collect students’ comments on English pedagogical practices, and communicating with fǔ dǎo yuán, 辅导员9 about their performance. In my role as a bān zhǔ rèn, 班主任, I had many in-depth discussions with students. These searching but still ­informal conversations revealed that some students were not very satisfied with foreign English teachers’ efficacy and commented that they had learned very little, if anything, from them. Some students felt ambivalence towards their foreign English teachers; they had high expectations but felt disoriented in their classes. Students were not very satisfied with their overall English improvement; unfortunately, many reported that their performance in English examination tests (CET 4/610) had actually deteriorated after the two-year intensive English education component of the program. My observation was that students’ negative feelings and comments were hidden from official view, seldom articulated overtly in the formal evaluation surveys. I found myself wondering: why significant investment in English education in Sino-Australian programs seemed to be failing to generate quality experiences for the learners? My own experience as a student of Western English teachers was another motivating factor for this study. The English I learned prior to university was what I call “deaf and dumb English” (yǎ bā yīng yǔ, 哑巴英语), because I seldom spoke English myself and understood very little spoken English. The first Western teacher I had at university (where I enrolled as an English major) was from the United States. She taught us oral English skills and used the prescribed textbook New person to person (Richards et al., 1996). The lessons were filled with classroom activities (for instance, role-plays, conversations, and games), and were so casual that I felt it was not a normal or proper course; I was surprised that such a course formed part of a formal university qualification. In Year 3, a foreign English teacher taught the English writing course. One occasion is still fresh in my mind: the teacher told a long story with great enthusiasm, and as a diligent student I paid close attention to every detail of it. The teacher had almost lost her voice by the end, and I was exhausted by listening to a foreign language for so long. I was also confused about the point of the story telling, and my classmates seemed equally tired and puzzled. Finally, even at the end of the course, I still could not clearly grasp the logic of the Western teachers’ pedagogical choices and I felt that I had not learned much from her English writing lessons, even though I scored 90% for the course. Later experiences of teaching in an Australian university, combined with my English teaching and learning experiences in a Chinese university, gave me an acute sense of the differing perceptions of English language pedagogies in intercultural 9  “fǔ dǎo yuán” (辅导员) at Chinese universities are in charge of student daily matters such as organising meetings for ideological education and assessing students’ applications to join the Chinese Communist Party. 10  CET 4/6 refers to College English Test band 4 and 6. CET is a nationally administered high-­ stakes English test for non-English majors at Chinese colleges and universities. It is commonly assumed that higher CET results increase graduates’ competitive edge in the job market.

1.2  Representations of Chinese Students

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contexts. For example, I taught one unit in a TESOL Master’s program at an Australian university, while studying for my PhD; the students were of different ages and from different countries. The contextualised perceptions of language pedagogy are best exemplified in one Australian student’s comments on a video of a “model English lesson” (yīng yǔ shì fàn kè, 英语示范课), delivered by an English teacher from a Chinese senior middle school. The Australian student criticised the logic of the lesson and the classroom procedures, claiming that it made no sense to him. His remarks were intriguing, because the Chinese students I was teaching in China, and I, used the Chinese word luó jí (逻辑), translated as “logic” in English, to critique Western teachers’ English lessons. It was clear that the Australian student’s conception of the pedagogical logic that should underpin language lessons was different from that of Chinese students. Thus my teaching and learning experiences in intercultural settings led me to formally investigate a unique group Chinese learners of English, studying in the Sino-Australian joint programs in China. On the one hand, their learning experiences and perceptions are embedded in, and thus intertwined with, local social cultural and institutional contexts; on the other, they are exposed to a new set of thinking and ideations that derive from a different social and historical context. This book explores the ways in which Chinese university students perceive, construct and negotiate the two different mind-sets in the local context.

1.2  Representations of Chinese Students With over 1.3 billion people in China, education in China serves the largest population in the world. Despite the varieties and variables among such a massive body of students, Chinese students have often been researched as a homogenised group with shared cultural attributes. Here, I make no distinction between young and adult students, because my purpose is to show how Chinese students as a national whole are represented in international and intercultural contexts. As Ryan (2010) notes, early Western literature on Chinese international students has tended to describe Chinese learners as culturally lacking something in comparison with their Western counterparts. This leads to the “deficit model” of Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC), which explores the influences of cultural values on Chinese learners and their learning behaviours. To counter this deficit model, a “surplus model” of CHC was proposed (Ryan, 2010, p. 47) that aimed to inquire into the merits of CHC and to explain the paradox of Chinese learners. In essence, these two models use the “large culture” framework (Clark & Gieve, 2006, p.  57) to look at cultural deficiency and proficiency relating to Chinese students’ learning. These two polarised views, as Ryan (2010) argues, create stereotypes of Chinese learners and are thus not helpful for mutual understandings between Chinese and Western systems. To address this issue, some research has argued for the deconstruction of the large culture approach and consequent cultural dichotomisation of Chinese and Western

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learners (Clark & Gieve, 2006; Heng, 2018; Mathias et al., 2013; Ryan, 2010; Ryan & Louie, 2005). Such an approach is referred to as the “small culture approach”. Clark and Gieve (2006) explained the complexity of the constructions and deconstructions of stereotypes of Chinese students. They note that despite increasing concerns about inaccurate pictures of Chinese learners created by the large culture approach, it is rarely perceived as incomplete. Instead of examining the specificity of contextualised data, empirical studies have tended to resort to the large cultural explanations for generalisations (Clark & Gieve, 2006, p. 57). It can be seen that, on the one hand, in order to uncover the reasons for certain learning styles and behaviours among Chinese learners, empirical studies most often seek explanations using a large national culture perspective, and thus involve generalisation (Parris-­Kidd & Barnett, 2011; Wen & Clément, 2003); on the other hand, some researchers challenge this type of deconstruction of Chinese learners, because contextualised data are not taken into account appropriately in the empirical research. This large culture view reinforces “inaccurate” and “incomplete” understandings of Chinese learners (Clark & Gieve, 2006; Ryan, 2010; Ryan & Louie, 2007), and Ryan (2010) argues that stereotypical views persist in the literature on CHC and Chinese students. Next, I describe in detail large culture and small culture approaches to representations of Chinese learners.

1.2.1  “Large Culture” Versus “Small Culture” Approach As explained above, two models ensue from the large culture approach—the deficit model and surplus model. In the deficit model, Chinese learners are perceived as products of Confucian Heritage Culture (Hu, 2002; Parris-Kidd & Barnett, 2011; Wen & Clément, 2003). Studies from this perspective are primarily conducted in intercultural contexts in which Western educators have direct experiences teaching Chinese students. In comparisons of the learning behaviours of Western and Chinese students, the latter are portrayed as having specific characteristics that can be attributed to Confucian heritage. Chinese learners are described as passive, obedient, unwilling to participate in classroom activities and reluctant to express their opinions publicly (Ballard & Clanchy, 1991); they are alleged to rely heavily on memorisation and rote learning and they lack critical thinking skills because the Chinese cultural values of education are incompatible with underlying notions of teaching and learning in Western cultures of learning (Atkinson, 1997; Carson, 1992). A “culture of learning”, as defined by Cortazzi and Jin (1996), is a set of culturally transmitted expectations, beliefs and values about what constitutes good teaching and learning and what teaching styles, approaches and methods are considered acceptable. By comparing the different notions of these concepts between China and Western countries, researchers offer a large culture panacea for related issues such as cultural resistance to communicative language teaching (CLT) in China and cultural conflicts between Chinese students and Western teachers (Hu, 2002; Rao, 2006; Simpson, 2008).

1.2  Representations of Chinese Students

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When Chinese learners are evaluated by Western researchers, they are often compared with their Western counterparts, using conceptions that developed in Western social and educational contexts. As Clark and Gieve (2006) note, “much of the evidence produced for the way Chinese students behave in classroom settings has been drawn from reports and perceptions by Western instructors, thus filtered through their own values, expectations and standards” (p.63). Ryan (2010) summarised the binary opposites used in the literature in this area. Table 1.1 illustrates how both Western and Asian education values are portrayed as static, homogenous, exclusive and definable opposites in the literature (Ryan, 2010, p. 43). Hu’s (2002) discussion of the cultural resistance to communicative language teaching in China also resorts to the large culture explanation. His argument has been widely cited (715 citations as of 04/09/2018) as an interpretation of the Chinese culture of learning (Cheng & Dörnyei, 2007; McDonough et  al., 2013), and as exemplifying how Chinese learners and pedagogical practices can be explained culturally in relation to four groups of assumptions about: education, teachers and teaching, learners and learning, and learning strategies. Hu’s comprehensive interpretations of cultural resistance to the Western approach to teaching (CLT) provide a representative example of how the way in which Chinese students learn is determined by different aspects of their Confucian Heritage Culture. They also show how Chinese learning styles are supposedly culturally incompatible with Western approaches and Chinese learners’ attempts to cope with them are presented from the deficit perspective. The aim of the surplus model is to explore the positive features of CHC and thus to debunk the paradox of Chinese learners, which is that Chinese learners can outperform their Western counterparts in mathematics, science and reading despite unfavourable learning conditions, such as large classes, learning through expository methods and in poorly equipped classrooms (Hau & Ho, 2010; Lee, 1996). In other words, it aims to explore how apparently passive and obedient Chinese learners can still achieve outstanding academic performances (Kember, 2016). Several books about Chinese learners (Chan & Rao, 2009a; Watkins & Biggs, 1996, 2001) draw on cultural, psychological, contextual and pedagogical lenses to investigate this paradox, arguing that Western educational conceptions (as presented Table 1.1) are Table 1.1  Binary opposites of Western and Confucian learners Western Deep learners Independent learners Critical thinking Student-centred learning Adversarial stance Argumentative learners Achievement of the individual Constructing new knowledge

Confucian “Surface” or rote learners Dependence on the teachers “Follow the master” Respect for the teacher Harmony Passive learners Achievement of the group Respect for historical texts

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not necessarily suitable for analysing how Chinese students learn. This model has led to a number of studies of how learning and pedagogy occur and are understood in Chinese social, cultural and institutional contexts (Chan & Rao, 2009a; Watkins & Biggs, 1996, 2001). Biggs and Watkins (1996) attempted to refute the dichotomised portrayal of Chinese learners by probing various perspectives of CHC that are conducive to academic learning and grouped them into four categories. The first is “memorising and understanding: the role of repetition” because Chinese-learner-as-rote-learner is the central and most obvious case of “cultural astigmatism” (Biggs & Watkins, 1996, p. 270). They argue that memorising is not rote learning but a route to deep understanding; memorisation and understanding have been shown to be intertwined in Chinese students’ learning processes (Marton et al., 1996). Thus, while memorising may not create understanding, it can be a useful precondition (Biggs & Watkins, 1996, p. 271; Kember, 2016). Therefore, it may be inappropriate to label Chinese learners who use memorisation strategies as rote learners (Mathias et al., 2013). The second misconception about Chinese learners is that they are mostly extrinsically motivated. Westerners see intrinsic motivation as the precursor to deep learning strategies; however, for Chinese students, deep learning strategies may be triggered by a range of motivational factors: personal ambition, material rewards, family honour and interest (Biggs & Watkins, 1996, p. 273). The third set of binary terms is “collective versus individual orientations” (Biggs & Watkins, 1996, p. 274). Under the influence of collectivism, students from CHC tend to collaborate in assignments and other academic activities, and this collaborative learning environment promotes deeper learning. The last category is “internal attributions: controllable versus uncontrollable” (Biggs & Watkins, 1996, p.275). Westerners perceive natural ability as the determinant of success, whereas Chinese people place high value on controllable hard work and endurance; for Chinese students, success is within their own control and so they tend to work hard. The paradox is also examined from the teachers’ point of view (Watkins & Biggs, 2001). Classes in mainland China are large and exam-oriented, classroom interaction tends to be teacher-dominated and involves the participation of only a small number of students; most students are apparently passive in the classroom (Shi et al., 2019; Su, 2019). However, as Biggs and Watkins (2001) have observed, academic mechanisms in Chinese classes are different from Western contexts, and much more is happening than is immediately apparent. In Chinese classes, students listen intently when teachers deliver knowledge or interact with only a few students. This is described as “concentrated listening”, which involves active if convert participation in the class; teachers’ interaction with a few students can be “vicarious learning” (Biggs & Watkins, 2001, p. 285) for the other students in a large class. Moreover, Chinese teachers use “careful planning, timed questioning, and associated activity” (Biggs & Watkins, 2001, p. 285) to allow students to be active even in large classes. Thus, they question Western pedagogical notions that a student-­ centred teaching method is necessary to ensure students’ active engagement in the lesson.

1.2  Representations of Chinese Students

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Chan and Rao (2009a) also discussed the paradox of Chinese learners against a background of wide-ranging socioeconomic changes, advances in educational goals and pedagogy, and the development of technology-assisted learning in China. They argue that both teachers’ and students’ ideas about learning are influenced by the social, cultural, educational and institutional contexts, and “in particular the value and belief systems in societies in which they are embedded” (Rao and Chan 2009, p. 18). As Chan and Rao note, their own and Watkins and Biggs’ (1996, 2001) studies of Chinese learners all adopt a systems perspective to understand learning and pedagogical practices in China. A systems perspective posits that learning is situated and should be studied in specific sociocultural contexts in order to understand its nature and complexity; it highlights “the need to consider the learner in context rather than either the learner or the context in isolation” (Chan & Rao, 2009b, p. 316). The emphasis on the interaction between students and the context aligns with the small culture approach advocated by other researchers (see Heng, 2018; Mathias et al., 2013). A small culture model, as Holliday (1999) says, seeks to interpret the emergent and cohesive behaviours of small social groups and activities without cultural, ethnic or national stereotyping: Small culture discourse accommodates difference in terms of social status, gender, and difference which is the result of geography (rural, regional, national); it is concerned with individuality, and locates the learners as negotiating with particular others in the class, with the teacher and with content knowledge. In addition, it emphasises dynamic processes, ways of interacting and context creation, and investigates multiple allegiances, which are sometimes in conflict. It is more concerned with agency than structure and observes the performance of adopted identities. (Clark & Gieve, 2006, pp. 68–69)

A small culture approach highlights individual differences among students and the dynamic processes they negotiate in their learning in situated contexts. “Small culture” explanations based on individual students’ behaviours are thus required in order to do justice to the complexity and diversity of Chinese learners. The application of a small culture approach is useful for the deconstruction of binary oppositions between Chinese and Western students (Heng, 2018; Mathias et  al., 2013; Ryan, 2010; Wang, 2013; Wang & Gao, 2008). To sum up, by showing the mechanisms of classroom teaching and learning in Chinese social, cultural and educational settings, the surplus model literature counters the deficit model and demonstrates how teaching and learning are perceived and carried out in the Chinese context. As mentioned, Western approaches to learning with its primary “surface/deep learners” distinction (Biggs, 1987) and Western conceptions of learning that distinguish between superficial memorisation and understanding (Marton et al., 1993) do not explain what is going on in a Chinese context. These findings question the legitimacy of applying Western conceptions to the Chinese context and indeed, transcend the dichotomy of Chinese and Western conceptions. Despite that, this surplus model literature has not sufficiently discussed the methodological and theoretical approaches that can begin to dismantle the China/Western dichotomisation in theorisation. In addition, like the deficit model, the surplus model has followed the large culture approach, and individual learners’

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situated learning has received limited attention. A small culture approach, however, seeks to shine a light on individual students and to understand the dynamics between learners and multiple others in the class, including teachers, content knowledge, context and identity. In the light of small culture approach, this study applies representation theory with a multilingual perspective to explore Chinese students’ lived learning experiences in transnational higher education programs in China. It seeks to investigate the ways that students’ perceptions and negotiations of intercultural English learning experiences are shaped by the complex interaction between situated discourses. By showing the nuances of Chinese students’ learning behaviours in their local contexts, this work destructs the binary labels of Chinese and Western learners. In the next section, I explain the innovative theoretical framework adopted here.

1.2.2  R  epresentation Theory with a Multilingual Perspective: A Nuanced Approach The specific framing applied here consists of Stuart Hall’s (1997a, 1997b, 1997c) representation theory and Michael Singh’s (2015) post-monolingual research methodology. Representation theory presupposes that the social world, as we understand and act within it, is understood through the lens of language and culture. Language here is not merely the medium through which meaning is conveyed but rather is an embodied, reflexive and conceptual resource in our representation of the world. Here, then, I am concerned with how discourses embodied in language play out in people’s construction of social realities, and I apply a discursive approach to representation. That is, I explore the ways in which people’s perceptions of the world are shaped by competing discourses embedded in particular social and historical contexts (Foucault, 1980). Hall’s representation theory reflects the sociocultural views of language that several researchers (Gee, 2008; Kramsch, 1998; Pennycook, 2010) have developed. Sociocultural views of language stress the inextricable relations between language and culture and foreground the ways in which language is produced by local social, cultural, and historical practices and activities (Pennycook, 2010). The interdependence between language and culture in making sense of the world is elaborated in Kramsch’s explanation of linguistic relativity: speakers of different languages sometimes do not understand each other because they do not share the same culture (the same conceptual system), that is, a product of shared experiences within a community. Hence, to appreciate language in a particular social context, people need to consider the “other stuff” (Gee, 2008, p. 1) as well as language, including cultural models, perspectives on experience, power and politics, and values and attitudes. The language together with the “other stuff” is what Gee (2008) calls “Discourse” (with a capital “D”). According to Gee, each Discourse has its own taken-for-­ granted and tacit theories about what count as “normal” and “right ways” of

1.3  Western TESOL in Non-Western Contexts

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thinking and being in the world. People are members of multiple Discourses that “often do not represent consistent and compatible values” (Gee, 2008, p. 4) and thus they live and breathe the conflicts of various Discourses. From this theoretical perspective, the Chinese words, concepts and metaphors that participant students used to describe their English language teachers’ pedagogical practices are the product of the local sociocultural and institutional contexts, and they embody the normal and appropriate ways of thinking and behaving in the situated discourses. Thus, the different discourses that underpin the participant students’ conversations are revealed as tacitly interacting with each other in complex ways in the representations of their English learning experiences. Participants’ conceptualisations of English language pedagogy in both languages (English and Chinese) have brought to light the multilingual perspectives of representation theory and this is theorised with reference to Singh’s (2015) post-­ monolingual research methodology. Post-monolingual research methodology proposes that concepts, metaphors and modes of critical thinking in languages other than English can be used to construct theory in a globalised world. That is, the Chinese concepts and metaphors about English language pedagogy that emerge from the situated contexts should be integrated into theories of TESOL pedagogy. Representation theory with a multilingual lens brings lived experiences to the fore and explores why people perceive and behave in the way they do in specific sociocultural contexts. In this study, it brings to light the nuances of Chinese university students’ intercultural learning experiences, framed and negotiated within specific institutional conditions, local sociocultural contexts and the culture and the constructions of foreign Others. An enhanced understanding of Chinese learners’ experiences in their local contexts is of great significance, in the critique of the homogenised and binary constructions of Chinese and Western learners prevalent in the extant literature. It is also a valuable theoretical tool with which to examine the relationship between Chinese and Western conceptions and to challenge further the privileging of Western theories and knowledge, particularly the use of Western TESOL theories in non-Western contexts (China in this case).

1.3  Western TESOL in Non-Western Contexts Kumaravadivelu’s (1994, 2001) notion of post-method pedagogy marks a shift away from conventional searches for an optimal teaching method regardless of contexts. It facilitates context-sensitive English education, based on a thorough understanding of local sociocultural, linguistic and political particularities, and refigures the relationship between theorisers and practitioners by empowering teachers to construct their own theories of practice. Several researchers have adopted the post-­ method in researching TESOL pedagogy. Suresh Canagarajah, too, challenges the unquestioned application of Western TESOL theories and knowledge to non-Western contexts (Canagarajah, 1999, 2000, 2005). He often adopts a socially-situated orientation to research into non-Western

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communities and thus brings the lived experiences of the periphery to the forefront. For instance, in the light of critical pedagogy and grounded theory, his influential book, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching (1999), describes classroom realities in the Tamil communities of Sri Lanka and examines the values and assumptions underpinning local educational practices. By reporting on pedagogical insights from periphery communities, he challenges the privileging of Western knowledge in non-Western contexts. Similarly, the appropriateness of Western TESOL theories for China has been questioned by Lu and Ares (2015) in the light of Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital. In Hong Kong, Angel Lin (2013) has proposed plurilingual pedagogies11 to challenge the dominance of monolingual Western TESOL knowledge in Asian contexts. Lin et al. (2002) used their own autobiographic narratives of English learning and teaching to illustrate how the teaching of English can and should be informed by people’s lived experiences in varied sociocultural contexts. Thus, they proposed that the question for the TESOL discipline about what constitutes good pedagogy should be rephrased as “what counts as good pedagogy in specific sociocultural contexts?” An important issue they raise is the ongoing dominance of mainstream TESOL pedagogy. They argue that most published knowledge about TESOL derives from experiences in English-speaking societies, such as the UK, US, Canada and Australia, and thus may not be applicable to the East, because appropriate pedagogy must be informed and constructed by particular sociocultural contexts. Drawing on Chen’s (2010) notion of “Asia as method”, Lin (2012) further suggests that critical educators and researchers need to regain autonomy and confidence when constructing theories and knowledge born from their local contexts, and to explore innovative ways to develop their critical curriculum and pedagogies suitable for local communities (p. 175). The hegemony of Western theories in the TESOL area is summarised in Slethaug’s (2010) argument that “intellectual colonialism” (p. 35) exists in the globalisation of education: theories from education-exporting countries dominate, whereas pedagogical strengths and models represented by the local communities of the students and teachers are ignored. The question of how to challenge the dominance of Western TESOL theories has attracted considerable research attention, but so far theoretical discussions about the ways TESOL concepts and theories are constructed in language and culture other than English is scarce. My study contributes to research in this area by proposing a theoretical framework that researchers from diverse contexts can use with their own social, cultural, and historical resources in the process of knowledge and theory construction. As I show, the dubious legitimacy of Western TESOL theories in non-Western contexts is well-illustrated in the case of foreign teachers teaching English in China.

 Plurilingual pedagogies refer to strategic use of local linguistic and cultural resources to scaffold students’ learning in language and content classrooms.

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1.4  Foreign Teachers of English in China

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1.4  Foreign Teachers of English in China To provide a better understanding of foreign English teachers’ experiences, I first briefly describe English teaching and learning in China. Working in such a different context, many of these teachers have experienced pedagogical dissonance, because they have been trained in contexts where CLT is the norm.

1.4.1  The Role and Status of English Education in China English language has taken on a high official status in Chinese education; it is a subject that provides Chinese students with a key to the door to higher education, whose entrances are all guarded by examinations (Cheng, 2008; Jin & Cortazzi, 2006). The Gaokao12 English exam and College English Test (CET) 4/6 are the two standardised English tests for Chinese students, administered nationwide by the National College English Testing Committee on behalf of the higher education department of the Ministry of Education (MoE) in China. The stakes associated with these examinations are extremely high. At senior middle schools, English, as one of three key subjects in the Gaokao exam (the other are Chinese and mathematics) as such plays a pivotal role in students’ admission to universities. The CET 4/6 is linked to teachers’ evaluations, students’ future job prospects and the prestige of a university education (Cheng, 2008). The exams are characterised by the testing of discrete linguistic items and a focus on English reading and writing skills (Jin et al., 2005; Li, 2014; Su, 2019). As Li (2014) notes, the CET mainly tests knowledge of grammar and vocabulary (p. 295). Consequently, university English teachers focus mainly on teaching these discrete linguistic items in order to prepare students for the CET (Qiao et al., 2010; Su, 2019). Though the CET has a listening component and a speaking test for high achievers, listening and speaking skills have not received due attention in teaching practices (Du, 2012; Su, 2019). Due to the continuous expansion of English in Chinese education, the MoE has been engaged in intensive English language planning at all levels since 200013 (Hu, 2005; Xu & Fan, 2017). All policy documents for English teaching in elementary schools, middle schools and universities advocate task-based, learner-centred and communicative teaching methods aimed at enhancing students’ communication skills in English (Liu et al., 2016). Yet, despite all the guidelines and recommended pedagogical practices, research indicates that it is difficult to integrate the recommendations into classroom teaching practices (Du, 2012; Hu, 2005; Li, 2014; Shi

 Gaokao is the college/university entrance exam in China. It is regarded as the most important exam nationwide. 13  The MoE has issued curriculum policies to guide English education, including English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education (2011 edition); College English Curriculum Requirements (2007 edition). 12

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et al. 2019). The factors that have been shown to slow implementation are related to curriculum design, textbooks, assessment, teachers’ limited proficiency, and large class sizes. For instance, Li and Baldauf (2011) argue that the testing system is a major obstacle to the implementation of the 2001 English curriculum for primary and secondary schools in China; they claim that unless Gaokao-driven education policy is changed, no real changes in English teaching and learning in China can occur. Similar findings have recently been reported about university English education. Research results suggest that pedagogical methods in English have remained unchanged for years and that teacher-centred teaching still prevails in English classes (Pei, 2015). Due to these various constraints, it appears that English curriculum policies have brought about minimal changes to approaches to teaching English in China (see Fan, 2010; Pan & Block, 2011). In the exam-oriented testing system in China, English teaching and learning methods are characterised by fast-paced teacher-centred instructions and the concentrated attention of students (Jin & Cortazzi, 2006; Liu, 2020). These methods are related to the assumed roles of teachers and learners in language learning. Chinese teachers believe in the role of modelling in language learning, so they demonstrate “a model of authoritative learning, expert knowledge and skills, and moral behaviours” (Jin & Cortazzi, 2006, p. 10) and how to learn English in a classroom setting. Hence, the main role for learners is to listen carefully and try to learn and internalise the models. The method for English teaching is thus mainly teacher-dominated, form-based and expository, and the learning method consists of memorising words, expressions and accurate structures transmitted by teachers and then trying to put these “good models” into practice (Cortazzi & Jin, 1996; Li, 2014; Liu, 2020; Liu et  al., 2016; Rao, 2006). Many researchers argue that such traditional teaching methods are incompatible with enhancing Chinese students’ English skills, as advocated by the national educational policies (Hu, 2002; Li, 2014; Rao, 2006).

1.4.2  Foreign Teachers of English in China Foreign English teachers teaching in China have mostly been researched from cultural (Li, 1999; Simpson, 2008)), pedagogical (Shi, 2009) and identity perspectives (Stanley, 2010, 2013). For instance, Li’s (1999) doctoral thesis details disparities in pedagogical and role expectations between expatriate teachers and Chinese university students and argued that the disparities derive from differing cultural values and beliefs about language teaching and learning. Inevitably, these disparities lead to misunderstandings between the teachers and the students, who interpret each other’s behaviours from within their own cultural and educational paradigms. Similarly, Shi’s (2009) research findings indicated that there is a disparity between Western English teachers and Chinese university students about the efficacy of Western teaching approaches in the China–West “contact zone”. Shi reports that native-­ speaker (NS) instructors in English writing, influenced by their educational and training experiences in Western institutions, attempt to develop students’ critical

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thinking and direct Western writing style. These attempts encounter resistance from the students, because they do not begin from knowledge about local English tests and students’ prior English learning experiences. Phiona Stanley (2013) examined foreign teachers’ teaching experiences and their negotiation of identity in oral English classes at a Chinese university and concluded that foreign teachers  and students have disparate assumptions about language and language learning. Foreign teachers see language as a holistic system that can learned primarily  through meaningful communication, whereas Chinese students regard language as a set of discrete and quantifiable items. These differing views translate in the classroom into different implicit theories about language learning—interpersonal/functional versus structural, macro skill development versus acquisition of language items. As a result, Chinese students misinterpret foreign teachers’ outward pedagogical behaviours, which gives rise to the notion that foreign teachers are incompetent, but more “fun” than Chinese English teachers. This intercultural miscommunication is theorised by Stanley with reference to symbolic interactionism.14 The Occidentalist construction of foreigners (taken up below) as “fun”, in turn puts pressure on Western teachers to perform in fun ways rather than focus on effective teaching, which is detrimental to the construction of their professional identity (Stanley, 2013). Stanley’s study further suggests that rather than enhancing cultural communication, Westerner–Chinese contact consolidates cultural stereotypes. One recurrent theme in the above-mentioned studies is that expatriate English teachers, trained in Western pedagogies, encounter mismatches with Chinese students, who are situated in a different social and cultural context. As Stanley (2010) notes, for most NS teachers, “English teaching training was undertaken in contexts in which CLT is the norm” (p. 77). CLT refers to both processes and goals in English language learning (Savignon, 2002, p. 1). In language learning, a variety of communicative activities such as role play, games, debates, and group discussions, are developed to get learners to use the target language for meaningful communication. The essential goal of CLT is communicative competence, which refers to learners’ capacities to interact with other speakers in meaningful communication rather than to memorise discrete grammatical and lexical items (Savignon, 2002). Learners’ communication needs guide the learning process, so class activities should focus on learners’ real-life communications (Hiep, 2007). The aim of CLT language learning is “real communication rather than simply … learning the vocabulary, grammar, and structure of a language” (Hiep, 2007, p. 194).Therefore, the pedagogical styles of Western teachers, who are process-oriented and who design classroom activities to engage students in the use of English language and to develop their critical thinking skills (Zhang & Watkins, 2007), may not be fully appreciated by Chinese learners.

 Symbolic interactionism posits that people interpret the outward symbolising behaviours through the lens of their own symbolic system.

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Foreign English teachers in China are involved in the debate about native-speaker (NS) and non-native speaker (NNS) English teachers,15 which is also an integral part of my study. Distinguishing between NS and NNS teachers has recently been critiqued as less than useful because it creates a binary division that requires deconstruction in a globalised world, where such distinctions are increasingly questionable. As Moussu and Llurda (2008) state, linguistic discussion about English language has been used to critique the dichotomy between NS and NNS speakers from perspectives of Anglo-centrism and linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992), World Englishes, and its lack of contextualisation. An alternative is to propose other conceptual terms for native and non-native constructs. Selvi (2014) notes that scholars have proposed terms, such as “language expert”, “English-using fellowship”, “multicompetence speaker” and “competent language user”, to replace the term “native speaker” (p. 580). A third approach is to highlight the egalitarian values that both NS and NNS teachers bring to language teaching and thus to problematise the dichotomy from professional perspectives (Braine, 2004; Ma, 2009, 2012; Medgyes, 1992, 1994). Despite increasing awareness of the values of both categories of teachers, Ahmar Mahboob (2010) points out that conceptualisations of NS/NNS represent a hidden belief that privileges NS models in English language teaching. As Selvi (2014) notes, this is primarily due to the prevalence of native-speakerism (Holliday, 2005) and the native speaker fallacy (Phillipson, 1992). Native-speakerism is “an established belief that native-speaking teachers represent a Western culture from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology” (Holliday, 2005, p.  6); the native speaker fallacy is that the ideal teacher of English is a native speaker of the language. This accounts for discriminatory practices in the hiring of English teachers in schools and in workplaces (Medgyes, 2001). Existing literature on foreign English teachers in China reveals that subtleties of the contact between Western English teachers and Chinese students have not been fully revealed. I explore these subtleties in this book by examining how Chinese students themselves negotiate and conceptualise disjunctive English learning experiences in the context of Sino–Australian programs in China.

 In this book, I use “NS teachers” to refer to teachers whose first language is English, and “NNS teachers” for whom English is a foreign language. This is not to further a dichotomy that has been critiqued for its ambiguities and lack of meaning in the debates of the “ownership of English”, but to delineate clearly the two groups in this particular study who differ in terms of cultures of education as well as geographical and cultural origins.

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1.5  E  xperiences of Chinese Learners in Transnational Higher Education Programs in China The past two decades have witnessed a rapid growth of transnational higher education in China against the background of globalisation of education. The students in these programs must negotiate foreign and Chinese cultures of learning, and exploration of their intercultural learning experiences is an emerging area of research.

1.5.1  The Rise of Transnational Higher Education in China Globalisation is a term used to describe and explain the political, social, cultural, economic, educational and technological changes that cross national spaces (Altbach, 2004; Held et al., 2000). Cross-border mobility is one of its key features, and the flow of educational resources, academic staff, students and services among different countries and regions has become one of the major strands of globalisation. “Transnational higher education” (TNHE) has emerged as a product of the globalisation of education. As defined by the Council of Europe/UNESCO (2002, “Code of Good Practice in the Provision of Transnational Education”), TNHE is a form of education “in which learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based”. It is a highly contentious field of study, with unique features. Different from traditional international programs for students who travel to another country to pursue further study, students in transnational programs, called “offshore international students” (see Wallace & Dunn, 2013), live in their home country, but have access to foreign teachers and different teaching and learning styles; transnational programs are termed “offshore programs” (see Chapman & Pyvis, 2006a; Knight, 2005) or “transnational joint programs” (see Yang, 2008). The number of TNHE programs in China has grown substantially since the late 1990s, as the result of a series of government policies (Wang, 2014; Yang, 2014).16 Chinese–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools17 (CFCRS) rapidly became a pillar of the education system. By March 2016, there were 2403 CFCRS institutions and projects in China, accommodating about 560,000 students, with a variety of degree awarding strategies (Lin, 2016). This rapid expansion of TNHE is a response  The promulgation of the national Contemporary Regulation on Operation of Higher Education in Cooperation with Foreign Partners (1995), issued by the former State Commission of Education (renamed Ministry of Education in 1998), served as a prologue to the internationalisation of education in China. China’s MoE issued other policies to regulate the operation of CFCRS in China, including Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on Chinese–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (2003) and Opinions on How to Further Enhance the Quality Assurance on CFCRS (2013). 17  This is an overarching official term for transnational education in China. It includes Chinese-­ foreign cooperative programs at both tertiary and school-levels.

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to the high social demands for higher education, the influence of economic globalisation and the World Trade Organization, and the perceived need to increase China’s global influence through the internationalisation of education (Huang, 2003, 2007; Wang, 2014; Yang, 2008). The quality of TNHE programs in China has attracted growing academic attention (Dai & Garcia, 2019; Hu & Willis, 2017; Pyvis, 2011). While there are multiple definitions of quality in relation to education, I base my discussion on “quality as satisfying the client” (McBurnie & Ziguras, 2006, p. 107), where the client is the student rather than the Chinese education institutions, because the “nature and quality of the student experience will constitute a crucial perspective in discussions of educational quality assurance” (Chapman & Pyvis, 2013, p. xvi). In contrast, quality assurance in transnational higher education has often been discussed at macro policy level (Hou et al., 2014; Mok & Han, 2016). As Karen Smith (2010) notes, without practical measures to implement well-structured proposals at the micro level, policies for ensuring students’ experiences can only demonstrate good intentions; the responsibility for quality assurance falls to individual institutions and their teaching staff (Mok & Xu, 2008). This is why many researchers have raised the issue of appropriateness of curricula and pedagogy in transnational education programs imported from foreign countries (Henderson & Pearce, 2011; Leask, 2004; Ziguras, 2008). In order to assess the quality of education, there is an urgent need to examine real classroom teaching and learning in transnational programs and see how the programs operate at micro levels. Australia is one of the largest providers of education services in China, along with the UK and the US (Hou et al., 2014). While the exact numbers of offshore international students enrolled in Australian universities are not available, it is predicted that, by 2025, more than 436,000 students will be enrolled in Australian university programs delivered offshore, which will account for 44% of Australian international higher education; in 2013, all 38 Australian public universities offered transnational programs (Chapman & Pyvis, 2013, p. xv). Offshore programs are of paramount importance to the Australian education service industry. China is a major partner in Australian offshore programs. According to Australian Education International (AEI, 2018), China has contributed the most international students to Australia’s higher education sector for many years, both within Australia and offshore. Sino–Australian joint programs in China have therefore become increasingly significant for educational enterprises in both China and Australia. An exploration of Chinese students’ learning experiences in the Sino-Australia transnational higher education programs is likely to be of benefit to both China and Australia’s educational development, as well as making a significant contribution to the scholarship of internationalisation of education.

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1.5.2  I ntercultural Learning Experiences of Chinese Learners in Transnational Programs Chinese students’ intercultural learning experiences in a foreign educational context (especially in developed Anglophone countries) is worth mentioning briefly. The bulk of literature on Chinese overseas students has primarily been concerned with their cultural adaptations and adjustments while studying in a different cultural and educational context (Gu, 2009; Gu & Maley, 2008; Gu et al., 2010; Zhang & Zhou, 2010). Thus acculturation is a key subject in the relevant studies, though some research findings have revealed the dynamics of students’ adjustment processes (Gu et al., 2010). Unlike Chinese international students in Western universities, Chinese students in TNHE programs, and the 2 + 2 articulation programs in particular,18 must negotiate between two higher education systems and cultures. K. Dai and his colleagues have explored these students’ cross-system learning experiences from multiple angles (Dai & Garcia, 2019; Dai et al., 2018, 2020), including an analysis of 12 such students’ experiences in a 2 + 2 setting from the theoretical perspectives of diaspora and space and place. Their findings were that, because of academic differences in teaching, assessment, university culture and use of internet-based technology between the two systems, the 2 + 2 articulation program creates a third or in-between space; Chinese students within it go through complex and dynamic negotiation processes that shape their sense of in-betweenness. This in-betweenness has been further illustrated and discussed in the light of different conceptual tools, including “stress-adaptation-development” plus “in-between” space (Dai, 2020), and Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus (Dai et al., 2020). Dai and Garcia (2019) conclude that students’ agency, identity, and belonging undergo constant changes due to cross-system academic inconsistencies and differences in the 2 + 2 programs. They suggest that the articulations between Chinese and Australian universities should be enhanced and that educational differences be taken into considerations in the design and implementation of transnational articulation programs (Dai et  al., 2018; Dai & Garcia, 2019). Chinese students’ intercultural learning experiences in these research settings have involved transitions from Chinese to Western educational and cultural circumstances, yet local students’ experiences in the internationalisation of higher education in China, have received little attention (Yuan et al., 2019). Among the scant existing literature on Chinese learners’ experiences in transnational programs in China, cultural dissonance is a common theme (Chapman & Pyvis, 2006b; Heffernan et al., 2010; Pyvis & Chapman, 2005). Other themes include reasons for choosing transnational programs (Forestier et al., 2013), identity issues (Chapman & Pyvis, 2006b; Yuan et al., 2019), time management, students’ preferred learning activities, and their assessments of the programs (Wallace & Dunn, 2008). These studies  A “2 + 2 articulation program” refers to the joint undergraduate program in which students spend 2 years at a Chinese university and 2 years at a foreign university.

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provide glimpses of students’ experiences of transnational programs, including, for example, the cultural dissonance and identity formation dilemmas that students in transnational programs can experience even though they are still in their home country (Chapman & Pyvis, 2006b; Pyvis & Chapman, 2005). As a result of perceptions of cultural differences, students can encounter difficulties in adapting academically, which suggests that best practice in Western education does not always work well elsewhere. It appears that teaching staff in offshore programs need to develop an understanding of the cultural and social adaptations that both they and their students must make (Chapman & Pyvis, 2006b, p. 301). In addition, students’ prior education experiences need to be considered when courses are delivered in a transnational context (Wang, 2005). In the above-discussed research on Chinese learners in transnational programs in China, the external cultural and contextual factors are highlighted; how individual students construct and negotiate this intercultural learning in local Chinese context has not been adequately addressed. Through an examination of a particular English language education program in one Sino–Australian program at a Chinese university, my study aims to add insights into this under-researched research area. English language education programs are important parts of transnational higher education programs and therefore should be a matter of concern to educators, researchers and higher education practitioners (Dunworth, 2008). However, language education programs in transnational programs in China have hardly received any research attention, although there are some discussions at institutional management level (Blickem & Shackleford, 2013; Dunworth, 2008).

1.6  Overview of This Study The salient feature of the Sino-Australian joint programs discussed in this book is that in these programs, Chinese learners are exposed to both Chinese and Western cultures of teaching and learning. For most Chinese students, this may be their first experience with foreign English teachers, so they tend to evaluate these teachers’ pedagogical practices using established perceptions of English language education and preconceived beliefs about the foreign Other. Thus, the context is a site of intercultural encounter, entailing the negotiation of two different learning cultures. I have observed that Chinese student responses to the situation demonstrate ambivalent and complex feelings about these foreign Others and Western teaching practices. The aim of this book is to investigate more closely Chinese university students’ perceptions and negotiations of the foreign English language teachers’ pedagogical practices, through asking how local education norms, teacher identities, and institutional conditions interact to affect the students’ everyday learning experiences. How do Chinese university students experience their English language education in Sino–Australian joint programs? More specifically: how do teachers’ (both Chinese and Western) understandings of English language education affect students’ learning experiences? How do students perceive and negotiate their English language

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learning in the Sino–Australian joint programs? What underlying discourses underpin students’ own perceptions of English learning experiences? This study is a form of ethnography, which interprets human behaviours in their larger social and cultural context (Fetterman, 2010; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). A specific branch, institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005), complements conventional ethnography by investigating people’s interactions in the context of social institutions and helps us to understand how such interactions are institutionalised. It typically draws on interviews, observation, and document review—all these methods were used in this study. I spent a total of 2 months in a Chinese university collecting data through interviews, classroom observations, follow-up focus groups and examining course documents. My primary data was collected in semi-structured interviews with both students and their English teachers. To ensure that the students who were selected to participate were representative, I designed specific selection criteria through the use of maximum variation-purposeful sampling (Patton, 2001); ten students were selected for interview. Then I selected and interviewed ten participant teachers; five local Chinese English teachers, and five foreign English teachers. Classroom observations and follow-up focus groups with students were also conducted to complement and consolidate the interview data. I also collected relevant documents, such as the (English for Academic Purposes) EAP19 unit guide and workbook designed by the partner Australian university, papers posted around the classroom (stating students’ expectations of foreign English teachers), the official introduction to the program, and assessment materials to improve my understanding of the institutional context. In the theoretical framework adopted in this book, meanings are constructed through language, culture and discourse; therefore, I used critical discourse analysis (CDA) in my data analysis. CDA refers to discourse analysis that combines sociopolitical aspects of textual practices and language use with general thematic analysis (Luke, 1997). Fairclough (2012) explained the critical nature of CDA as “normative and explanatory critique” (p. 9). “Normative” and “explanatory” mean that CDA does not simply describe the existing realities, but evaluates them against values and standards of a certain society on the one hand and seeks to explain them by showing the underlying structures or mechanism or force on the other (Fairclough, 2012, p. 9). Thus, CDA is concerned with both values and causes: it critiques people’s normative understandings in relation to a certain theme and explains how and why they emerge in certain circumstances. In my study, CDA linked the themes generated from language-in-use data with macro analysis of the situated discourses; it is an analytical tool with which I studied individual critiques of the English language pedagogical practices to explain how the student participants’ perceptions arose in the local social, cultural, institutional and historical contexts.

 The EAP program aims to prepare students to study at universities and/or vocational institutes where English is the medium of instruction. It consists of six levels, from elementary to advanced plus.

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This study is limited insofar as the people I selected for interview may not be representative of other Chinese students learning in transnational programs in China. (There are millions of students studying in these programs.) Moreover, it was carried out in a central and inland city, where the curricula can differ significantly from southern and coastal city schools. In some southern provinces, for example, English listening and speaking skills are assessed and counted in the Gaokao English test, whereas in most other provinces (including the one where I collected my data) these skills are not tested. The small number of people involved in this study is not necessarily problematic as it is a case study of one long-running and ongoing Sino–Australian higher education program, and the goal of case study research is to generate analytical rather than statistical generalisations. That is to say, case studies are used to generate theoretical propositions, not conclusions about populations (Yin, 2014). My close analysis of the students’ lived realities and their perceptions of pedagogical practices in an intercultural context demonstrates how learners’ everyday experiences are negotiated and framed within larger social, cultural and institutional contexts. Such improved understanding of Chinese students in transnational higher education programs in China is of importance in the internationalisation of education worldwide.

1.7  Structure of the Book Thus far, I have described the inspiration for this book and discussed the two prevailing paradigms in representations of Chinese students in the literature. I have outlined the new theoretical framework adopted for the study and discussed how it provides a more nuanced understanding of Chinese students. I seek to explore how Chinese students negotiate and construct their intercultural English learning experiences and how the local sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts mediate and negotiate these everyday experiences. In Chap. 2, I set the scene for the inquiry with a brief history of the Qunxi program and its English language training, and describe the Chinese students and the English teachers in it. Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 report on the data using Hall’s representation theory with a multilingual perspective, which stresses the intricate relationship between language, identity and discourse in representational processes. In Chap. 3, I explain Hall’s discursive approach to representation through sociocultural views of language and culture, and describe the larger social and educational contexts of the students’ stories. Then I examine the first discourse within which students talk about their English learning experiences in Qunxi, that is, the discourse of English language education. Its norms are revealed by analysing two Chinese concepts repeatedly raised by the students—shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (substantive knowledge) and yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑 (logic of the English lesson).

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Equipped with normative ideas about English language pedagogy, students develop distinct perceptions of the pedagogical practices by foreign and Chinese English teachers. They describe foreign English teachers as méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 (headless flies) and Chinese English teachers’ lessons as zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的 学 (real learning). In Chap. 4, I trace the role of identity in people’s representation of the Other and how identity is contingent, mediated and constructed through language and discourse. Foreign English teachers’ identity of “foreign friends” to the students highlights the second discourse that shapes student commentaries on their English learning, namely, the Occidentalist discourse. The normative thinking in their Occidentalism is revealed in the students’ definitions of English writing course as formal and English speaking course as informal. Seen through this discourse, foreign English teachers’ pedagogical practices that express a notion of teacher as facilitator, are interpreted by the Chinese students as wán, 玩(play); the classroom activities chosen by Chinese English teachers are seen as wēng wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡响的课堂活动 (buzzing class activities), though the teachers argue that they are implementing their philosophy of English language education as xué sheng shì wán zhěng de rén 学生是完整的人 (students as whole persons) and lǎo shī shì cù jìn zhě, 老师是促进者 (teachers as facilitators). In Chap. 5, I examine the third discourse embodied in the Chinese metaphor of huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences)—the discourse of English writing, and how students negotiate foreign English teachers’ academic writing lessons through it. Western English teachers explain that they follow the “procedural teaching of the textbook”, that is, of genre knowledge about academic writing. However, students believe that teachers do not address the key components of English writing as prescribed by local discourse of English writing. Chapter 6 brings together the three discourses discussed in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 and explores the ways in which the interaction between them shapes students’ representations of their English language learning in the Qunxi program. First, I explain how I added a multiple perspective to Hall’s representation theory in the exploration of the students’ conceptualisations of their everyday learning experiences. This theoretical lens reveals further nuances in students’ negotiations of their English learning in the Qunxi program, embodied in three Chinese concepts—bèi dòng xué xí, 被 动学习 (passive learning), chén mò, 沉默 (silence) and pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判 思维能力(critical thinking skills). This chapter highlights how people’s lived realities are framed by specific contexts, and how their views of the world are mediated and negotiated through language, discourse and identity. In Chap. 7, I reflect on my multilingual journey examining Chinese university students’ learning experiences in Sino-Australian programs in China. I summarise the research findings, and discuss the policy implications for future transnational education programs in China.

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Chapter 2

Setting the Scene: The Qunxi Program

Abstract  In this chapter, I provide some background information on the Qunxi program, a well-established and well-recognised ongoing Sino-Australian program, based at a Chinese university. Then I discuss the Qunxi English language training program in some detail, its institutional arrangements and the curriculum. I describe the Chinese students and the teachers taking part in the program, using participants’ stories collected during my fieldwork in 2017.

The Qunxi program is a Sino-Australian joint program run at Central University (CU, a pseudonym), in a central province in China. CU is over 100 years old and recognised as one of the two best universities in that province. It is jointly funded by the national Ministry of Education and the provincial government. CU is a “double-­ first class” university in China and accommodates more than 41,000 full-time students. Undergraduates are admitted through Gaokao, and students must attain the scores set for tier-one universities in order to gain a place. A multidisciplinary university, CU has 11 branches of learning: liberal arts, science, engineering, economics, management, law, philosophy, education, history, agriculture and medicine. The academic year consists of two semesters. The Australian partner University (AU, a pseudonym) is a public university in Australia. It offers both Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and higher education courses in a wide range of subjects, including arts, education, computer and IT, engineering, science, law, sports and exercise, and health and biomedicine. AU is a pioneer in transnational education partnerships in Asia and has delivered its courses and qualifications in the region for more than 20 years. It is one of the largest providers of Australian education qualifications outside of Australia. The Qunxi program is affiliated with the School of International Education (SIE), one of 30-plus schools at CU, with more than 60 staff members. SIE is home to four transnational programs: two Sino–Australian, one Sino–American and one Sino– German; it was considered one of the largest transnational education providers in China, with over 3000 graduates by 2012 (Shi, 2008).This book focuses on the first

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_2

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and still thriving Sino–Australian program (the Qunxi program) in SIE established in 2003 between CU and AU. This program offers undergraduate courses in international economics and trade, accounting and computer science and information technology. It originally operated on a “2+2” model, wherein students spent the first two years of the undergraduate program at the Chinese university, and the last two at the Australian one. Upon completion of all the required courses, students are awarded two Bachelor degrees, one from each of the universities. Since collaborative structures between the partners were revised in 2016, students have been able to receive dual degrees without going abroad, after completing all the prescribed courses at the Chinese university. Most classrooms in SIE are traditional school-style rooms with about 50 fixed desks in rows and a podium at the front. Each classroom has a blackboard and is equipped with one control computer and an overhead projector; all the classrooms also have heating and cooling systems. Only a few then have movable chairs and desks. Next I discuss the Qunxi English language training program in some detail, its institutional arrangements and the curriculum. I describe the Chinese students and the teachers taking part in the program, using participants’ stories collected during my fieldwork in 2017.

2.1  I ntroducing English Language Education to the Qunxi Program Intensive English education is advertised as a characteristic feature of the Qunxi program, which is distinctive in two ways. Table  2.1 below summarises the key features of the jointly-delivered English language program. Table 2.1 shows that the first distinctive aspect is the structure of the courses and the teaching. English language training is divided into three different courses: speaking and writing, reading and listening. The speaking and writing course is a Table 2.1  The cooperation in delivery of English language courses between Chinese and Australian universities CU (The Chinese University) Name of the English reading; English listening course Textbooks New Vision College English (the textbooks widely used by non-­ English-­major university students in China) Class hours 10 sessions (in semester one) 8 sessions (in semester two) 7 sessions (in semester three) a

AU (The Australian University) English speaking and writing – a combined course EAP3, EAP 4 (A) and EAP 4(B)a – complied by AU’s English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) centre 10 sessions (in semester one) 9 sessions (in semester two) 8 sessions (in semester three)

EAP 3 and EAP 4 are for students with intermediate English skills

2.1  Introducing English Language Education to the Qunxi Program

35

combined one1 delivered by foreign English teachers in small groups 2(with approx. 30 students in each group). The reading and listening courses are taught by local teachers in small (xiǎo bān, 小班) and large groups (dà bān, 大班)3 (the latter a combination of three small groups), respectively. The writing and speaking modules are designed by the ELICOS centre of the partner university in Australia, and these form English for Academic Purposes (EAP) courses. The textbooks for the reading and listening courses are compiled by the Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and Research Committee in China and are widely used by non-English-major university students nationwide. During the first two years of the degree, students are taught by foreign teachers for three semesters, respectively, learning EAP 3, EAP 4(A) and EAP 4(B), and by locals for four semesters. The second characteristic feature of the program is that it is extremely intensive in terms of classroom hours. In the first semester, students attend 20 English-­ language sessions per week (one session = 50 minutes): 10 sessions with local English teachers, and another 10 with foreigners. This is nearly four times the volume of learning than for those studying non-English-major subjects. In the second and third semesters, students have 17 English sessions (nine with foreign teachers and eight with Chinese teachers) and 15 English sessions (eight with foreign teachers and seven with Chinese teachers), respectively. Classroom hours for the listening course are roughly half those for the reading course. It would seem that the English reading course is considered as a core course that contributes to students’ overall English language development. This explains why student participants in this study talked mainly about the reading course where local English teachers are concerned. An important milestone in English language education in the Qunxi, the End of Course Test, takes place at the end of the first academic year run by the Australian university. Students who pass this test then enrol at the Australian university; but those who fail are transferred to a parallel undergraduate program, which has significantly lower English language requirements. In the international program, students must meet a minimum language level in order to understand the lessons delivered by Western English teachers, who are mostly unable to resort to Chinese for explanations.

1  Combined in the sense that speaking and writing skills are taught by the same foreign teacher within a semester. Foreign teachers follow a semester delivery outline that indicates the number of weeks allocated to writing and speaking skills. 2  The intake of each academic year is divided into about 18 small groups. 3  The large group comprises around 100 students.

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2.2  Chinese Students Most students in the Qunxi program are from the local province; a small number come from other provinces, such as Hainan, Guangdong and Shanxi. Partly due to the high tuition fees of the joint program (RMB 18,000 or AUD 4000/per year), it is commonly assumed that students enrolled in this program are economically advantaged. This is reflected in their places of origin; a significant proportion of them come from urban areas. I interviewed ten students, all first or second-year undergraduates, aged 18 to 20. Table 2.2 presents their biographical data and their Gaokao English score. Their prior English learning experiences were similar. (Under China’s English educational policy, all students had studied English for at least six years before entering university, three years in junior middle school and three years in senior middle school.) Seven of the students were from urban areas, and had begun to learn English in Year 3 of primary school; three (Juan, Fang and Hao) were from rural areas and, due to limited education resources in the countryside, had started learning English in junior middle school. Only two students (Chuan and Hua) had direct learning experiences with international English teachers in junior middle school; for most of the others, their lessons in the Qunxi program with foreign English teachers were their first contact with people from outside China. There are no specific English requirements for enrolling in the program. Participant students’ Gaokao English scores ranged from 90 to 130 (out of 150). These students Table 2.2  Biographical data of students participating in interviews Age in years (Dec 2016); gender; university and level; Pseudonym place of origin Wei 18, male; CU first-year undergraduate; a city in the local province Hua 18, female; CU first-year undergraduate; a city in the local province Ting 19, female; CU first-year undergraduate; a city in the local province Juan 19, female; CU second-year undergraduate; a village in the local province Ping 18, female; CU second-year undergraduate; a city in the local province Hao 19, male, CU first-year undergraduate; a village in the local province Fang 20, female; CU second-year undergraduate; a village in the local province. Chuan 18, male; CU first-year undergraduate; a city in the local province Qing 19, female; CU second-year undergraduate; a city in the local province Yu 20, male; CU second-year undergraduate; a city in a southern province of China

Gaokao exam score in English 90+ 108 126 114 130 84 98 100 128 116

2.2  Chinese Students

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were ranked at intermediate level in the Western English teachers’ classes, beginning in EAP 3 in the first semester of the program. To illustrate the similarities and differences of these students, I will tell the stories of two of them, Fang and Chuan. These two students are representative in two important aspects. The first relates to social and economic conditions and differences in their access to learning resources: Fang is from a poor rural family and learned English solely at school in her home town. Chuan came from a middle-class urban family and was sent to extra-curricular English classes in his city. The second representative aspect lies in their opposing views of foreign English teachers’ lessons: Fang criticised them as “a waste of time”, whereas Chuan praised them as “ideal classes”. The other students’ commentaries sit somewhere between these extremes. (Other students’ profiles are attached in the Appendix)

2.2.1  C  huan—a Privileged Boy and His “Ideal” English Classes Chuan was a first-year student born to an affluent family in an urban area of China. He started learning English in Year 3 in primary school, and was inculcated with the idea that English would help him to travel and see the world; his parents wanted him to pursue tertiary education in an English-speaking country. He had access to valuable resources to support his English language learning. He attended “the best class”4 in academically high-ranking schools in his city. His father, who was a head of school at a university, found a foreign tutor who taught him for three consecutive years during summer and winter vacations before he went to senior middle school. Nevertheless, Chuan said he had no feeling for or interest in English at that time because of the exam-focused teaching he had experienced in senior middle school and being forced to attend extra-curricular English classes. His attitudes towards English changed positively when he entered university and recognised the importance of English for travelling and for enlarging his life opportunities. At university, instead of feeling that he was being forced to learn English, he created opportunities to speak with his foreign teacher and was very happy to do so (Luo, 2021, p. 62). Chuan’s contrasting attitudes to learning English prior to and after entering university may be attributed to the different English language pedagogies he experienced and his changing motivations. He explained that though he was in the best class and had had access to superior educational resources in middle schools, the teaching and learning modes were exam-oriented grammar-translation methods and the lessons centred around vocabulary and grammar. Chuan said that most of the experienced English teachers in senior middle school told students that memorisation of all the test items listed in one high-frequency vocabulary

4  “Best class” refers to the class composed of high academic achievers, and it is usually taught by experienced and proficient teachers.

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notebook would ensure a high score in the exams. These methods, which he perceived as tedious, diminished his interest in learning the language. However, at university, he was exposed to different pedagogical approaches; he liked the cheerful and relaxed teaching styles of his Western teachers and saw them as “ideal”. He believed that these classes improved his confidence, team spirit and critical thinking skills.

2.2.2  F  ang—A Highly-Motivated Young Woman and Her “Waste of Time” English Lessons Fang was a second-year student at the time of my interview with her; she was born in a village in rural China. Her parents earned their living through hard physical labour, and one of them had chronic health problems. Fang explained how her family influenced her study: she started to learn English from middle school onwards and worked very hard; she told me that she felt ashamed if she wasted time playing with classmates. Her aspiration was to be a loyal child and provide an affluent life for her parents in the future. The economic constraints that shaped her childhood meant that Fang did not attend extracurricular educational activities, nor could she travel, though she wanted to do both very badly (Luo, 2021, p.62). In junior middle school, Fang had a good English teacher who had good pronunciation and a sense of humour. She became interested in English and worked hard to memorise words because she believed that learning English was about such an accumulation of knowledge. However, in senior middle school, her English teacher was less capable and often confused her, and consequently her English skills stagnated. When she failed the Gaokao exam, she went to a private senior middle school for Year 4 (which in practice meant a repetition of Year 3), where handwriting was believed to be key for getting good scores for English composition, so students spent much time practising calligraphy (i.e. English handwriting). Though her interest in English waned in senior middle school, she still studied hard to get a good score in the exam, which was her main motivation for learning English at that time. Fang’s major in the Qunxi program was international economy and trade, and she was highly motivated to learn English; this was directly related to her aspirations for her future job and life opportunities. In addition, as kè dài biǎo, 课代表 in the English speaking and writing course5, Fang was proactive in seeking opportunities to communicate with her foreign teachers. Despite all of these positives, however, she believed that these teachers’ classes were “a waste of time”, because they were not improving her English to the degree she expected. She complained that what she gained in foreign teachers’ classes was just increased confidence to speak English and more chances to speak with foreign teachers.

5  Liaison students who help the course teacher to contact students about homework or for information distribution.

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39

2.2.3  Lessons From Fang and Chuan—Changing Motivations of Learning English The stories of Fang and Chuan reflect two aspects of English learning that all participant students raised in the discussion. The first is the exam-oriented teaching and learning prevalent in Chinese senior middle schools. Regardless of the region or ranking of the school, Gaokao serves as the guiding doctrine in English language pedagogical practices. Students said that they had spent hardly any time practising their listening or speaking skills, because these were not tested in the high-stakes Gaokao exams. In preparation for the Gaokao English exam, lessons focused on the transmission of grammar rules and vocabulary, which eroded student motivation and interest. The second aspect related to how students’ motivations for learning English altered when they got to university. Eight out of ten said before university they had no genuine interest in English, because its only purpose seemed to be for passing examinations. Upon entering university, however, they seemed to realise the importance of English, and started to develop a genuine desire to learn. Some wanted to go abroad or to migrate to an English-speaking country and some saw English as a necessary skill in their future careers. Most students described themselves as motivated English learners at this point.

2.3  English Teachers English teachers directly involved in the students’ English learning process can provide important information about their learning experiences in the situated context. I interviewed five local and five foreign English teachers about their academic backgrounds and their professional experiences in the Qunxi program. Interview questions for local English teachers were translated into Chinese, and all Chinese teacher participants chose to be interviewed in Chinese rather than in English. Biographical data of participant teachers in interviews are presented in Tables 2.3 and 2.4. In the Qunxi program, English language teachers are divided into two distinct cohorts for language training, divided on the basis of their origins, that is, between Chinese and non-Chinese. This division is evident in the curriculum documents produced by the Australian partner university. For the EAP 3 unit, the course guide states that “throughout the course, you [students] will be taught by a number of foreign English-language teachers” (personal communication, EAP 3). Similar statements appear in the EAP 4B workbook. The clear message is that foreign and local English teachers are treated as separate for the purposes of achieving the course aims, with each cohort of teachers responsible for different English language skills. The division between Chinese and foreign English teachers’ pedagogical domains is also reflected in the small number of visits that teachers make to each other’s classes. When asked about mutual class observations, most foreign teachers

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Table 2.3  Biographical data, qualifications and experience of Chinese English teacher participants Age (Dec 2016), gender; place of Pseudonym origin; professional role Lan 35, female; rural China; Year 1 English reading teacher

Yan

34, female; rural China; Year 1 English reading teacher

Lili

36, female; urban China; Year 1 English reading teacher, and coordinator for Year 1 English reading course 36, female; urban China; Year 2 English listening teacher, prior English reaching teacher, coordinator of English listening course 37, female; urban China; Year 2 English reading teacher

Xian

Hong

Qualifications; teacher training BA (English language), CU; MA (English Linguistics), CU; 4-week professional development program at the partner Australian university; 4-month program in the US BA (English language), CU; MA (English translation), Nankai University; 3-week professional development program at the partner Australian university BA (English language), CU; MA (English linguistics), CU

BA (English language) CU; MA (English literature), CU; 4-week professional development program at the partner Australian university BA (English language), CU; MA (English literature), CU; 4-week professional development at the partner Australian university; 1-year teaching and research training at the partner Australian university

Table 2.4  Background information about foreign teacher participants Age (Dec 2016); gender; place Professional qualifications Pseudonym of origin Beth 63; female; BA, Certificate in English Australia Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA) John 58; male; BA, PGCE (Postgraduate England Certificate of Education) in English for speakers of other languages MA, CELTA, postgraduate Kate 53; female; Certificate in University Northern Teaching Ireland Tom 56; male; BA, Graduate Diploma in Australia Education, TESOL certificate

Alice

59; female; BA, MA, CELTA, postgraduate New Zealand Diploma of Education

Countries taught in UK, China

Number of times teaching Qunxi program 10 times in this program

UK, Czech Republic, Brazil, France, China

First time

Solomon Islands, Costa Rica, Cuba, UK, Australia Australia, Solomon Islands, Cambodia, Hong Kong (China), China New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, China

First time

First time

First time

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said that it would be interesting to know how Chinese English teachers deliver the reading and listening lessons. Tom exclaimed, “I’d love to know what’s going on in the reading and listening lessons, that would be really interesting”. He did not explain why he would like to observe, but he had not in fact observed any local English teacher’s class. Most local English teachers said that they were so busy with their teaching loads that they had no time for observing the classes of others. The reality in the Qunxi program is that there is little communication among foreign and local English teachers; they follow the curriculum guidelines within their own cohorts. Therefore, they have little understanding of each other’s lessons, about either the content, the teaching methods or the patterns of interaction in the classes.

2.3.1  Local English Teachers Versus Foreign English Teachers There are about 20 local English teachers in the SIE, and they are mostly tenured staff of CU. As Table 2.3 shows, these teachers are similar in many aspects: they are from the same province, of similar age and have similar education backgrounds, especially at the tertiary level. Most have Bachelor’s degrees with a major in English language, and Master’s degrees in English linguistics or literature from CU (only Yan received her Master’s degree from a different university). All teachers, except Lili, had attended short-term professional development programs in an English-­ speaking country. All participant local English teachers said that their perceptions of English language pedagogy were heavily influenced by the grammar–translation method of their own former English teachers, that is, lessons that revolved mainly around transmission of the linguistic knowledge in the designated textbook. This is attributable to their tertiary education backgrounds. All participant teachers described themselves as graduates of English majors rather than graduates of an English language teaching degree. They emphasised the fact that they had little knowledge of TESOL theory; their competence in English was sufficient for them to be able to teach the language. However, after several years of teaching, they recognised that knowledge transmission is not sufficient, and that student engagement is crucial to the efficacy of the lessons. A common approach among local English teachers to enhancing students’ classroom participation is the introduction of classroom activities. They said that such activities are organised primarily to make the lessons “less traditional” and “livelier”. Foreign English teachers are casual teachers recruited by AU’s ELICOS centre. All those who participated in this study were from Western English-speaking countries: two (Tom, Beth) from Australia, one (Alice) from New Zealand, one (Kate) from Northern Ireland and one (John) from England. They all had teaching and TESOL qualifications. Beth, Kate and Alice had the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults (CELTA); Tom had a TESOL certificate and John had a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) in English for speakers of other

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languages. TESOL qualifications originate in Western contexts (Stanley, 2013), and thus these foreign English teachers can be considered as embodying Western philosophies of English language pedagogy. Tom’s ideas about “good” teachers certainly illustrate this understanding of English language pedagogy. A 56-year-old from Australia, Tom began teaching English in an Australian secondary school in his mid-20s. With a Bachelor of Arts and a TESOL certificate, he is a well-qualified English language teacher. He has taught English in the Solomon Islands, Cambodia and Hong Kong, among others. Teaching in the Qunxi program was his first experience in mainland China, although he had extensive teaching experience in Hong Kong. Tom explained that good English teachers are able to develop students’ English language skills in effective and enjoyable ways. Games and activities are important tools to make lessons interesting, but more important still, they help students to develop their English language skills. He said he tries his best to make his lessons enjoyable by engaging students in various class activities. Tom’s words reflect the tenets of CLT, that is, language is learned by using it in communicative activities. He believes that students’ active engagement is key to successful language learning. In my experience, Tom’s views are commonly held among Western English teachers, who aim to engage students in various communicative learning activities through which they will acquire the language in an enjoyable and productive way. These differences between Chinese and foreign English teachers are complemented by the differences perceived by the teachers themselves. Chinese teachers tend to perceive Western English teachers as “better” and “more advanced” in English proficiency and TESOL/linguistic theories. The issue of English proficiency appears to be related to their identity as non-native speakers of English. Xian said, “in terms of English language, I feel inferior to NS English teachers”, although she defined herself as a competent English teacher in front of students. Her feeling of inferiority is representative of most local English teachers. This sense of inferiority is reinforced by pedagogical practices. Lili said that she often struggled with the appropriate language when organising class activities. For her, classroom activities require much more spontaneous use of English language, which is not easy for the local teachers who are not proficient in English. Thus non-native-like English proficiency is an important influence on local English teachers’ teaching methods. Another weakness relates to TESOL theoretical knowledge, which local English teachers hail as a panacea. Local teachers told me repeatedly that they feel that foreign teachers have at their disposal a variety of teaching techniques and classroom activities. This is because they have theoretical knowledge, which is believed to inform and improve teaching practices. As Hong said, “theories have substantial impact on pedagogical practices”. Moreover, Western TESOL theories have been endowed with an unquestioned superiority. Hong explained, “it is a trend that Chinese researchers have followed Western researchers … We must read Western theories, we must draw from Western theories”. These words raise the issue of a one-way knowledge flow between China and the West, and the stance that Chinese educators assume they should take in relation to it.

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By contrast, the foreign teachers in this study overwhelmingly believed that Western and Chinese English teachers complement each other in language teaching, because each cohort brings a different perspective to teaching. Tom’s comments are instructive here. First, he challenged the legitimacy of the question “who are better English teachers?” For him, the words “better” or “worse” are not appropriate to evaluating English teachers in terms of NS status. Second, he said that simply being a native speaker does not make someone a better teacher than a local. However, he added that “There should be a complementary relationship between the native English teachers and local English teachers”. The word “complementary” shows that Tom still assumes that there are certain differences between NS teachers and local English teachers. Tom’s position is representative of the views of all five Western English teacher participants, who, despite the criticism of value judgements relating to NS and NNS teachers, enthusiastically discussed the different perspectives that Chinese and foreign teachers bring to English teaching. Tom, Kate and Beth explained that they had certain advantages as English speakers, arguing that native speakers can be better language models for students than local English teachers because they are aware of the nuances of the language. As to Chinese English teachers’ strengths, both cohorts of teachers emphasised that “Chinese as a first language” and “their identities as Chinese EFL learners” contribute to effective teaching practices. Lili noted, for example, that local English teachers can better predict and identify students’ learning obstacles. Given the bilingual backgrounds and English learning experiences they share with students, they are confident that they can resolve students’ learning difficulties in more effective ways. Thus the local English teachers in this study were inclined to contrast their weaknesses with foreign English teachers, whereas the latter advocated a cooperative and complementary relationship between the two groups. Despite that, the differences in language teaching between the two groups of English teachers were seen as laying primarily in their identities as native speakers of English and their embodiments of Western TESOL knowledge. The Qunxi program is Sino-Australian collaboration at a “double first-class” Chinese university, In China, traditional, transmissive teaching approaches are still prevalent at all levels of English language training. When studying with Western English teachers whose teaching methods are different in the Qunxi, some students feel a lack of achievement in their English learning, whereas others hail the Western model as an “ideal” teaching method. The two groups of teachers, institutionally divided, have different perceptions of English language pedagogy, which seems to stem from their national identities and TESOL-related education backgrounds. This gives us a useful picture of the situated realities from which emerge the interactive stories of the participant teachers and students explored in the coming chapters.

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Appendix: Participating Student Profiles Wei At interview, Wei was an 18-year-old first-year university student from a city in the local province. He began learning English in Year 1 of primary school. His family provided him with all the resources he needed to learn English. He attended English training programs from Year 2 because all his peers did—he simply followed the trend. In fact, he was not interested in learning English. In junior middle school, he was in the “fast” class, and after realising that his classmates’ English was better than his, he started to work harder. The Gaokao exam was his sole focus in senior middle school. In order to gain a good score there, he did not spend much time learning English in Year 3; he assumed that his English score would not improve at all and he would rather spend the time on other subjects. Before entering university, Wei said that his only motivation for learning English was getting good scores in the English exam. However, by the time he was majoring in international economy and trade in the Sino-Australian program, his motivation had changed to travelling abroad and benefiting his future career. Ting At interview, Ting was a 19-year-old first year undergraduate and a good student (according to her English reading teacher). She started to learn English in Year 3 in primary school. Since then, she has attended English training sessions and enjoyed them. She became strong in English and was appointed as the representative of English subject (see footnote 7 above) in junior middle school. Though she was admitted to the best senior middle school in her city, Ting followed her parents’ advice and joined a private Peking University-affiliated senior middle school, where she maintained her interest in English. One characteristic of her private school was the friendly relationship between teachers and students. However, referring to her motivation for learning English, she described herself and her compatriots as utilitarians—they studied hard at English for the exams and to improve their future job prospects. Ping Ping was a second-year undergraduate born to an affluent family. She is a “like-­ the-­teacher-like-the-subject” type of student, characterising a good teacher as one who has broad knowledge and can impart it in a logical way, and who also has charisma. Since Year 3 of primary school, she had been good at and interested in English; unlike many of the other participating students in this study, she enjoyed the high contact hours for English in the Sino-Australian program. Her mother had planned to send her to a senior middle school in Singapore, but this did not eventuate. Nevertheless, Ping was keen to learn English because she aimed to go abroad for further study and to explore the world. She described English teaching and learning in senior middle school as basically teachers presenting material to the class and students listening and taking notes.

References

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Hao Hao was a 19-year-old first-year undergraduate born in rural China. He started to learn English in Year 3 in primary school. His father was an English teacher who taught him English during the holidays; however, he was not good at memorising words and could not understand English grammar, so his English was poor. For him, English was simply a compulsory school subject, and he had no more interest in it than that. Qing Qing was a second-year university student born in a city. She started learning English in primary school and also attended extracurricular training sessions. Although she went to a leading junior middle school, the English education there was still traditional—teacher-centred, focused on vocabulary and grammar and repetitive exercises. Qing said that the exercises were the major source of their achievement and made students feel secure in senior middle schools. In her view at that time, English was useful only for the exams results required to enter university. However, once there, she quickly realised how important English is and felt ashamed that she had not worked harder in the past. She began to treat the English reading course seriously and was attentive in class. She said that she was interested in English and would like to do international business in the future. Yu Yu was a second-year student born in a southern coastal city of Guangdong province. He started learning English in Year 3 in primary school. Yu said that his school English education classes were traditional, consisting of learning grammar and vocabulary, although the Gaokao English exam in his province included a speaking and listening component (worth just 15 of 150 marks). Foreign teachers’ classes in the program were a novelty for Yu at the beginning, but gradually became common. Yu believed that Chinese and foreign English teachers have different ways of thinking, which are attributable to their identities as Chinese or foreign.

References Luo, Y.  M. (2021). Towards innovative English language teaching: multilingualism and the re-­ conceptualisation of the Chinese/Western binary. In R. Arber, M. Weinmann, & J. Blackmore (Eds.), Rethinking Languages Education Directions, Challenges and Innovations (pp. 58–72). Routledge. Shi, B. (2008, August 20). Historic Henan fosters future talent (p. 11). China Daily. Stanley, P. (2013). A critical ethnography of “Westerners” teaching English in China: Shanghaied in Shanghai. Routledge.

Chapter 3

Headless Flies

Abstract  This chapter explores how students’ experiences of their English lessons in the Qunxi are framed and negotiated by the discourse of English language education in China. I first elaborate on Hall’s theory of representation, through sociocultural views of language and culture and focus on particularly the discursive approach to representation adopted in this book. Within their specific local social, cultural and educational contexts, students form normative understandings of English language pedagogy that are embodied in two Chinese concepts: “substantive knowledge” and “logic of the lesson”. I explain how students’ use of Chinese words and metaphors reveals their perceptions of their teachers’ pedagogical practices. There is a disjuncture between teachers’ and students’ views of good language pedagogy. Language is reflexive, embodied and multidimensional, and the linguistic expressions used by participants in this study reflect norms developed within local social practices. Students’ complex use of Chinese words to describe their English teachers’ pedagogical practices highlights the complicated negotiation process they engage in. Here, language not only produces and exchanges meaning, but it is also the principal means through which our everyday lives are performed and felt.

Xiaoxun, in focus group discussions, said that his foreign teacher came to class without clear ideas about what students were supposed to be doing in the lesson; he was like “a headless fly”. The Chinese metaphor of méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 (headless flies) is commonly used to refer to people who have no sense of purpose or direction and thus are busy flying wildly and bumping around, achieving little. It describes the ways that foreign English teachers’ pedagogical practices disturb students’ normative understandings of English language pedagogy. Unpacking méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 thus brings to view a broader discourse of English language education formed by everyday experiences in local sociocultural and educational contexts. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which students’ constructions of their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program are framed and negotiated within this discourse. To explain better the intricate relationship between language, discourse and the construction of meaning, I elaborate on Hall’s theory of representation through

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_3

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sociocultural views of language and culture, especially the discursive approach to representation. Through this theoretical lens, I first describe everyday conditions and practices in the larger social and educational context—whose key feature is that it is exam-oriented—and how that dictates the common sense understanding of education. I then examine norms of English language pedagogy in the situated context, embodied in two Chinese concepts: shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (substantive knowledge) and yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑 (logic of English lessons). Students’ complex negotiations in their Qunxi English classes occur in this local discourse on pedagogy. First, foreign English teachers explain that they use a pedagogical philosophy that rests on the idea of “students as whole persons”. However, the students call these English teachers méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 (headless flies), indicating that they see their lessons as purposeless and disorderly. Second, local English teachers’ English language pedagogy rests on jiāo kè bě, 教课本 (teaching of the textbook), which aligns with students’ expectations. They call the local teachers’ lessons zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (real learning). Given the reflexive, embodied and multidimensional nature of language as argued in this book, the students’ linguistic expressions reflect the normative understandings they have developed within local social practices. Their complex use of Chinese words and metaphors to describe how they see their English teachers’ pedagogical practices highlights the complex negotiations they engage in. Here, language is not only the means by which meaning is produced and exchanged but also the principal means through which our everyday lives are performed and experienced.

3.1  Representation Theory—The Overarching Theoretical Framework In this book, I draw on a constructionist approach to representation that suggests there is no single, fixed or true meaning of objects or ideas in this material world. Rather, meaning is constantly produced and exchanged in social interaction; it is negotiated by social actors who use their own conceptual and linguistic systems to construct meaning (Hall, 1997b, p.  25). This approach recognises the embodied, reflective and multidimensional character of language, and given the cross-cultural dimension of my work, it is the perspective from which data in this research is best analysed and interpreted. The reason is that in translation and analysis of data, the participants use words, meanings and metaphors complexly to explain their perceptions of English language pedagogy. This reveals gaps between strands of representation in Mandarin Chinese and English. To understand this process better, we need to understand Hall’s constructionist approach to representation. For Hall (1997a), culture is a key element in the processes of meaning construction (representational practice). He argues that production and exchange of meaning is important in the definition of culture: culture is a conceptual map shared by a group, which enables its members to interpret and make sense of the world in

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roughly the same way, so that they can understand each other (Hall, 1997a, p. 2). Hall further suggests that the shared meanings of culture are not only cognitive in individuals’ minds but are also manifested in representational practices through which people give meanings to objects, ideas and practices. In my study, the Chinese university students’ shared understandings of the teachers from countries outside China give wài jiào, 外教 (foreign teachers) their specific associated meanings through how they “represent” them in a social community—the words they use about them, the stories and images of them they produce, the ways they classify and conceptualise them, and the values they accord them (as illustrated in Hua and Juan’s stories in the opening of the book in Chap. 1).These nuanced meanings and values have to be interpreted meaningfully by others in daily social communications. In this sense, culture permeates every society (Hall, 1997a, p. 3). Hall further explains the inextricable connection between culture and representation: in daily communications, people constantly engage in certain representational practices to make sense of other people, events and objects in the world, and it is the representational systems (culture and language) that create and fix their meanings. Since culture is conceived as “shared meanings” within a society, representation is one of the central processes in the production of culture. This centrality explains why representation occupies an important position in the field of cultural studies. The process of representation is not as innocent or transparent as it appears; people must go through complex processes to express their ideas to other people. First, they must establish a correlation between things in the world and a set of concepts that people carry in their minds. Primarily, “meaning depends on the system of concepts and images formed in our thoughts that can stand for, or represent the world” (Hall, 1997b, p. 17). Individuals have their unique conceptual systems, so they interpret the world in totally different ways. However, people within the same community can communicate with each other because they share the same broad conceptual map and thus make sense of the world in roughly similar ways (Hall, 1997b, p. 18). The world would not be interpreted meaningfully without the correlation between things and concepts, because this is what gives meaning to the world, “constructing a set of correspondences or a chain of equivalences between things— people, objects, events, abstract ideas, etc—and our systems of concepts” (Hall, 1997b, p.  19). In my study, Chinese university students in their own community formed a set of correspondences between English pedagogical practices and their systems of concepts, such as effective English language pedagogy (yǒu xiào yīng yǔ jiào xué fǎ, 有效英语教学法), yīng yǔ shí zhì de jìn bù, 英语实质的进步 (substantive improvements of English), zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (real learning), and wán, 玩 (play). This shared conceptual system cannot exchange meanings or concepts with another without access to a common language; language is the second system of representation in the overall process of meaning production. The concepts and ideas embodied in our shared conceptual map must be translated to a common language (written words, spoken sounds or visual images) in order to express our meanings and convey our thoughts to other people. This second process produces meaning by “constructing a set of correspondences between our conceptual map and a set of

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signs, arranged or organized into various languages which stand for or represent those concepts” (Hall, 1997b, p. 19). The relationship between concepts and signs is arbitrary, so people use different linguistic signs to refer to the same thing in different languages. These languages or signs, together with the conceptual map they represent, form the meaning system of a culture (p. 18). To sum up, at the heart of meaning production in a culture is how things, concepts and signs are related and the processes that join these three elements together; this is representation. My study is concerned with the processes through which participant teachers and students used language (Mandarin Chinese and English) and concepts (such as yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑, zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 正式的英语课, and teachers as facilitators) to explain their views of English language pedagogical practices. People from the same culture express similar meanings and communicate with each other not only because they share a conceptual map and a language system, but also because they know the code that sets up the correlations between conceptual system and language system (Hall, 1997b, p. 21). This code influences people to use particular language to talk about certain concepts, and to choose which concepts will be referred to. The production of meaning depends on and is sustained by people constantly encoding and the others decoding and interpreting (p. 62). This is the “translatability” established between concepts and language, which is the result of a series of social conventions and fixed in culture (p. 22). In my study, for instance, participant students used the language shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (substantive knowledge), to talk about their conception of effective English language pedagogy, whose meanings are the product of social, cultural, educational and linguistic conventions. Hall further argues that because linguistic and social conventions change over time, meanings of words can never be fixed in any final sense (though this is not to deny a certain meaning in language that is fixed enough to enable people to communicate with each other). Consequently, within cultural and linguistic systems, the same words might acquire different connotations from one historical period to another; this shift of nuanced meanings is especially salient when a language is translated to another (p.  23). Cultures and languages differ and thus meanings change across different languages and cultures in what is called cultural relativism: So one important idea about representation is the acceptance of a degree of cultural relativism between one culture and another, a certain lack of equivalence, and hence the need for translation as we move from the mind-set or conceptual universe of one culture and another (Hall, 1997b, p. 61).

In relation to this study, cultural relativism is particularly manifested in teachers’ (both Chinese and Western) ideas about English language pedagogy. Chinese and Western English teachers use common concepts in both their languages to explain their approaches to teaching English. However, due to the different social and cultural contexts in which these concepts are developed, they have different nuances. To sum up, the constructionist approach to representation proposes an intricate and mediated relationship between objects in the world, concepts in minds, and language (Hall, 1997b, p. 35), and it is particularly useful in this research. Teachers

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and students live in a world articulated through language and culture; they use certain cultural and linguistic frameworks to explain pedagogical practices that they take for granted, but which, in fact, are embedded in particular social, cultural and institutional conventions. That is, Chinese students, local English teachers, and Western English teachers use their own cultural and linguistic frames to conceptualise English language pedagogy and to define what is normal or legitimate in terms of the common sense and shared understandings within their own contexts. To better understand Hall’s representation theory as it applies to the case of these two specific cultural contexts, it will help to explore the inextricable relationship between language and culture in meaning production.

3.1.1  Language and Culture in Representation The sociocultural view that language is an embodied, reflexive and multidimensional resource for conceptualising the real world, inextricably bound up with culture in multiple and complex ways, is held by many poststructuralist researchers in cultural and educational studies. In post-structuralism, as García and Wei (2014) note, language is conceptualised as a chain of local practices and actions embedded in a historically particular network of social and conceptual relations (pp. 31–32). Numerous scholars, including Pennycook (2010), Gee (2008) and Kramsch (1998), have investigated the ways in which language and culture are entangled in representational practices. My study draws on their notions of language and culture. The embodied and reflexive features of language appear in Pennycook’s (2010) notion of “language as a local practice”, which is about “the ways in which language practices are moulded by social, cultural, discursive and historical precedents and concurrent contexts that become central to any understanding of language” (p. 9). The “local” here refers to the context in which a language is used, and it is constitutive of language practice. Language is thus defined as a product of the social and cultural activities in which humans participate (Pennycook, 2010, p.  9). Language is not merely a static linguistic tool employed for communication, but rather a practice, an activity, “embodied and materially mediated”, and “social and culturally produced and regulated” (Pennycook, 2010, p. 28). Here, Pennycook is stressing the importance of local knowledge for the analysis of language. To understand language, researchers must understand the local meanings of language that are grounded in local ways of thinking (Pennycook, 2010, p. 10). The notion of language as a local practice marks a radical departure from structuralist views of language that generally privilege the language structure over the social activities. Pennycook is not the only researcher who argues the importance of social practices in the study of language. As noted earlier, James Gee (2004, 2008), taking a sociocultural approach to language, introduces the notion of “Discourse” to argue that language is attached to other “stuff”, such as social relations, values and attitudes, cultural models and different perspectives on experience (Gee, 2008). Gee defines Discourse as ways of behaving, valuing, thinking and being in the world

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“that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities” (Gee, 2008, p. 3). Each Discourse has its own taken-for-granted and tacit theories about what counts as normal and proper ways of being in the world. For Gee, since language has no meaning outside Discourse, in order to appreciate a language in a particular social context, it is essential to consider the “other stuff” within Discourse. Take the phrase “yīng yǔ zhēn zhèng de jìn bù, 英语真正的进步 (genuine improvements of English)”, for instance. This Chinese concept is the product of local English teaching and learning practices, and its meanings are grounded in local ways of thinking that are seen as “natural”. The interdependence of language and culture in the production of meaning has been best expounded in Claire Kramsch’s (1998) Language and culture, according to three principles: “Language expresses cultural realities”; “Language embodies cultural reality”; “Language symbolizes cultural reality” (p. 1). Interpreted through Kramsch, Chinese university students in my study can exchange ideas with each other because they belong to the same discourse community, use the same linguistic code (Mandarin Chinese) and refer to common experiences and knowledge. Through verbal and non-verbal use of a language, their learning behaviours and activities express a cultural reality of their community. Kramsch also views language as the symbol of cultural and social identity: English-speaking foreign teachers are constructed as cultural “others”. Her views of language and culture are similar to Hall’s; she understands culture as “ways of thinking, behaving, and valuing currently shared by members of the same discourse community” (Kramsch, 1998, p.  7). People from the same discourse community have common ways of seeing and interpreting the world and thus culture plays a central role in the construction of knowledge and text. As Kramsch suggests, if culture is taken seriously as the very base of intellectual inquiry, then we must accept the fact that knowledge is coloured by the social and historical situations in which it is constructed. In this respect, language study is predominantly cultural study. Seen from this perspective, English-medium Western knowledge is mediated and constructed through Western social, cultural and historical conditions; it embodies shared ways of thinking, valuing and being in a context that are different from any local Chinese context. Sociocultural views of language and culture destabilise essentialist and structuralist notions of language and culture and stress their inextricable relationship in making sense of the world; they highlight the embodied, reflexive and local nature of language that is born of particular social, cultural and historical contexts. Such understandings of language and culture in meaning production offer powerful conceptual tools to challenge dominant theories of knowledge and truth. This has relevance for my study in that the words the participants used to express ideas about English language pedagogies must be analysed to show how language springs from embedded social, cultural and institutional conditions. In doing this, I reveal the complex ways in which my participants conceptualised English teaching through their particular linguistic and cultural frames. Next, I focus on the discursive approaches to representation applied in this study.

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3.1.2  Discursive Approaches to Representation The focus on language in representational practices has moved from a semiotic approach—concerned with the details of how language works, to a discursive approach—concerned with the roles of discourse in culture (Hall, 1997a, b). According to Foucault, discourse is more than the language and texts that describe and reflect social reality; it refers to practices that produce a knowledge of things through language. This notion of discourse transcends the conventional distinction between language and practice: Discourse…is not a consciousness that embodies its project in the external form of language; it is not a language plus a subject to speak it…Discourses are practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak…discourses are not about objects, they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in doing so, they conceal their own invention (Foucault, 1972, p. 169).

In other words, Foucault is saying that discourse is constitutive of reality. Whenever individuals use statements to describe one object and disperse them systematically, they are dealing with discursive formation that exhibits a regularity (Foucault, 1972, p. 38). Foucault thus characterises discourse as a grouping of statements that provide a language for talking about, or representing, particular kinds of knowledge of a topic at a given historical moment (Hall, 1992, p. 201). Discourse constructs a topic, governs the way that the topic can be thought and spoken of by a system of dispersion, and influences how knowledge of the topic is put into practice in order to regulate social practices. Foucault (1972) argues that outside discourse, nothing has any meaning. This does not deny the physical existence of things, but stresses the notion that things only acquire certain meanings and become objects of knowledge within discourse. Moreover, historical specificity is foregrounded in the theorising of discourse and, as Foucault (1980) notes, meanings and knowledge of objects in the world are discursively constructed, and are always socially, historically and culturally embedded. As such, discourse plays a central role in people’s construction of the social world. According to Foucault, at any historical moment, people live in multiple discourses and each discourse is unequally empowered in society. This opens up spaces for resistance. Knowledge of things is produced by competing discourses, which is related to contestation over power (Hall, 1992, p. 203). This is what Foucault (1980) calls relations of power; it is they rather than relations of meaning in history that determine knowledge about the social world. The discursive approach to representation provides a powerful theoretical tool for analysing the data collected for this study. Participant students’ views of English-­ language pedagogical practices can be shown to be embedded in three socially and culturally mediated discourses. The complex discursive interaction shapes their perceptions of their English teachers’ classes, which in turn influences the way students behave in their English lessons and towards their teachers. It is thus the outcome of this struggle between competing discourses that produces the world of students’ everyday learning experiences in the Qunxi program (Fig. 3.1):

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Chinese Students

Language (Mandarin Chinese)

Discourse 1 (Chapter 3)

Discourse 2 (Chapter 4)

Interaction between different discourses

Discourse 3 (Chapter 5)

Languages and people’s experiences

The complexities of students’ learning experiences in the Qunxi program (Chapter 6) Fig. 3.1  The application of the theoretical framework in this study NB: 1. Discourse 1-Discourse of English language pedagogy (embodied in méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇)    2. Discourse 2-Discourse of foreign teachers as foreign friends (embodied in wài guó yǒu rén, 外国友人)    3. Discourse 3-Discourse of English writing (embodied in huáng jīn jù, 黄金句)    4. Languages and peoples’ experiences: Languages are the principle means through which students’ everyday lives and learning are experienced and performed

3.2  Culture: Orderly and Exam-Oriented Education in China

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3.2  C  ulture: Orderly and Exam-Oriented Education in China As illustrated above, to understand the language used by participant students to explain their perceptions of English learning experiences, it is vital to explain culture in the local social community. The situated context in which the students function is characterised by notions of order, exemplified by the constraints of the exam system. The exam-oriented education system impacts significant aspects of education in China, particularly the implementation of school curriculum policies (Bai, 2017; Dello-Iacovo, 2009; Yan, 2015) and teaching and learning methods (Kirkpatrick & Zang, 2011). In this section, I explore the orderly education practices in China as depicted by students. Commenting on their prior educational experiences, almost all students who participated in my study expressed similar views: examinations, especially Gaokao, form the normative context for all parties involved, including school administrative staff, parents, teachers and students. Yu’s words best exemplify the exam-oriented atmosphere in China: No matter what kind of educational/teaching methods a teacher uses, they are used for the purpose of exams. Even in primary schools, exams were emphasised; when I was a junior middle school student, my mom told me, “you should be going to a good university”, and she said the same words when I was at senior middle school. Our teachers share exactly the same opinion, and they inculcate in parents the concepts [of exams].

It appears that, from primary school onward, the importance of exams was ingrained in Yu; in senior middle schools, Gaokao had become the sole purpose of education. Teachers, students and parents try their best to ensure that students attain high scores in the high-stakes Gaokao. Yu felt that teaching methods should address— as their main purpose—the improvement of exam results, in line with the determining role of exam scores in students’ academic activities (Kirkpatrick & Zang, 2011). The normative acceptance of Gaokao can also been seen in the eagerness to attend cram schools. In response to my interview questions, students spoke mainly about cram schools for English (rather than for other subjects). Most of these students attended English cram schools; even those from less economically advantaged families (e.g. Fang, Juan) expressed a desire to attend such schools, though their families’ economic constraints had not allowed it. As Fang said, “I would like to attend extracurricular cram schools, but because of economic constraints, I have not attended any of them”. Chuan also affirmed their importance when he claimed that they are “a must for all students in China”. Despite possible overgeneralisation, Chuan’s words allude to the reality that Chinese students make use of all their available time and learning resources to prepare for the Gaokao. The prevalence of extracurricular cram schools attests to the ways that their lives are framed by the exams. The primacy of exams and results continues at university. As Ting put it, “Chinese students care only about exam scores”. She explained that in the Qunxi program, “students are very serious while doing IELTS test exercises in our English reading classes”. These serious attitudes reflect their ingrained belief in the importance of learning English for examination purposes.

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The exam-oriented system frames the ways in which Chinese students understand education. Fang’s depiction (below) of her senior middle school life provides an extreme but useful illustration of this, encapsulating what came out of my conversations with students about the importance of disciplined learning and the value of time in school. She describes how school administrators attempted to create a disciplined and high-paced way of life, even with respect to running around the track and going to the canteen: …we even had a very strict discipline for running around the track—person after person running, heel to heel, we had to be highly consistent in our running pace, otherwise we would fall down and the heel of our shoe would slide off. … This was meant to create a rigid atmosphere… From the classroom to the canteen, it was not far, but there were several “stops” where on-duty teachers stood … and blew a whistle to remind us to hurry up and run, so we hurried to the canteen; this was meant to make us feel that time was limited and we had to rush all the time. Some students were running and eating at the same time.

In such academic settings, education is treated as a highly disciplined and serious undertaking (Hu, 2002). The words “highly consistent” and “rigid” describe even activities outside class carried out in extremely orderly and organised ways. The deliberately created sense of pressure is meant to remind students that time is limited and precious, and that school time should be used as much as possible for academic learning. Such notions are seen as promoting the efficient use of classroom time. The notion of discipline in education is also reflected in students’ descriptions of quality-oriented education reform.1 Students who talked about education reform in middle schools mostly discussed the introduction of group discussion sessions to the classroom procedure. Often, this novel classroom technique was soon suspended. This has been noted by previous researchers, who note that despite large-­ scale reforms in China, the fundamental nature of Chinese middle school remains unchanged and exam-oriented teaching methods still dominate Chinese schooling (see Bai, 2017; Dello-Iacovo, 2009). Most of the students with whom I talked declared that group discussion is not a normal, and normal education is characterised by orderly and well-disciplined teacher-centred teaching: … the reform lasted for only one month [before] they returned to the normal state—teachers teaching and students listening (Ping, interview).

Thus, an orientation towards exams, academic rigour and performance, and a highly systematised approach to teaching and learning in general continue to be features of China’s education system. Within this socially and culturally mediated context, most Chinese students assume that attaining high exam scores is the sole aim of education: education is regarded as a serious, disciplined, efficient and wholehearted pursuit of knowledge that will be assessed in high-stakes exams (Luo, 2021, p. 68). Students have become habituated to teaching and learning parameters considered effective for achieving expected education objectives. The traditional. Knowledge-transmission modes of teaching are seen as the normal ways to achieve

1  China launched quality-oriented education reform to attempt to shift educational aims from examinations scores to developing well-rounded individuals.

3.3  Discourse of English Language Pedagogy

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educational goals in China. They are also perceived as a central feature of normal education.

3.3  Discourse of English Language Pedagogy English language education at middle schools in China is structured and constrained by exam-oriented demands, the limits of which are reflected in students’ growing pleasure in learning English at universities. Four students (Hua, Qing, Chuan and Fang) described having more positive attitudes to studying English after entering university. As Chuan described it, all his English education prior to university had occurred in a state of tension. His parents had forced him to go to cram schools. In this atmosphere, Chuan had had hardly any interest in English as a subject, which is only one of the three major subjects in Gaokao. Qing expressed a similar view, stating “we were thinking only about passing Gaokao”, illustrating the common situation that students are so preoccupied with exams that they have little time or space to take any interest in learning English for reasons other than achieving certain exam marks. Released from external exam pressure, students began to recognise more meaningful reasons for learning English—for their future employment, for study or travel in Anglophone countries: Now, I have a strong interest in English. This is totally different from the years in which my life was only for Gaokao… After Gaokao, my worldviews and values changed a lot. Now, I think English is very useful and it is the pathway I can take to the world (Chuan, interview).

Prior to university, students’ motivations for learning English were framed by an orientation towards exams. Chuan, Juan, Qing and Fang all said that since entering higher education they had become more proactive in learning English. Chuan added that “liberation” from Gaokao had helped their overall self-development, because they had started to build up their own world views and values in relation to studying English. The Gaokao English exam was the principle doctrine that formed these participant students’ understandings of normal English classes. Hua used the term “normal classes” to refer to lessons with few interactive activities, whereas classes that included them were described as “open classes.”2 When she talked about normal classes, she seemed to assume that I, as a Chinese educator, knew all about them; forgoing detailed explanations, she used the word “whatever” to refer to taken-for-­ granted knowledge. Her generalisations further foreground the strong and fixed educational norms in China: We had some “open classes”—some interactional activities or dancing activities [in primary and junior middle school]. In senior middle school, the English classes were back to “normal classes”, doing exercises or whatever (Hua, interview).

2  “Open classes” are the opposite to “normal classes”. This indicates Hua’s perception of “normal classes” as conservative.

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To capture the full sense of these norms, I sought quotes from participant students that would illustrate what “whatever” really means for English education in China. For almost all participant students, normal English classes follow the traditional teacher-centred, knowledge-transmission mode of teaching and learning; as Wei noted, “English teachers teach the knowledge and we take notes and memorise” (interview). Hence, good English teachers in senior middle schools, as Chuan put it, “knew exactly the important and difficult language points the Gaokao papers may have and [they] explain the key points systematically and comprehensively”. Chuan’s words indicate two attributes of a good English teacher—a clear understanding of the points delivered in the lesson and systematic delivery of them. English language learners, as Wei explained, take notes and try to memorise linguistic knowledge points, which primarily refer to new vocabulary and grammar. This explains why the participant students mentioned “taking notes” repeatedly. The students feel that the lesson should include tangible knowledge which they can note down and take away for further consolidation: Teachers taught new words and grammar in the texts; students learned the grammar and memorised the words. Teachers checked our memorisation afterwards (Wei, interview).

The centrality of grammar and vocabulary in English language pedagogy surfaces in students’ comments about how English teachers dealt with textbooks in senior middle schools. As Ting explained: English teachers in middle school knew it was pointless for us to comprehend the texts, so we just read them through once. Teachers just picked up the important grammar in the texts and focused on exercises.

Similarly, many other students explained that English teachers at school sometimes did not explain the contents of texts within textbooks; rather, they selected important grammatical items and vocabulary from them for students to memorise and followed this with many exercises. The norms of English language pedagogy were further revealed in comments about foreign English teachers’ pedagogical strategies. Analysis of students’ critiques shows how effective English language pedagogy was conceptualised in the local context and embodied in two Chinese concepts: shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性 的知识 (substantive knowledge) and yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑 (logic of English lessons).

3.3.1  s hí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (Substantive Knowledge) Students complained that the lack of substantive knowledge transmitted during foreign teachers’ lessons was a key reason for their low effectiveness. About the English writing course, most of them said that these teachers did not fulfil their expectations with respect to teaching good essay writing skills. As Fang saw it, learning about essay writing structure was of little importance for developing

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writing competence. For her, effective English teaching was more closely correlated with substantive knowledge, which, she believed, was obtained through systematic teaching from textbooks and the gradual accumulation of vocabulary and grammar (Luo, 2021, p. 63): I expected that my English would improve substantially, but what I have got here is not substantive improvement… What I have gained in foreign teachers’ classes is just the essay structure… I expected the foreign teacher would go through the textbook and teach systematically and then expand the language knowledge… Many students feel it is a waste of time… Many students play (wan, 玩) on their phones through the whole class….

She argued that the foreign teachers lack a systematic approach to teaching supported by rigorous use of textbooks. Their failure to use what she understood to be a comprehensive approach resulted in students not making any substantive improvement in English. The repetition of the notion of “substantive” emphasises the chasm between the objectives of the Western teachers and the expectations of the students. That Fang’s views were shared by the other students was exemplified by their lack of engagement—playing on their phones during class. Fang’s claim that she could not adapt to the different objectives pursued by the Western teachers emphasises the depth and breadth of this disjuncture (Luo, 2021, p. 63). Fang’s understandings of foreign teachers’ writing classes were reiterated in both participant interviews and focus groups. Most participant students expressed, implicitly and explicitly, their concerns about the lack of substantive knowledge in academic essay writing. Ting and Juan were wholly in agreement with Fang’s definition of substantive knowledge as vocabulary and grammar. Because foreign English teachers did not teach such linguistic knowledge systematically, they felt that their English writing skills were not improving substantially. With no expansion of linguistic knowledge, students complained that the quality of their essays remained dependent on their previous stock of English: I don’t think we can improve our English in foreign teachers’ classes, as the teacher teaches us how to use “and” “but”. It is as easy as A.B.C… He [the foreign teacher] does not teach us good sentence structures or words, and [so] it all depends on our previous English levels (Ting, interview).

Ting’s concern about the appropriateness of knowledge in the academic writing textbook reflected students’ desire to acquire substantive knowledge. She believed that the linguistic knowledge delivered in the foreign teachers’ lessons did not suit the students. In Ting’s argument, linguistic knowledge refers to the construction of compound sentences using conjunctions, such as “and” and “but”, and how to use commas and create complex sentences. In her view, such “easy” knowledge is not worthy of explicit instructions in any sense and makes no contribution to their language improvement. As students in focus group 1 explained, they had much more knowledge of grammar than most foreign teachers realised: …it would be useful for foreign teachers to do the Gaokao English exam paper at the beginning of semester 1 and they would get an idea of what we already know. Foreign teachers think we know nothing when they teach us “am, is, are”, but in fact we learned a lot in senior middle school (Xiaobai, focus group 1).

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According to Xiaobai (focus group 1), Chinese students had already learned complex English grammar in senior middle school, which is reflected in the test items in the Gaokao English exam paper. Xiaobai’s comments highlight the mismatch between the linguistic objectives of the English writing course and students’ existing knowledge. Qing approached knowledge from a different perspective, talking about the error-related knowledge taught in foreign teachers’ classes. She explained that she had learned nothing from the foreign teachers’ classes, because all the error-related explanations were confined to one essay written and repeatedly modified within one semester: When I wrote something in the essay, they would point out that some sentences are informal. If I hadn’t written them in my essay, I would never have known…The reality is that we write only one essay for the whole semester and we keep editing and refining it. It means I can learn the language errors only in that single essay.

The crux of Qing’s criticism is that the teachers should impart (error-related) knowledge comprehensively, so it can be applied in future essay writing. Once again, Qing’s words highlight the students’ perceptions of language learning as first an accumulative process of linguistic knowledge before it is used in communicative activities. In relation to the speaking course, most students argued that, because they had not increased their linguistic knowledge much, their oral English had not improved a lot. Most seemed to think that English speaking skills were related to the amount of linguistic knowledge they had acquired. Hence, an insufficient language stock, especially of vocabulary, hindered the advancement of their speaking skills. This point was exemplified by Juan: I think foreign teachers’ classes are all about playing, and we can’t learn a lot from their classes… If I don’t learn grammar or vocabulary, I can’t express what I would like to say. I don’t think I have adequate stock of grammar or vocabulary. I expect foreign teachers to push us to memorise some words.

Juan believed that foreign teachers should emphasise the memorisation of English words. Without expanding their linguistic stock of vocabulary, students feel unable to develop their speaking skills further. Some students also said that their oral English skills had not improved because foreign teachers neither pointed out nor corrected the errors in their spoken English, nor provided guidance about how to improve their speaking. As Juan articulated, the teacher “did not advise me how to learn English speaking”. It seems that students expected explicit teaching of oral skills and language knowledge, which they assumed to be the foundation of communicative skills development. Here, the students’ emphasis on accumulation of certain linguistic knowledge is foregrounded: We seldom spoke English before, so we are afraid of making mistakes, and making the same mistakes forever… He [the foreign teacher] would not correct grammatical mistakes or incorrect language in your spoken English as long as you can get the message across… (Xiaozhu, focus group 1).

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As suggested here, foreign English teachers are more concerned about the communicative function of language and aim to develop students’ language skills in communicative activities. My discussion with students highlighted a gap between the students’ and their foreign teachers’ understandings about English language and English language learning, which will be further revealed in discussion of the concept of “logic of English lessons”.

3.3.2  y īng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑 (Logic of English Lessons) The students used the Chinese concept luó jí, 逻辑 (logic) to describe their understandings of effective English teaching. For example, Fang used the words méi luó jí, 没逻辑 (no logic) to describe foreign teachers’ classes. She illustrated her argument with a scenario in which she perceived casual and random communication between the teacher and individual students as illogical (Luo, 2021, p. 64). It seems that she was unable to grasp the rationale of the teachers’ teaching tactics. She compared the apparent disorder in the foreign teachers’ classrooms to the state of the Chinese teachers’ classrooms, where important points were derived from textbooks and taught systematically (Luo, 2021, p. 65): …there is no logic in the foreign teachers’ classes. Sometimes, they teach a sentence, then they express their feelings and answer individual students’ unnecessary [off-topic] questions… students do activities… there are no important points… I expected that they would impart Western knowledge and would teach the textbook systematically… however, we seldom look at the textbook… In our Chinese teachers’ classes, however, we go through the texts in the textbook and learn the important points, and learn some words… I have a sense of achievement after I have learned the important points in a text in Chinese teachers’ classes....

For Fang, luó jí, 逻辑 means “a clear demonstration of important points and a systematic teaching approach derived from the textbook” (Luo, 2021, p. 65). The repetition of the notion of ‘important points’ emphasises Fang’s understanding that language learning is reducible to essential features that can be clearly defined and imparted in ordered and sequential ways. Reduced to their elementary characteristics, the vocabulary and grammatical points (“substantive knowledge”) taught by Chinese teachers give Fang a sense of achievement that she does not have in the Western teachers’ classes (Luo, 2021, p. 65). Similarly, Ping’s criticisms of her three foreign teachers highlight an appreciation for clear and orderly delivery of teaching tasks. In her view, the “good” foreign teachers were those who were clearly aware of the designated tasks and taught enough to help students to complete them; in contrast, the “bad” foreign teachers lacked a clear schedule for the tasks and did not give appropriate instructions: … we had many assignments, so we did not have time to play, and the [second foreign] teacher was to help us complete the assessment tasks… She [the third foreign teacher] assumed we knew what to cover in the schedule, but we did not have that schedule. She just

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3  Headless Flies informed us we would have an assessment in the next week, but she did not teach us how to do that in advance…

The salient point is that most students valued the ordered and sequential transmission of knowledge in class and largely ignored the merits of methods favoured by foreign teachers. Foreign teachers, trained in norms of CLT (as discussed in Sect. 2.3 above), hold the view that English language is better learned and retained by engaging students in communicative activities and catering to individual learners’ needs. In the students’ perceptions, this is wrong, and their descriptions describe a binary condition that opposes the logical order of the Chinese teachers’ classes and the apparent disorder of classes taught by foreign teachers. Yet, this mismatch was seen differently by one of the students, Dou. While supporting Fang’s contention that foreign teachers’ classes are unsystematic and lack order, Dou enjoyed the sense of disorder and surprise that the different teaching methods provoked in class: We are doing this activity, then that activity, so there is a feeling of surprise, and it is less likely to become boring (Dou, focus group 3).

In contrast, only two students (Chuan and Ping) appeared to understand the rationales underpinning Western teachers’ apparently disorderly teaching behaviours. As noted in Chap. 2, Chuan was highly critical of local English teaching methods in China and hailed the foreign teachers’ lessons as “ideal” lessons; Ping had always been good at and interested in English learning. Far from portraying the Western language teachers’ classes as lacking logic or systematicity, Chuan described lessons in which teachers guided students to practise their spoken English in group discussions and public presentations. He said, “our foreign teacher would let us discuss a certain topic in our study team and then present it in class in turns. I liked it”. For him, the foreign teachers’ lessons had a deliberate sequence, group discussion followed by individual presentation. Similarly, Ping thought that her foreign teachers followed a thread of completing all the tasks week by week, despite the addition of peripheral playful activities. This analysis of the norms of English education suggests that, though the participant students changed their attitudes toward English learning once they started university, most of them maintained ideas about English language pedagogy that were shaped during their senior middle school years. Good language pedagogies were defined as the systematic transmission of substantive knowledge in the classroom and the “logical structure of lessons”. These students expected all lessons to revolve around the delivery and accumulation of linguistic knowledge, which they assumed would result in substantive improvement of their English and their performance in English exams. These features of English teaching and learning in China have been noted by previous researchers (see Jin & Cortazzi, 2006; Li, 2014; Liu et al., 2016; Rao, 2006). Western English teachers’ lessons disrupted such norms of English education, resulting in students engaging in negotiation processes in their classes, as discussed in the following section.

3.4  Students’ Learning Experiences in Foreign English Teachers’ Lessons

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3.4  S  tudents’ Learning Experiences in Foreign English Teachers’ Lessons Embedded as they are in this discourse about English language education, Chinese students described apparent interstices as they negotiate unfamiliar language pedagogies used by foreign English teachers. The next section first presents the foreign English teachers’ perceptions of good English pedagogy, based on the notion of “students as whole persons”, then examines how students interpreted their teaching practices in this discourse.

3.4.1  Foreign English Teachers: “Students as Whole Persons” Foreign English teachers told me that English learners should be treated as whole people. This means that students’ individual learning styles, their lived experiences, motivations for learning, affective factors, career prospects and critical thinking skills should all be taken into account by English language pedagogy. Kate, from Northern Ireland, made this point most saliently by saying that her philosophy was to treat students as whole individuals, and not to focus only on their academic ability: Generally, my philosophy of education is that you have to think about the whole person, not just academic but all their abilities… I think they need to find a way to relate to their life, to draw on their experiences, to connect to the life they are living… [We should] give them a chance to talk about themselves, their things, so as to bring their experiences to their learning… Let them make choices themselves, everybody has different learning styles… If possible, I try to give them different ways of learning and also to use different activities, some pair work, group work, or whole class feedback.

Thus, for this teacher, “the whole person” encompasses individual students’ life experiences, their personalities, past English learning experiences and individual learning styles. In her teaching, Kate tries to relate class material to her students’ lived experiences so that the activities are meaningful for them. She provides them with opportunities to talk about themselves and their life stories in class. In addition, since each student has a different style of learning, English teachers should organise different activities to accommodate them. By highlighting traits of individual students other than their academic abilities, Kate emphasises her concern for individual students. John’s view of teachers and students as a community demonstrates his perception of the “student as a whole person”. The “community” here refers to a scenario in which teachers and students can share and learn from each other on an equal basis, and teachers are genuine and sympathetic in front of students: I try to create a kind of community as well. … We are kind of learning together… I think students can explore their errors together and explain their errors better than I can. I think teachers should be authentic, they should be compassionate as well… If they are teaching

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3  Headless Flies them something, they can meet them on equal terms… That’s to say, trying to know each student and being able to address them by their name.

By foregrounding the equal relationships within the teacher–student community and the teachers’ humanity, John demonstrates his caring attitude to individual students. He tries to get to know each student in his class. In this “community”, the advantages of peer-assistance among students surface; as John explained, mutual support between fellow students can facilitate language learning better than a teacher can. John’s belief in viewing learners as whole persons was also reflected in his discussion about the usefulness of English for students’ future development. He said that his students were not motivated to learn English because it was not related to their individual plans and future careers. As he explained, after the course, few students might use English, because most did not plan to study or work in an English-­ speaking country. John’s question about the post-university function of learning English suggests that some students have few reasons for learning English: I find it more motivating… when there is a clear objective and there is a real-life situation involved… Here, students don’t have immediate [English] needs… How many students will go to Australia and study in the future? Maybe a very small percentage. This is one question. Another question, my weakest class is computer science: do they need English? To what extent do they need English after the course?

These questions reveal that John’s views of English language pedagogy involve his consideration of students’ disciplinary areas, their personal future plans and job prospects. Tom extended John’s questions about the relationship between real-life goals and English language education by emphasising the teachers’ role of inculcating in students a faith in the benefits of language learning: Teaching is all about giving the kids the skills to cope with life better. Ultimately, that is what teaching is about… giving them a great opportunity in life. So if I can help them to develop or get them to see and understand learning English can be beneficial. Superficially, I think everyone knows… [to] get them to really take that to heart and to want to change their lives is another level again.

Tom believes that learning English is a skill that enables students to cope with life better. The teacher should try to incorporate this idea into students’ long-term beliefs so that it will translate into language learning behaviours. With such a belief, their motivation for English learning will surely improve. Tom’s emphasis on students’ beliefs in language learning demonstrates some of the nuances of Western English teachers’ conceptions of language learners as whole persons. The development of students’ critical thinking skills is another aspect highlighted by John’s philosophy of education. He stated that the teacher should challenge and encourage students to explore and form their own thoughts in relation to certain issues, rather than provide knowledge as an “authority”: I think it is important to challenge students, demand high, that is why I try to do this in the classroom. I don’t like giving them [students] answers, I would like them to be able to

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think… In other words, some kind of extending in some way… there are no right or wrong answers…

This suggests that John’s lessons were not characterised by systematic transmission of knowledge but rather involved students exploring and constructing knowledge. His words suggest that the English lessons are not limited to English skills development, but extend to the cultivation of students’ thinking skills. The above analysis suggests the ways in which the concept of “students as whole persons” was interpreted by Western English teachers in the Qunxi program. Western English teachers tend to regard students as individuals in their understandings of English language pedagogy. Therefore, they attempt to make use of individual aspects in language learning as embodied in the words “community”, “belief” and “critical thinking skills”. With this inclination to look after individual students, foreign teachers seem to be surprised and disoriented by large class sizes in the Qunxi program. (At the time of my research, there were at least 30 students in any one class and one teacher usually taught three classes in the semester.) As Alice explained, showing her concern for individual students, “every day, I come to class with 35 people with 35 lives, 35 types of problems, 35 learning styles”. For Alice, being unable to address the learning needs of each student is challenging.

3.4.2  Students: Disoriented Lessons Students used the Chinese metaphor méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 (headless flies) to describe their foreign English teachers, showing how the teachers’ teaching methods disturb their taken-for-granted notions of English teaching and learning. The metaphor describes how foreign teachers’ practices disrupt students’ notions of order, purpose and efficiency in English lessons; it encapsulates their negotiations with foreign English teachers’ lessons. Our Chinese English teachers plan very well in advance and every lesson runs according to a procedure. However, this foreign teacher comes without clear ideas about what we are doing with this lesson. It is like [being taught by] a headless fly… (Xiaoxun, focus group 4).

Xiaoxun’s remark brings out the nuances of the méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 (headless flies) metaphor more explicitly by comparing Chinese and foreign English teachers. The phrases “plan well” and “run according to a procedure” suggest that Chinese English teachers are meticulous and efficient; their teaching is described as a “procedure”, which suggests an orderly and sequential lesson (the logic of the lessons). In contrast, students see foreign teachers as lacking plans, as Xiaozi’s words illustrate, “without clear ideas about what we are doing”. As a result, their lessons were described in focus group 5 in this way: I don’t know the purpose of the lesson…it seems that the teacher teaches whatever he likes… If we can learn English effectively, our English level would improve… but we only have a little improvement (Xiaozi, focus group 5).

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This observation suggests that foreign English teachers’ lessons are random, aimless and ineffective (as described in Sects. 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 above). Here, foreign teachers disrupt the students’ assumptions and beliefs in relation to two aspects: the purpose of English lessons, and their notions of effective English language pedagogy. First, foreign English teachers’ classes ruffle students’ preconceptions of the purposes of an English lesson. As discussed above, the central aim of English lessons, for the students, is the accumulation of linguistic knowledge (substantive knowledge) that prepares them for reading and writing-focused English exams (Li, 2014). This understanding shapes their ideas about writing and speaking courses delivered by foreign English teachers. Academic writing lessons that focused on genre-related conceptual understandings do not align well with students’ perceptions of English learning. Similarly, conversation classes that aim to enhance students’ communicative competences were described as ignoring students’ real barriers to enhancing their oral skills. The real issue, according to the students, is their inadequate stock of linguistic items. In short, foreign English teachers’ classes were perceived as not addressing the substantive knowledge that contributes to English language improvements. Second, foreign English teachers’ approaches disturb students’ conceptualisations of effective English language pedagogy. As noted in Sect. 3.3.2, the clear and concise demonstrations of linguistic points and their systematic delivery are described as effective and efficient teaching. Designated English textbooks serve as a canon that teachers draw upon. Thus, in students’ perceptions, good English pedagogical practices should revolve around efficient and effective transmission of the designated knowledge. Against such perceptions, foreign English teachers’ practices are inevitably received negatively. The reasons, according to the students, are that foreign English teachers do not follow textbooks and more importantly, their pedagogical practices seem random and chaotic, and—the students believed—do not contribute to substantive improvement of English language. The students referred to this state of disorder and randomness as illogical. Foreign English teachers’ pedagogical behaviours disturb students’ normative understandings of education. As noted already, for them, education is the serious and disciplined pursuit of knowledge; for example, the learning of English words and grammar; thus lessons should be carried out in an ordered and serious manner. According to many students, foreign English teachers seem to seize upon whatever comes up in class as points of illustration. This chaotic and casual approach contradicts their notions of the serious and disciplined flow of a lesson and is thus inevitably characterised as deviant or abnormal. Moreover, foreign English teachers’ apparently inefficient teaching practices seem to challenge Chinese students’ values and beliefs about precious class time being used for serious learning. These disruptions that students experience may be linked to foreign English teachers’ conception of “students as whole persons”. Western teachers show much concern for individual learners in designing lesson procedures. Thus, to develop students’ productive skills in English writing and speaking, they incorporate in-­ class activities to engage each and every student in a big class, which inevitably appears casual, disorganised and inefficient in comparison with so-called normal English lessons. This is a clear example of how the students interpret their learning experiences within a discourse of English language education.

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3.5  S  tudents’ Learning Experiences in Local English Teachers’ Lessons In this final section of the chapter, I discuss the ways in which participant students perceive their local English teachers’ pedagogical practices within a discourse of English language pedagogy. I first describe local English teachers’ conceptualisations of English language education as jiāo kè bě, 教课本 (teaching the textbook). Then I explore how students interpret these teachers’ pedagogical practices.

3.5.1  L  ocal English Teachers: jiāo kè bě, 教课本 (Teaching of the Textbook) The “teaching of the textbook” was found to be a dominant principle in all local Chinese teacher participants’ statements about the philosophy underpinning English language education. Asked about what their philosophy for teaching the English reading course was based on, Lan, Yan and Hong all said that they were unsure. Instead, they described the procedures that all English teachers go through while teaching such a course, from vocabulary to content, and the messages the texts are meant to convey: I don’t have a clear philosophy; I am not sure what I am doing here. All of us are teaching like this: from vocabulary to content and to the message the text is meant to convey (Lan, interview).

Lan’s pragmatic view of pedagogy appears to be a basic textbook-based teaching approach, in which texts are used as a vehicle for language to be introduced and themes to be discussed. The following field notes are a summary of a typical 50-­minute lesson delivered by an experienced English teacher, Rui,3 to Year 2 students, which demonstrates how “teaching to the textbook” proceeds: Stage 1: 20 minutes: The lesson began with dictation of ten phrases and sentences, e.g. “exceed the speed limit”, “increasing convenience”, “living in harmony with nature”…After collecting the dictation sheets, the teacher repeated the dictated words one by one using translation as a scaffold. So, the questions posed were “what is the meaning of ‘renew the contract’?” “How could we say kě zài shēng zī yuán, 可再生资源?”… Stage 2: 10 minutes: the teacher provided background information about the theme of the text, e.g. family structure, DINK (dual income no kids), single-parent family, blended family, left-behind children. During this phase, the teacher attempted to activate students’ stock of knowledge concerning the topic by posing some questions, but mainly answering them herself. Stage 3: 10 minutes: the teacher moved on to the key words and expressions prescribed in the unit guide… These words were presented and then practised by students, who read them collectively first, and then the teacher offered more examples and explanations. The 3  Rui started work in the program in 2004 and had been the coordinator of the Year 2 English reading course for over 5 years at time of interview.

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3  Headless Flies teacher used mainly translation and occasionally synonyms or antonyms to explain these words. To emphasise the importance of the words and expressions, the teacher said in Chinese “We should store all these expressions in our memory, and this is the purpose of our learning”. Stage 4: 10 minutes: Then they moved to more complex sentences in the text as listed in the preview notebook. The teacher explained her interpretations of the more complex sentences. There were some text comprehension questions and students were asked to find the answers. (Classroom observations 6)

These classroom observations illustrate how the centrality of teaching of the textbook is the Chinese teachers’ philosophy of language education. The lesson described above revolved around the teaching and learning of one unit, consisting of two texts (texts A and B) in the prescribed textbook. The dictation procedure (20 min) was meant to evaluate and review vocabulary delivered in text A; the rest of the lesson mainly focused on explanations of linguistic expressions in text B. The allocation of class time (roughly 60% of lesson time was spent on linguistic knowledge) reflects the emphasis on linguistic knowledge in the textbook and the way it was expected to be taught. In addition, the teacher tried to activate students’ schematic knowledge of the topic. She asked them about their understandings of family structure, but mostly answered the questions herself without giving students the time to respond. One reason may be, as the teacher explained in Mandarin, that the real purpose of the English reading lessons is the accumulation of linguistic items; opportunities for language production are thus not seen as an indispensable part of the lesson. Therefore, the introduction and explanations of the theme only took 10 min and the remaining time was spent on explicit teaching of linguistic items within the text. The class observations, of which those reported above are a reasonably typical example, suggest that Chinese English teachers mainly use teacher-centred knowledge transmission teaching methods. Linguistic items are taught explicitly through translation and examples. The students mostly listen to and respond to teachers’ questions in chorus; they also take notes of what the teacher says. The content of the text seems unimportant, because it evokes no discussion among students and is merely used as the medium for introducing the linguistic items. In summary, the observations show that a principal objective of local English teachers’ classes is to teach significant amounts of the linguistic knowledge contained in the textbook..

3.5.2  Students: zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (Real Learning) A common opinion of local English teachers among participant students was that their lessons are a continuation of those taught in senior middle school, which is what they think of as zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (real learning),, which refers to the intensive methods used in school through which students advance their knowledge and understanding substantially. This concept describes how students felt that they had made genuine improvements in their English through the local teachers’

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lessons. Nuances of this concept are reflected in their pedagogical practices, as summed up by Juan: Our local English teachers would teach us some grammar and vocabulary and how to use them and they would check in the classroom… their teaching is an extension of English teaching in senior middle school and I am used to that… I feel that students like the reading course more than the foreign teachers’ courses (Juan, interview).

It appears that a grammar–translation approach represents continuity because it jells with student expectations of English language pedagogy. According to students, a grammar–translation approach means that grammar and vocabulary are the primary content of lessons and the teaching method is more or less teacher-centred. Juan’s words “I am used to it” are indicative of most participant students’ attitudes to this approach. It appears that prior English learning experiences shape students’ assumptions about English language pedagogy. This explains Ting’s argument that university English teachers should stick to traditional ways of teaching and learning, which are seen as the most effective way to achieve the goal of genuine improvement, that is, the accumulation of English linguistic knowledge: I would stick to the traditional way of teaching and learning, focus on the important points, things that will genuinely improve your English proficiency and be useful in the future (Ting, interview).

Figure 3.2 shows commonly used PowerPoint slides in the participant Chinese English teachers’ classes; they demonstrate the teaching method students identified above. The two sentences in these slides were subjected to further examination in class because they contain some key words (in red)—“exceed” and “accelerate”—that require explanation. They are new vocabulary items which the teacher regarded as high frequency English words, and useful in communication. Translations and examples were provided to illustrate the usage of these words. Most students agreed with the assertion that genuine improvement of English is achieved in the local teachers’ classes. This point is best exemplified in Qing’s story. Qing once served as a volunteer for a local marathon (organised in a local city with a small number of foreign participants). She said that volunteers with good oral English skills have many more opportunities to greet and talk with foreign guests at that event. When she became aware of the significance of English speaking skills in activities related to the marathon, she began to treat her English reading classes seriously. Qing’s remarks further highlight the common assumption among participant students that genuine improvement in English proficiency takes place in  local English classes rather than in foreign teachers’ classes: [Before], we were only thinking about passing the Gaokao… Now, I realize how important English is… I have a strong interest in English… I have a better attitude to English reading courses. Previously, I was not attentive in classes, but now among all the courses, it is in the reading course that I am the most attentive (Qing, interview).

As explained earlier (3.5.1), Chinese English teachers’ lessons focus mainly on the systemic teaching of linguistic points through textbooks, an approach that

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Fig. 3.2  PowerPoint slides in the participant Chinese English teachers’ classes

accords with students’ preconceptions of English language pedagogy. They thus describe these lessons as “real learning” or “normal classes”. This chapter has explained the overarching theoretical lens adopted here to analyse students’ perceptions of English learning experiences in the Qunxi program. Hall’s representation theory demonstrates the intertwined relationship between language, culture and discourse; it is a novel theoretical tool for investigating how participants’ perceptions are socially, culturally mediated and embedded in discourse. I have also described the larger social, cultural and educational contexts of this study, examined the Chinese discourse of English language education and analysed how participant students describe the teaching practices of both local and foreign teachers from within this discourse. Data analysis indicates that the Chinese students held to norms of English teaching that stress the logical delivery of linguistic knowledge. According to these norms, foreign English teachers responsible for developing their speaking and writing skills were described as “headless flies”.

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Reading courses taught by Chinese English teachers were perceived as “real learning”, and as contributing to “substantive” improvement of English language. Students’ construction of English teachers’ pedagogical practices is also related to another discourse, one associated with teachers’ cultural identities; this is the focus of discussion in Chap. 4.

References Bai, J. (2017). Teachers’ understandings and actions towards china’s new curriculum reforms in the context of Chinese examination-oriented education (Order No. 10666424). Available from Education Collection. (1984326027). Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/ dissertations-­theses/teachers-­understandings-­actions-­towards-­chinas/docview/1984326027/ se-­2?accountid=146575 Dello-Iacovo, B. (2009). Curriculum reform and “quality education” in China: An overview. International Journal of Educational Development, 29(3), 241–249. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. Tavistock. Foucault, M. (1980). Power and knowledge. Harvester. García, O., & Wei, L. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan. Gee, J. P. (2004). An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method (2nd ed.). Routledge. Gee, J. P. (2008). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Routledge. Hall, S. (1992). The west and the rest: Discourse and power. In S.  Hall & B.  Gieben (Eds.), Formations of modernity (pp. 185–227). Polity Press/The Open University. Hall, S. (1997a). Introduction. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 1–11). Sage Publications, in association with The Open University.. Hall, S. (1997b). The work of representation. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 14–74). Sage Publications, in association with The Open University.. Hu, G. W. (2002). Potential cultural resistance to pedagogical imports: The case of communicative language teaching in China. Language Culture and Curriculum, 15(2), 93–105. Jin, L., & Cortazzi, M. (2006). Changing practices in Chinese cultures of learning. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 19(1), 5–20. Kirkpatrick, R., & Zang, Y. (2011). The negative influences of exam-oriented education on Chinese high school students: Backwash from classroom to child. Language testing in Asia, 1(3), 36–45. Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford University Press. Li, C. (2014). Development, problems and solutions: A critical review of current situation of college English language education in mainland China. Arab World English Journal, 5(3), 291–303. Liu, N., Lin, C. K., & Wiley, T. G. (2016). Learner views on English and English language teaching in China. International Multilingual Research Journal, 10(2), 137–157. Luo, Y.  M. (2021). Towards innovative English language teaching: Multilingualism and the re-­ conceptualisation of the Chinese/Western binary. In R. Arber, M. Weinmann, & J. Blackmore (Eds.), Rethinking languages education directions, challenges and innovations (pp.  58–72). Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. Routledge. Rao, Z. (2006). Understanding Chinese students’ use of language learning strategies from cultural and educational perspectives. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 27(6), 491–508. Yan, C. (2015). “We can’t change much unless the exams change”: Teachers’ dilemmas in the curriculum reform in China. Improving Schools, 18(1), 5–19.

Chapter 4

Foreign Friends

Abstract  In the Qunxi program, students refer to foreign English teachers as “foreign friends”. In this chapter, I elaborate on how foreign English teachers’ identity is discursively constructed in a local context, which, in turn, affects students’ representations of the teaching practices of both local and foreign teachers. I first explain how identity operates in the representation of social practices. The relationship between representation and identity is lived out in students’ construction of their foreign English teachers’ pedagogical practices, forming a discourse of “foreign English teachers as foreign friends”. Within this discourse, the foreign teachers’ practices are devalued by students as “play”. The foreign teachers, however, have a radically different interpretation of their methods, which is encapsulated in their principle of “teachers as facilitators”. In comparison, students describe some of the activities in local English teachers’ lessons as “buzzing class activities”.

Foreign English teachers were referred to as wài guó yǒu rén, 外国友人 (foreign friends) by many of the students who participated in this study. In this chapter, I elaborate on how the identity of English teacher is discursively constructed in a local context, which informs students’ representations of the teaching practices of both local and foreign teachers. I begin by explaining how stereotyping and identity operate in representation of social practices, as outlined in Hall’s representation theory. The relationship between representation and identity is lived out in students’ construction of foreign English teachers’ pedagogical practices, forming a discourse of “foreign English teachers as foreign friends”. Within this discourse, the English speaking course run by the “foreign friends” is described as fēi zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 非正式的英语课 (informal English course), whereas the English writing course is defined as zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 正式的英语课 (formal English course). Foreign English teachers describe their philosophy of English education as guided by the principle that teachers are “facilitators”. However, their students have a radically different interpretation of their pedagogical practices, which they devalue as wán, 玩 (play). Local Chinese teachers also conceptualise English language education as based on notions of “students as whole persons” and “teachers as facilitators” and, therefore, occasionally incorporate some lively and interactive class

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_4

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activities into their lessons. These in-class activities, however, were poorly appreciated, and described by students as wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡响的课堂 活动 (buzzing class activities) that do little to improve their English. This is partly because they distinguish the local Chinese teachers from the “outsider” foreign teachers.

4.1  Identity and Representation To understand better the relationship between identity and representation, let’s examine Hall’s (1997) illustrations of the process of stereotyping in the representation of difference, of a foreign or exotic culture, and then discuss how identity plays out in representational practices.

4.1.1  Stereotyping—“the Spectacle of the Other” When Hall writes about “type”, he means any simple, memorable and widely recognised characterisation in which a few traits are foregrounded and change is minimised (Hall 1997, p.257). In everyday social communications, people make sense of people, events or objects by categorising them into different types (or concepts) that are culturally specific. This creation of types is essential to the production of meaning in representational processes (as described in Sect. 3.1). Furthermore, when people are making sense of things in the world, their understandings are based not merely on types but also on some wider categories; that is to say, things and their meanings are often placed and defined in “different orders of typification” which are hierarchical (Hall 1997, p.257). Hall argues that when people from a dominant culture represent a peripheral community, they tend to grasp a few simple and easily recognised characteristics, further simplify and exaggerate them, then attribute everything to those traits and fix them eternally. So, the first point is that stereotyping “reduces, essentialises, naturalises and fixes ‘difference’” (Hall 1997, p. 258). Second, stereotyping involves “a strategy of splitting” (Hall 1997, p.  258). Hall observes that people who are significantly different within a community are frequently exposed to a form of representation that sets up sharply opposed and polarised binary extremes, such as good/bad, civilised/primitive, ugly/attractive, Us/ Them. These binary poles are not equally weighted; there is always an imbalance of power between them. Through the exercise of power in discourse, binary splitting defines the boundaries between “normal” and “deviant”, the “acceptable” and the “unacceptable”, and what belongs and what is excluded. Third, stereotyping is more likely to happen where there are “inequalities of power” (Hall, 1997, p. 258). One example is the representation of a different culture through the application of the norms of one’s own. In this way, stereotyping occurs when people are classified in reference to certain cultural norms and constructed and positioned as Other. This is

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the “symbolic power” of representation, the power to classify and represent someone or something in a certain way (Hall, 1997, p. 259). By representing and classifying people according to established norms and excluding the Other, stereotyping is a key process in exerting symbolic violence. Stereotyping often occurs in scholarly representations of Chinese students, as discussed in Chap. 1 (Sect. 1.2.1). When Western education researchers explain Chinese students’ learning behaviours, they tend to use binary terms to essentialise and classify them according to the established norms of their own. An example of mutual stereotyping between the East and the West are Orientalism and Occidentalism. Occidentalism can be seen as the East’s essentialisation and misinterpretation of the West, an imagined Western Other against which Oriental identities may be constructed (Joseph, 2004; Wodak et al., 2009). The process of Occidentalism in China involves the complex representation of Westerners through the media and in relation to concepts in China, that is, the West is reconstructed in China. The Chinese government plays a significant role in the imagining and production of the West in China, and therefore Occidentalism may be purely a political issue involving “the essentialisation of the West as a means for supporting a nationalism that effects the internal suppression of its own people” (Chen, 1995, p. 17). This is what X. Chen (1995) calls official Occidentalism. Anne-Marie Brady (2003) also describes how the Chinese government has drawn on and manipulated nationalism to address political ends at given moments. Westerners are described as “foreign friends” coming to assist in China’s social and economic constructions, and at the same time, they are portrayed as imperialists out to exploit China (Brady, 2003). In this research, Chinese university students’ representations of foreign English teachers involve a misrepresentation of the West, that is, Occidentalism. Foreign English teachers are constructed as “foreign friends” and Western others, who are imagined as having certain characteristics different from local Chinese English teachers. The students’ binary constructions of Chinese and Western English teachers are informed by their prior knowledge about foreigners and the institutional demarcation of the two cohorts of English teachers. As with Occidentalism, Western Orientalism is a complex process involving essentialising and reductionist images of the Orient. Orientalism, according to Edward Said (2003), can be viewed as Western countries’ institution for dominating and restructuring the Orient; it is a discourse that enables imperial Western countries to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, ideologically, during the postcolonial period (Said, 2003, p. 3). According to Said, the West, in order to understand and dominate its colonised peoples, engages in certain representational practices through the gaze of Western culture; the Orient is thus essentialised and marginalised through reduction, categorisation and distortion. The Oriental is represented as eccentric, backward, irrational, sensual and untrustworthy, in stark contrast to normative assumptions about the West. Oriental values, beliefs and capabilities are judged in terms of the West and the Orientals themselves are denied subjectivity and variation (Rizvi & Lingard, 2006, p. 296). In this sense, the Orient is “an imagined place that is articulated through an entire system of thought and scholarship” (Rizvi & Lingard, 2006, p. 296). Orientalism ultimately reflects

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the interests and perspectives of Westerners who seek to control colonised peoples rather than Orientals themselves (Rizvi & Lingard, 2006). To put it more simply, Orientalism is a postcolonial theory that homogenises and misrepresents the Orient, employed by the hegemonic West for the purpose of promoting imperialism and colonialism. It provides a strong conceptual and analytical tool with which to examine issues of representation, identity and cultural communication. Though Orientalism is not directly concerned with education, it is related to research in that Western educators, with essentialised understandings of Orientals, tend to reference characteristics developed within this hegemonic framework. The predominance of Western explanatory framework in education research results in “intellectual colonialism” (Slethaug, 2010, p.35), a new form of Orientalism in postcolonial period. “Intellectual colonialism” results in the domination of theories developed in Anglophone Western countries, while the pedagogical values and strengths of local communities of teachers and students are ignored.

4.1.2  Identity in Representational Practices There are two conflicting notions of identity: essentialist and non-essentialist. From the essentialist perspective, identity has some kind of essential core, such as race, ethnicity, gender or religion, that marks out a particular group (Woodward, 1997); individual subjects are thus perceived as products of their biological, social and cultural conditions, which are fixed and unchanging. This leads to the stereotyping of Others. From a non-essentialist perspective, “identity is … contingent; that is, as the product of an intersection of different components, of political and cultural discourses and particular histories” (Woodward, 1997, p. 28). Recent researchers are inclined to follow the non-essentialist view of identity that holds that identity is a not a fixed and stable construct, but a multiple, shifting and contradictory relationship with the world, influenced by sociocultural, historical and institutional contexts (Hall, 1996; Norton, 2000; Varghese et al., 2005); identity is fluid, contingent and discursively constructed (Norton, 2013). This is what Hall (1996) describes as the “revolution of the subject” in new times, wherein, individuals are no longer conceived as whole, stable and complete selves; rather, The “self” is conceptualized as more fragmented and incomplete, composed of multiple selves or identities in relation to the different social worlds we inhabit, something with a history and “produced” in process. The subject is differently placed or positioned by different discourses or practices. (1996, p. 225)

Foreign teachers in China do not have a unitary and fixed identity as English teachers only for Chinese students; their identity is constructed and negotiated in socially, culturally and politically mediated contexts. Varghese et  al., 2005 have done a brief literature review on language teacher identity, and they uncovered three central ideas in recent understandings of the concept of identity. First, identity is not a fixed, stable and unitary phenomenon, but multi-layered, controversial and

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shifting. Second, identity is context dependent and is closely linked to social, cultural and political, and institutional settings. Finally, identity is mediated, negotiated and constructed to a large extent through language and discourse. Their views of teacher identity stress the interaction between contextual and individual factors in shaping a teacher’s identity in specific contexts. I used this perspective of identity in my study to analyse how Western teachers’ identities are negotiated and constructed within the multiple discourses in which they are placed. Let’s examine how Western English teachers’ identity plays out in the formation of the Occidentalist discourse.

4.2  The “Foreign Teachers as Foreign Friends” Discourse In our interviews and focus group discussions, many students mentioned the concept of wài guó lǎo shī shì wài guó yǒu rén, 外国老师是外国友人 (foreign teachers as foreign friends) as an important factor in their perceptions and negotiations of foreign teachers’ lessons. In this section, I explore how students’ views of their foreign teachers were constructed in the social, cultural and institutional contexts reflected in the notions of fēi zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 非正式的英语课 (informal English course) and zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè,正式的英语课 (formal English course). Here, these imagined constructions of Western teachers are theorised as instances of Occidentalism. Norms of foreign English teachers were negotiated institutionally and revealed in students’ interpretations of the Chinese metaphor “foreign friends”. As explained in Chap. 2, at the institutional level, local Chinese and foreign English teachers are treated as working separately to achieve the aims of the degree course, with each group teaching in different skills areas. The latter group’s collective title wài jiào, 外教 (foreign teachers), as they are called in institutional documents, suggests a given identity as outsiders and foreign Others. In students’ interpretations, the word “foreign” equates to distant, exotic and curious, and the word “friend” suggests concern for personal rather than professional attributes. Student use of the word “Western” indicates that wài jiào, 外教 refers in particular to anglophone white people. Data analysis suggests that Chinese students’ construction of foreign teachers as “foreign friends” refers to both their cultural identity and their pedagogical practices. First, from the vantage point of cultural identity, the view of these teachers as “foreign friends” is well illustrated in students’ hospitality towards them. One common example in the Central University that constituted the research setting for this study is the party and banquet specially organised for such visitors. It has become a convention of the Qunxi program that, at the end of the semester, each class holds a party or organises a banquet to say farewell to their foreign teachers. Chinese English teachers do not enjoy such a privilege and one whom I interviewed, Lan, expressed dissatisfaction about this discrimination, saying that “students have more affection for foreign teachers”. Ping provided a representative response that explains their contrasting treatment of the cohorts of English teachers.

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4  Foreign Friends They [foreign teachers] come here from a distant place, no friends or relatives here. So we should show them a warm welcome. Also, we like them. It is also a tradition that we will have a party with foreign teachers at the end of semester. We don’t have such a tradition with local Chinese English teachers (Ping, interview).

Ping’s words point to a host–friend relationship between Chinese students and foreign teachers, which has led to the tradition of the farewell party; with Chinese English teachers they have no such relationship so students feel that farewell parties are unnecessary. The exoticism of the foreign Others was highlighted in student responses to questions about their first class with a Western English teacher. They used highly emotive words such as “thrilled” and “excited” to describe the experience, as Hao exemplified: I felt curious and thrilled to have a foreign teacher. I had never seen a foreign teacher before. Our foreign teacher is amiable (Hao, interview).

For Hao, Western English teachers are exotic. Unfamiliarity with these exotic Others makes students inclined to comment on their personal attributes, thus Hao used the word “amiable” to describe his Western teacher. Foreign English teachers’ cultural identity as outsiders is also implied in some students’ strong patriotism. Wei, for example, said that locals must treat such teachers well, because they are foreigners; otherwise, their sense of national pride would make them feel ashamed. Wei’s clear-cut division between “locals” and “foreigners” reflects his underlying distinction between Us and Them. It appears that “foreign teacher” is not only a professional title, but also a sign for representatives from a different country who should be treated in a friendly manner (Brady, 2003): When I had my first lesson, I felt that I must treat [the teacher] well, we must treat him with the best attitude. Because we are Chinese, we should not lose face in front of foreigners (Wei, interview).

The notion of national pride, reflected in this Occidentalism (Chen, 1995), was repeated in focus group discussions. Xiaohua, in focus group 2, explained that she might be responsive rather than silent in a Western teacher’s class because “she is a foreigner and we are Chinese. I certainly would like her to know that our Chinese students are as good as [their] Western counterparts”. “Good” here suggests that Chinese students can be as active and engaging as learners in Western countries. These perceptions of foreign teachers as cultural Others are clearly summarised in students’ stated expectations. To understand better the students’ needs at the beginning of the course, one foreign teacher asked her two classes to form groups and to write down their expectations (one class is usually divided into 5–7 groups), then stuck their papers on the classroom wall (see samples of Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). The following are some of the students’ expectations:

4.2 The “Foreign Teachers as Foreign Friends” Discourse Fig. 4.1 Students’ expectations of foreign English teachers (1)

Fig. 4.2 Students expectations of foreign English teachers (2)

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4  Foreign Friends Learn by playing games or other interesting ways; more laughter; more interaction with the foreign teacher; everyone should be involved1; deepen exchanges in private2; show more foreign cultures.

The mentions of “games”, “interesting” and “laughter” are indicative of students’ perceptions of foreign teachers as casual, funny and lively. The expectation that they be shown “more foreign cultures” suggests that foreign teachers are seen as bringers of Western culture. The desire for “deepen[ed] exchanges in private” suggest a desire to know foreign teachers as exotic Others. Taken together, these expectations suggest that the role of a foreign teacher is to live up to students’ imaginations and curiosity about foreign people and cultures. Second, from a pedagogical perspective, perceptions of Western English teachers as Others are implied in students’ binary imaginations of Chinese and Western English teachers’ teaching styles. As we saw in Chap. 3, when the participant students commented on their foreign teachers’ pedagogical styles, they tend to talk about them in a dichotomised way, contrasting them with Chinese teachers. This distinction between teaching styles may be explained by reference to their prior experiences with Western teachers. Chuan and Hua both had foreign English teachers prior to university. Chuan had a private foreign tutor merely to talk with him in English; Hua’s foreign teachers’ classes in junior middle school featured festival-­ related entertainment activities. Chuan’s and Hua’s initial contacts with foreign teachers gave them the impression that Western English teachers are not there for test-oriented “formal” teaching but for casual conversation. For most of the students, who had no prior experience of foreign teachers, their encounters with foreign teachers at university consolidated certain notions of imagined Others. As discussed in Sect. 3.4, most of the students expressed their disappointment with foreign teachers’ classes, describing them as being of no use; their impressions of low effectiveness were drawn from the comparison they made with the reading courses taught by local English teachers. In sum, the students’ prior and current learning experiences with foreign English teachers led them to conclude that foreign teachers are Others, quite different from Chinese English teachers. Mediated through the notion of “foreign teachers as foreign friends”, students’ perceptions of the “informal” and “formal” English courses were brought up in discussions about the appropriateness of teachers’ practices. As explained by one student in focus group 4: If foreign teachers teach something, and we need to do tests and get scores based on what they teach [then] foreign teachers are not suitable... [however] we can play together with foreign teachers (Xiaodong, focus group 4).

This remark implies that the characteristics of foreign English teaching is not suitable for a serious academic writing course that involves exams and scores. 1  “Everyone should be involved” indicates the students’ expectation that the lesson engage every student, not just a small number of them. 2  “Deepen exchanges in private” means that the students want more interactions with foreign English teachers outside the classroom.

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Rather, Western English teachers are more appropriate for casual, playful lessons. As explained earlier, foreign English teachers are seen by Chinese students as humorous and open and therefore good at teaching casual/informal speaking courses but not formal writing courses. Here, definitions of informal/formal English courses (fēi zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 非正式的英语课/ zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 正式的英语 课) stem from Chinese students’ constructions of Western English teachers’ cultural identities. On this basis, the institutional arrangement that foreign English teachers should teach the English writing course is thus questionable.

4.3  S  tudents’ Learning Experiences in Foreign English Teachers’ Classes Students must negotiate the novel pedagogical practices of their foreign English teachers. The teachers explained that they performed as “teachers as facilitators” in their English classes, but the students saw their lessons as wán, 玩 (play).

4.3.1  Foreign English Teachers: “Teachers as Facilitators” Most teacher participants believe that the teacher’s role is to be a facilitator, that is, to make the language learning process easier, more effective and enjoyable. Kate said that she organises a variety of activities and attempts a range of teaching techniques, including “pair work, group work, and whole class feedback”, to make English language learning more engaging and ultimately, more successful. She does not teach English grammar explicitly as prescribed in the textbook; rather, she incorporates the grammar learning into activities from which students might unconsciously acquire knowledge of structures, following the precepts of the communicative approach to language learning: [I] incorporate some grammar in an activity, rather than say [that] it is a grammar activity; [Instead, I] say this is an activity, you will do a bit of grammar… in the end, they would say, we did not do grammar, but ha-ha, you did, look… If possible, I try to give them different ways of learning and also to use different activities, some pair work, group work, or whole class feedback, so I try to keep them busy (Kate, interview).

Thus Kate, like many Western English teachers, transforms the process of acquiring “tedious” grammar knowledge by incorporating it into various classroom activities. Through such activities, students acquire grammatical knowledge without explicit instruction. According to Kate’s understanding of English language pedagogy, learning the grammar rule in a rote-learning exercise will not necessarily lead to a student being able to apply it in practice, whereas engaging students in communicative activities will give them an intuitive grasp of the function of grammar rules.

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Beth, too, argued that teachers should be facilitators who raise points of knowledge and guide and engage students in communicative activities: Me telling [them] what they need to learn is not an important thing, the important thing is for them to do it.… I model the way how they can do it, I try to get them to produce, rather than…tell them what to do… I try to take their writing to a slightly higher level… (Beth, interview).

The aims of Beth’s lessons are to bring out the students’ knowledge of English language and to help them to make qualitative improvements in their academic writing. To achieve these objectives, she models the ways of doing the tasks first and then asks students to follow suit. Beth believes that the language learning process is accelerated by engaging students in productive language activities. For her, some language features should be taught explicitly, but the primary role of a teacher is to be a facilitator who organises class activities that encourage the development of the required skills. The notion of teachers as facilitators is most salient in Tom’s statements about what makes effective language pedagogy. In a successful English lesson, the teacher renders the learning process easier and more productive: …serious learning does not have to be boring. I think some people make the mistake [of thinking] that if we want to be serious in the classroom, we can’t be laughing and we can’t have fun… we have got to strike [a] balance: ensure there is fun and enjoyment in the learning (Tom, interview).

For Tom, efficacy and pleasure are interrelated elements that determine the quality of learning. Regarding the effectiveness of a lesson, he is convinced that the fun elements and the serious are not necessarily incompatible. For him, “serious learning” is skills development and knowledge advancement; activities that are “fun” are a means to achieve that end. Games and other such activities are also important ways of making the lessons interesting. Tom believes that if learners enjoy learning something then they will learn better. This is why he does his best to provide a variety of activities that will make a lesson more enjoyable. These discussions reveal how Western teachers conceptualise the notion of teachers as facilitators in their pedagogical practices. For these teachers, a fundamental principle of their English language pedagogy is to plan and execute communicative activities in order to facilitate students’ language learning processes, an approach that is aligned with the norms of CLT (Savignon, 2002). Along with the notion of teachers as facilitators, the foreign English teachers who participated in this study repeatedly discussed the challenge of their students’ varying proficiency levels. As Kate pointed out, classes contain both high-level and low-level students, and it is hard to cater to their needs. In fact, a large proportion of students were described as having low-level proficiency; many of the foreign teachers spoke frequently about pupils’ difficulty understanding instructions. Jennifer, an Australian teacher who had spent two periods working in the program, said: “I feel most of the students do not quite understand what I am talking about most of the time” (fieldnote 1). Many of the others also said that it was hard to address the imbalance between weak and strong students in one class. The problem of striking

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a balance between them is evident in Sue’s brief comments at the end-of-semester staff farewell party: I have a very good student, but I did not notice him until the end of last week, because I have to babysit them [the rest of the students]. I do think more opportunities need to be given to high-level students who also need my help (Fieldnote 2).

In the classes of mixed student ability, Sue gave all her attention to the weaker students and ignored the small number of strong students. The word “babysit” suggests that she might have been constructing Chinese students as Others by infantilising them. For Sue, emphasising the few good students who need better learning opportunities suggests that the majority of weak students perhaps do not need them; what they need is babysitting, which could refer to doing “interesting” class activities.

4.3.2  Students: wán, 玩 (Play) The complex articulation of identity and difference with reference to Western English teachers is apparent in students’ discussion of the idea of wán, 玩 (play). Nearly half the participants (Juan, Ping, Fang, Qing) used the Chinese word wán,玩 (play) at various points to describe Western teachers’ classes, and other participants used the Chinese words for “casual”, “lively”, “relaxing”, “fun” or “cheerful” to describe them. Analysis of the way these words were used shows how the students defined the pedagogical concept of wán, 玩 (play) in relation to both teachers’ cultural identities and their teaching practices. The dual construction of foreign teachers’ classes as wán, 玩 (play) from both their identity and pedagogical perspectives, is well exemplified in Fang’s comments. Fang illustrated her frequent references to foreign teacher’s propensity for wán, 玩 (play) with a description of her early classes (Luo, 2021, p.66): The first foreign teacher is my favourite one; she is young, so she can play with us. For me, foreign teachers’ classes give me the courage to communicate with [them]. In fact, I feel that foreign classes are for “playing”. … she doesn’t teach systematically... In terms of increasing content knowledge, I don’t think we have learned much (Fang, interview).

On the one hand, Fang demonstrates here her appreciation of the youthfulness of her foreign teacher and her playful demeanour. The casual aspect of the teacher’s disposition gave Fang the courage to interact with a foreigner. On the other hand, the relaxed and cheerful atmosphere in the foreign teachers’ classes is contrasted with the serious lecturing that Fang believed she should find in class. Foreign teachers’ classes, Fang argued, do not provide her with the systematic learning and content knowledge expansion she believed should drive the language learning process. Hence, Fang used wán, 玩 (play) to refer to her belief that foreign English teachers’ classes are inefficient and ineffective for language learning. Her choice of words reflects the students’ perceptions of the foreign teachers’ lessons as wán, 玩 (play) from both identity and pedagogical perspectives.

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The concept of wán, 玩 (play) was often interpreted in terms of teachers’ cultural identities and their associated dispositions. Like Fang, most students attributed their achievements in English speaking skills to familiarity with people who were foreign to them in the past. Students explained that before their interactions with native English speakers, they had been uncertain about their ability to communicate with strangers. Classes with foreign teachers gave them opportunities to try their English with native speakers, which helped to build their confidence about speaking English. Thus, the improvement in their speaking skills was perceived as being related less to foreign teachers’ lessons than to the boosted confidence created from the contact with native English speakers. It appears that for student participants, the nativespeaker identity is a sufficient quality to be a good teacher of spoken English. As Ting explained, “as long as he is a native speaker English teacher and he speaks English in class, that would help my oral English” (interview). Students imagined foreign teachers as having dispositions suitable for playful conversation classes. For example, Hua and Chuan explicitly imagined foreign teachers as casual agents who should have nothing to do with “formal stuff”, such as academic writing. Before encountering them, Hua had thought that all foreign teachers’ lessons would involve childlike activities, but she soon learnt that they were also required to deliver serious academic essay writing classes. She found it strange that foreign teachers should teach formal academic writing. One noteworthy point in Hua’s conversation with me was her allusion to serious classes without many interactive exercises as “normal” English classes as opposed to “playful” ones: I thought foreign teachers’ classes were about making biscuits, or milk shakes, but when I [got] here, I found that it was all about writing… I feel that foreign teachers’ classes are like normal English classes, they are serious classes… It is a bit strange to let a foreign teacher teach such formal stuff like academic writing (Hua, interview).

The relationship between foreign teachers’ cultural identities and the concept of wán, 玩 (play) is also manifested in Ting’s differentiation between Chinese and Western English teachers. For Ting, English teachers’ styles are determined by their identities as Chinese or foreign. She believed that foreign teachers are able to deliver casual and relaxing classes because they are foreigners. In contrast, she did not expect Chinese teachers to behave in the same casual manner. Hence, for her, the distinct cultural identities implied distinct teaching methods: Foreign teachers’ classes are casual and relaxing… I would accept this way of teaching, because they are foreign teachers. But if it were a Chinese teacher, I would not expect that… (Ting, interview).

Ting’s remarks reflect the students’ perceptions of an underlying dichotomy of Chinese and foreign English teachers. It appears that, to the students, the teachers’ identity as foreigners endows them with playful qualities that differentiate them from Chinese English teachers. These ascribed foreign qualities are, in fact, the major factor in the students’ construction of Western English teachers’ language pedagogy as wán, 玩 (play). Moreover, the students constructed the concept of wán, 玩 (play) from the ways that Western teachers’ methods disrupted their understandings of good English

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teaching practices. Wán, 玩 (play) is seen as being of little value, as a student in focus group 1 explained (Luo, 2021, p.67): Our first foreign teacher treated us as kindergarten kids and would pat us on our shoulders and … design some activities to wake us up, like dropping paper balls for learning English words. But I think it is too naïve, and we are not kids from kindergarten (Qing, focus group 1).

Like many students, Qing believed that such interactive exercises have a purpose only insofar as they enable students to learn new vocabulary and sentence structure. Her contention that the main focus of the activity is to “wake students up” adds weight to the students’ view that the activity is unsuitable and inappropriate for vocabulary teaching at university. Juan, too, noted that foreign English teachers use childlike activities to teach new words, such as acting out and guessing the words, which the students regarded as inefficient for learning vocabulary: …. playing kids’ games for the whole session… I feel it is not interesting at all. [Just take] several words and look them up in the dictionary, that’s done. However, [instead, we had to] act out the words and then guess the meanings (Juan, interview).

Students’ frequent use of the word “kids” is indicative of the foreign teachers’ tendency to infantilise the Chinese students, an example of stereotyping. Such infantilising of Chinese students seems to be a common practice among Western teachers, who referred to them in our informal conservations as “babies” or “kids”. As Beth commented, “they [students] are just like babies. I gave them all the vocabulary and the things they need to write a good essay” (interview). I theorise that this represents Orientalism, an essentialisation and misrepresentation of “the East” (Said, 2003). This leads to foreign English teachers’ introduction of what look to the students like inappropriate class activities, which they commonly described as “kids’ games”, and because they reportedly occurred frequently, students felt they did not learn much. Regarding wán, 玩 (play) activities, the students’ choice of certain terminology to refer to both Chinese and Western teachers’ classes adds another aspect to the perception of Western teachers as Other. Students used the term huó dòng, 活动 (activity) to describe classroom procedures that they saw as inappropriate to serious learning in Chinese teachers’ lessons; but they all used the word wán, 玩 (play) to refer to similar activities in the foreign teachers’ classes. This highlights the differentiated framing of Chinese and Western teachers’ identities and the othering of the latter. Chinese teachers’ classes were “normal” and serious, thus the non-serious activities were referred to as “normal” activities, whereas foreign teachers’ classroom activities were like play because they were conducted by cheerful, lively, extroverted, exotic foreigners (Luo, 2021, p.70). In this way, Westerners are reconstructed in China (see Wodak et al., 2009). In contrast to these majority student views, Chuan agreed that foreign teachers’ classes were relaxing and cheerful, and yet maintained that students could and did learn in them. An enthusiastic critic of the Chinese education system, Chuan saw foreign English teachers’ teaching methods as ideal. Hence, rather than stressing the importance of a tangible expansion of linguistic knowledge, he regarded acquiring

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the courage to speak English as the major achievement of his time in the foreign teachers’ classes. Though he did not think that the students’ spoken English had improved a lot, they had gained the confidence to speak. Chuan did not use the word wán, 玩 (play) to describe foreign teachers’ classes. Despite holding some negative views, most students expressed their appreciation of the foreign teachers’ casual and playful teaching styles. For instance, Ting commented that though the students did not like the content of foreign teachers’ lessons, they still welcomed the opportunity to take a more relaxed approach: I don’t like the content delivered in foreign teachers’ classes. But I think [about] that kind of teaching style [that] everyone would love [it]. It is very casual and easy (Ting, interview).

Ting’s observation suggests that the students have ambivalent feelings about the foreign teachers’ lessons. On the one hand, they were not convinced that playful lessons can be effective but, on the other, they prefer the relaxed and casual teaching style. To sum up, within the parameters of “foreign teachers as foreign friends”, foreign teachers’ approaches to lesson that aim to facilitate language learning were described by students as wán, 玩 (play) for two reasons. First because these teachers are imagined as fun foreigners, and second because the class activities are judged as being of little worth for the improvement of English language skills.

4.3.3  Students’ Negotiation of Foreign Others In line with the construction of Western teachers as Others from these two perspectives, students’ negotiations of them are reflected in both cultural and pedagogical facets. As Rizvi (2014) argues, in this globalised world, people necessarily negotiate cultural messages in interactions between the local and the global. First, from personal and cultural perspectives, the exoticising of the Western teacher is a process that students engaged in and became aware of. The use of terms to differentiate between the professional and personal attributes of Chinese and Western teachers was complemented by critical reflection on the complex dynamics of personal and intercultural interactions both inside and outside the classroom. Fang, for example, often worried about offending her foreign teachers, who adhere to different norms and conventions. She described an incident that triggered this concern for her. During a social event with one of their Western teachers, students smeared whipped cream on the teacher’s face, for fun, which is a common prank in China. The Western teacher, who was not familiar with this, became very annoyed. Fang explained how she and her peers were more careful and cautious after this incident: Sometimes, we feel some behaviours are OK, but in foreign teachers’ eyes, they are not acceptable. For example, we think it is funny to smear some cream on someone’s face while eating cake. Once we had dinner with the foreign teacher and we did that. The foreign teacher regarded this behaviour as horrible and as a sort of “crime”… We are not aware of

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the Western stuff, so we are afraid that some of our behaviours may upset our foreign teachers. So we are very cautious so that we don’t offend them (Fang, interview).

For the students, smearing cream on someone’s face at a party is regarded as wán, 玩 (play) of another sort, indicating a close personal relationship. However, students had no idea how the teacher might feel about it. Subsequently, they learned that foreign teachers have ways of understanding and interpreting such behaviour that are different from those in China. This is what students referred to as xī fāng nà xiē dōng xī, 西方那些东西 (Western stuff). These two interpretative systems can cause misunderstandings. Negotiating this communication minefield can create a great deal of tension as it results in distress caused when intentions are misinterpreted. Even as the story told by Fang demonstrates the constructions of our identity and that of Others, it also makes evident the complexity of the interrelationships between them. The foreign teacher is both inalienably Other and also a fellow human being who is the subject of our sympathy and attention. Such perceptions of foreign teachers make students both relaxed and nervous: they feel relaxed because of the imagined amiability and extroversion of the Other, and the distance created by language barriers, as Hua described: Because there are communication barriers between us and the foreign teacher, we feel relaxed in foreign teacher’s classes. He [can] not understand what we are saying in Chinese (Hua, interview).

Students were nervous because they recognised their lack of knowledge of the Other in less formal settings. Their ambivalence about Western teachers seems to have both positive and negative effects on students’ English learning: they liked foreign teachers’ personalities and their casual teaching styles, which were beneficial to their study, but their concern about offending them led them to become more reserved. Second, from the pedagogical point of view, students’ constructions of teachers from outside China were disrupted by curriculum arrangements, leading to their talking about their English lessons in complex ways. As discussed above, foreign English teachers teach the formal course of English academic writing, which contradicts students’ imaginations of them as casual and cheerful. Though the nature of the conversation course arguably fits the imagined construction of Western teachers, students felt that their English speaking skills did not improve because of the limited class hours and the equally limited opportunities for language practice in such large classes. More importantly, these classes did not teach tangible linguistic knowledge, which was assumed to be the determining factor in English conversation skills. Thus, a common view among the participant students was that their limited improvements in English speaking skills could be attributed more to the familiarity of the English-speaking foreign Others than to the teachers’ professional expertise. From a professional point of view, foreign English teachers’ speaking classes were not regarded as of great value for language skill acquisition. The interplay between these personal and professional evaluations of Western teachers created ambivalence in the students. One who participated in focus group

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1 expressed this ambivalence overtly, saying that “having a good relationship with foreign teachers is one thing, and taking their classes seriously is another thing” (Xiaotao, focus group 1). What she meant was that it is easy for Chinese students to develop a positive teacher–student relationship with these “foreign friends”, but this relationship does not necessarily translate into different student learning behaviours. The contrast between “one thing” and “another thing” is indicative of the students’ dual construction of foreign English teachers’ identity. On the one hand, from the “friends” perspective, students were happy with teachers who satisfied their curiosity about foreign Others, and they often used positive words to describe them, such as “kind”, “friendly”, “amiable” and “extroverted”; on the other hand, from a professional stance, many doubted the effectiveness of their lessons. Despite this evidence of their othering of the foreign English teachers, students were reluctant to admit to this binary division between Chinese and Western English teachers. For instance, when asked about stereotypical notions of foreigners, Hao explained that apart from creating curiosity, foreign teachers are no different from Chinese teachers. Hao’s counter-stereotypical stance vis-à-vis Westerners is supported by his interpretation of the word “foreign”: “in their [foreign teachers] eyes, we are also foreigners. So, we are the same”. Hao’s comments represent an interesting mixture of sometimes contradictory views about foreign teachers in the program: on the one hand, students maintained obvious dichotomised constructions of us and them; on the other hand, they would not admit their tendency of othering when the topic is raised. Such ambivalent feelings about foreign Others were further manifested in students’ comments on research findings that such teachers’ lessons should be “fun” (Stanley, 2010). Students asserted that “fun” or “not fun” bears little relationship to teachers’ countries of origin, and that Chinese teachers are able to deliver fun lessons too: “I have no expectation of [a class] being fun or not. Chinese teachers can be also fun. It is not related to countries of origin” (Xiaoci, focus group 4). What students expect is “Western teaching and learning mode”, “Western thinking mode” and “new vision” (Xiaofu, focus group 4). Thus Chinese and Western English teachers are seen as embodying differentiated Chinese and Western thinking styles and perspectives. It seems that the Chinese students fall back into the dichotomisation of the Chinese and Western teachers that they attempt to avoid. This is due to their Occidentalist mindset, that is, their unconscious assumptions about the characteristics of Western Others, which underlie the ways in which they talk about foreign English teachers’ lessons. The dynamic of the negotiation between Us and Them is encapsulated in students’ decline in enthusiasm about foreign English teachers’ lessons over time. Most of the participant students said that they had expected certain foreign teaching styles from the cheerful and extroverted foreign teachers, so they anticipated with excitement these lessons at the outset. However, as they became familiar with these Others and developed views about their teaching effectiveness, many students gradually lost their initial passion for and interest in these classes.

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4.4  S  tudents’ Learning Experiences in Local English Teachers’ Classes Students also had to negotiate certain teaching practices employed by Chinese English teachers. Local teachers explained that they used classroom activities to actualise their conceptions of English language education as xué sheng shì wán zhěng de rén 学生是完整的人 (students as whole persons) and lǎo shī shì cù jìn zhě, 老师是促进者 (teachers as facilitators). The students described these exercises as “buzzing class activities” (wēng wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡 响的课堂活动).

4.4.1  L  ocal English Teachers: “the Learner as a Whole Person” and “Teachers as Facilitators” One of the local teachers, Lili,3 used the Chinese concept of xué sheng shì wán zhěng de rén 学生是完整的人 (the learner as a whole person) to explain her broad understanding of English language education. The three aims in her teaching philosophy were: to be a guide for students on how to be a “whole” person, to make students acutely aware of the communicative function of English and to sustain students’ passion for learning English. I think that as a teacher, I would like to influence students in terms of how to be a person. The second point is that we teachers need to make them aware that English is not only the learning of words and sentences; English is a tool for conveying your ideas and thoughts…The third point is that it is very important to maintain students’ interest in English…many students dislike or even resent English after three years’ boring learning experiences in senior middle schools (Lili, interview).

The first aspect of Lili’s philosophy concerns the nurturing of students as whole moral beings; she described them as self-interested. A purpose of education is to cultivate students’ morality on a daily basis. The second aspect of Lili’s education philosophy is the importance of enhancing students’ awareness of the communicative function of English in contrast to the superficial learning of linguistic knowledge. This reflects her awareness of the negative influences of exam-oriented English teaching in China that primarily focuses on learning of discrete linguistic items. When Lili talked about the importance of students’ interest in learning English, she also talked about the negative attitudes that many of them have to English, which might be attributed to the exam-oriented and tedious English learning experiences they had in senior middle school. Again, Lili’s thoughts moved beyond the classroom to consider her students’ collective history of English learning. To maintain their interest in learning English, she argued that teachers should teach in 3  Lili had been working in this program since 2005 and serving as the coordinator (team leader) of the Year 1 English reading teachers for roughly ten years.

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more stimulating ways, incorporating diverse classroom activities, which she conceptualised as lǎo shī shì cù jìn zhě, 老师是促进者 (teachers as facilitators). For Chinese English teachers, this concept refers chiefly to the incorporation of certain classroom activities, which make the lessons seem more interactive and therefore lively and motivating. As Yan explained: I now realise that what matters is not how much a teacher teaches, but students’ engagement in the classes and their motivation...how to organise class activities... When the foreign teacher observed my class, I started to think of designing some activities (Yan, interview).

As Yan argued, with a growing awareness of the learners’ roles in the language education process, local English teachers are seeking ways to incorporate interesting class activities to enhance students’ engagement. However, despite their changing understandings of English teachers’ facilitative roles, many teachers still teach lessons that follow the sequential transmission of knowledge to the learners. As Yan explained, when one of her lessons was observed by a foreign English teacher, she began to design her own class activities, although it seemed that such activities are peripheral elements for her, as she does not necessarily include them in her everyday pedagogical practices. Yan’s attitudes to novel classroom activities were common among local English teachers, which may be attributable to their scepticism about the efficacy of such “lively” practices. As Lili explained, classes that include class activities appear lively, but in essence, remain dull. She said that she felt students learn little in terms of accumulation of linguistic knowledge: We find that with apparently lively activities, students have not learned a lot… I think there is a contradiction here. On the one hand, reading classes are too traditional, and demand some changes; on the other hand, we can’t just organize some activities and be buzzing in the class and then that’s over… I think interactive and lively activities are important, but the learning efficacy is more important (interview).

The contradiction that Lili sees is that, on the one hand, Chinese teachers expect to move beyond their traditional roles as knowledge transmitters, but, on the other, they are sceptical about the effectiveness of lǎo shī shì cù jìn zhě, 老师是促进者 (teachers as facilitators) in practice. Her comments suggest that if the effectiveness of the lessons is not guaranteed through more classroom activities, then teachers will opt to dismiss them. For Lili, traditional teaching approaches are still more effective. This contradiction results in a situation where an activity has sometimes been incorporated for its own sake, that is, to create a superficially interactive atmosphere in the classroom, but it is treated as an add-on to the normal lesson that is believed to guarantee learning. The conflicting relationship between the traditional and facilitative roles of English teachers is summarised by Hong, who talked about local English teachers’ mindsets regarding English teaching: We are traditional and our mindset is fixed. Sometimes we incorporate some Western-like class activities, but the overall mindset is fixed. Our teaching principles are different. We easily revert to traditional modes (Hong, interview).

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Hong’s use of the term “Western-like” suggests that Chinese teachers are engaged in a superficial imitation of Western teaching approaches when they incorporate interactive exercises into their traditional lessons. However, she argues that Chinese and Western English teachers’ different classroom activities are explained by their different underlying rationales. These two cohorts of teachers have divergent philosophies about English language pedagogy. Hong’s words suggest that, due to their fixed perceptions, Chinese English teachers are unlikely genuinely to adopt the role of lǎo shī shì cù jìn zhě, 老师是促进者 (teachers as facilitators) in their teaching practices.

4.4.2  Students: wēng wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡 响的课堂活动 (Buzzing Class Activities) Students in this study often talked about English reading classes that included new, interactive, text-based activities. Such activities are among the few reported differences from the classes taught in senior middle school. Most of the students I interviewed said that new class activities in Chinese English teachers’ classes were of no great value for learning English. Local teacher Lili called them “buzzing activities”, saying “we can’t just organize some activities and be buzzing in the class and then that’s over”. “Buzzing” is the noise made by something vibrating rapidly, such as a bee’s wings; it is a word that Chinese teachers and students often used to describe seemingly lively and interactive classroom activities. As discussed in focus group 5, all students were sceptical about the efficacy of the so-called interactive classroom activities, because they believed, as Xiaoni said, that they did not learn much from them. Such activities in Chinese teachers’ classes were seen as not effective for learning English. The quality of the activities in Chinese teachers’ lessons was compared with that of Western English teachers’ classroom activities. Ting explained that Chinese teachers often divide students into groups in class but this did not involve real group work, because the few highly proficient students would do most of the work. Ting believed that this kind of activity in local English teachers’ classes merely created a superficial liveliness; but essentially, the lessons remained serious and high-­pressure. The reason was that, in Ting’s view, local English teachers dominated and controlled their classes, whereas Western teachers did not impose any pressure. Ting suggested that class activities carried out in Chinese and foreign English teachers’ lessons are different in nature: I think our reading classes are too serious; though our teacher tries to make them appear lively, I think that is only external appearance… She [the English reading teacher] thinks of other ways to push us, like checking the assignments or whatever. It is like she is our superior and we are inferiors… foreign teachers don’t care much, and they seldom check our assignments (Ting, interview).

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To explain the stark contrast in the classroom activities organised by Chinese and foreign English teachers, most students commented on teachers’ personalities collectively. They characterised Chinese teachers as traditional and conservative, but foreign teachers as open and stimulating. Ping said: Foreign teachers are more open, passionate and interesting than local Chinese English teachers… Chinese teachers tend to be more conservative. Foreign teachers always use exaggerated gestures, which makes lessons more appealing, not like the tedious classes conducted by Chinese teachers (Ping, interview).

Here, teachers’ differentiated teaching styles are attributed to their Chinese or non-­ Chinese identity. The ascribed extroverted characteristics of Western English teachers allow them to conduct casual and interesting classes, whereas conservative Chinese English teachers’ classes are tedious. Again, we see how the students categorised local Chinese and foreign English teachers into two distinct groups according to both personal and professional perspectives. As a result, most students seemed to have ambivalent feelings about the lesson activities in local English teachers’ classes. On the one hand, as discussed above, many students were not satisfied with the efficacy of the classroom activities; on the other, in conversations with students, most suggested that more interactive activities should be incorporated into lessons, because without them, lessons are boring. As Wei commented in an interview, “I [wish] there [were] more interactional activities in local English teachers’ classes”. These ambivalent feelings indicate the students’ uncertainty about new and unfamiliar classroom procedures. This analysis suggests that students’ experiences in Chinese English teachers’ lesson are framed and mediated through the concept of wēng wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡响的课堂活动 (buzzing class activities) and a view of Chinese teachers as conservative. As we have seen, local English teachers themselves acknowledge that they are uncertain about the efficacy of classroom activities that are mere supplements to standard lessons. In addition, they mostly feel that they lack the competence to design and implement class activities because they are not native speakers of English. These perceptions have resulted in activities being incorporated for the sake of being interactive, rather than with pedagogical goals. In addition, the students’ experiences are related to their views of the local teachers’ as conservative: though some students wanted a livelier and more interesting classroom atmosphere, they believed that their Chinese teachers’ identities made it difficult for them to deliver English lessons. In this chapter, I have explained the relationship between representation and identity as a complex process through which identity is discursively constructed in a particular social world, involving stereotyping and othering. In my study, the Western teachers were stereotyped through an Occidentalist discourse as a homogenised group with unique personal and professional features different from those of the local Chinese teachers. Analysis of the students’ perceptions of the pedagogical practices carried out by both local and foreign English teachers in the Qunxi program suggests vast differences between teachers and students in the representation of the pedagogical practices in English language teaching.

References

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References Brady, A. (2003). Making the foreign serve China. Rowman & Littlefield. Chen, X. (1995). Occidentalism: A theory of counter-discourse in post-Mao China. Oxford University Press. Hall, S. (1996). The meaning of new times. In K.  H. Chen & D.  Morley (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 221–236). Routledge. Hall, S. (1997). The spectacle of the “other”. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 223–290). Sage, in association with The Open University. Joseph, J. E. (2004). Language and identity: National, ethnic, religious. Palgrave Macmillan. Luo, Y.  M. (2021). Towards innovative English language teaching: Multilingualism and the re-­ conceptualisation of the Chinese/Western binary. In R. Arber, M. Weinmann, & J. Blackmore (Eds.), Rethinking languages education directions, challenges and innovations (pp.  58–72). Routledge. Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change. Longman. Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Multilingual Matters. Rizvi, F. (2014). Encountering education in the global: The selected works of Fazal Rizvi. Routledge. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2006). Edward Said and the cultural politics of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 27(3), 293–308. Said, E. W. (2003). Orientalism. Vintage Books. Savignon, S. J. (2002). Interpreting communicative language teaching: contexts and concerns in teacher education. Yale University Press. Slethaug, G. (2010). Something happened while nobody was looking: The growth of international education and the Chinese learner. In J. Ryan & G. Slethaug (Eds.), International education and the Chinese learner (pp. 15–36). Hong Kong University Press. Stanley, P. (2010). “The foreign teacher is an idiot”: Symbolic interactionism, and assumptions about language and language teaching in China. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 4(1), 67–89. Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B., & Johnson, K. A. (2005). Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of language, Identity, and Education, 4(1), 21–44. Wodak, R., Cillia, R. d., Reisigl, M., & Leibhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press. Woodward, K. (1997). Concepts of identity and difference. In K. Woodward (Ed.), Identity and difference (pp. 7–62). Sage in association with the Open University.

Chapter 5

Precious Golden Sentences

Abstract  Students repeatedly raised the Chinese notion of “golden sentences” when commenting on foreign English teachers’ academic writing lessons. The concept grew out of pedagogical practices in local English language education in China, in particular in the teaching of writing skills. In Chap. 5, I describe Chinese students’ normative understandings of academic English writing as embodied in this notion of “golden sentences” then explore how students negotiate this understanding in foreign their academic essay writing classes. Students’ negotiation processes are illuminated by their interpretations and misinterpretations of the marking criteria prescribed in the textbook. The foreign English teachers’ focus on content was neatly summarised by teachers in one concept—“procedural teaching of the textbook”. However, situated within a discourse of what is “good” English writing, students experience confusion about the definition of “academic English writing”, and this is demonstrated in their evolving perceptions of grammar with reference to “sophisticated sentences” vs “plain sentences”. Students believed that teachers do not address the key components of English writing as prescribed within local discourses about English writing.

Participant students repeatedly raised the Chinese concept of huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) when commenting on foreign English teachers’ academic writing lessons. This concept grew out of pedagogical practices in local English language education in China, in particular in teaching English writing skills. Within this educational setting, Chinese students have developed their habitus of academic writing, that is, the taken-for-granted and legitimate ways of “doing” academic writing. However, foreign teachers’ academic English lessons provide students with an encounter with a habitus of English writing developed in a Western educational field. The disjunctures of habitus between Chinese students and foreign English teachers cause the former to question certain aspects of their original habitus. In Chap. 5, I first explain Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and how it is used to analyse participant Chinese students’ perceptions of their foreign English teachers’ academic English classes. I then describe Chinese students’ shared common-sense understandings of academic English writing as embodied in the concept of huáng

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_5

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jīn jù,黄金句 (golden sentences), and explore how they negotiate this understanding in foreign teachers’ academic writing classes. Students’ negotiations in the academic writing lessons are illuminated by their interpretations and misinterpretations of the marking criteria prescribed in the textbook. The foreign English teachers’ focus on content to assist students to achieve a good academic writing score was neatly summarised by teachers in one concept—“procedural teaching of the textbook”. However, with the habitus of “understanding” and “doing” English writing, students experience confusion about the definition of “academic English writing”, and this is shown in their changing perceptions of grammar with reference to fù zá jù, 复杂句 (sophisticated sentences) vs jiǎn dān jù,简单句 (plain sentences); students believed that teachers do not address the key components of English writing.

5.1  Habitus Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is used in this study to understand students’ dissonance in foreign English teachers’ academic writing lessons. Habitus can be viewed as the commonsensical and shared ways of understanding and behaving, developed within the everyday conditions and practices of institutional life that are mediated by the rules and structures of the institutions, and negotiated within the larger fields of social, economic and cultural relations: The agent engaged in practice knows the world but with knowledge which is not set up in the relation of externality of a knowing consciousness. He knows it, in a sense, too well … Takes it for granted, precisely because he is caught up in it, bound up with it, he inhabits it like a garment or a familiar habitat. He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of the habitus (Bourdieu, 2000, p.142–43).

The habitus conceptualises what is normal and imposes tacit understandings of what is legitimate in everyday practices that are framed and expressed within the terms and conditions of the dominant culture. Implicit in habitus is that it plays out at an unconscious level. Bourdieu further argues that it is the interaction between habitus, capital and field that produces the logics of everyday practices (Bourdieu, 1990). My study is particularly concerned with the connection between field and habitus in that it explores Chinese students’ experiences when confronting a different habitus in the field of academic English writing. Bourdieu argues that habitus and field need to be understood as highly interactive in determining human praxis. He defines a social field (in a conversation with Wacquant) as “a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined, in their existence and in the determinations, they impose upon their occupants, agents or institutions” (p.39). Field is thus viewed as the way the objective social world is structured, while habitus is understood as the embodiment of past experiences in different fields which produce “a system of dispositions to a certain practice” (Bourdieu, 1990, p.77). When there is an alignment between habitus and field, individuals are like “fish in

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water” and they do not “feel the weight of water” and take “doing and being in the world” for granted. When there is mismatch between them, individuals are like “fish out of water” and they experience the resulting disjunctures. By drawing together the subjective and objective ends of the equation, habitus provides a conceptual tool for analysing “the experience of social agents and …the objective structures which make this experience possible” (Bourdieu, 1988, p.782). In this study, when Chinese students attended their foreign English teachers’ academic writing lessons, they encountered the habitus of “English academic writing”, formed in a Western educational field. Chinese university students with a well-­ developed habitus in the local Chinese world thus found themselves caught in contrasting logics of practice. At this time, their unconscious habitus was questioned and brought to the level of consciousness. The disjunctures between habitus and field as experienced by these students structured their perceptions of their foreign English teachers’ lessons as well as their actions towards them. Next, let’s examine the shared understandings of English writing.

5.2  Discourse of English Writing Most of the students explained that they had experience of memorising huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) in order to improve their English writing in senior middle school; how they unpacked the concept reflects their underlying assumptions about what constitutes good English writing. In student discussions, “golden sentences” referred to the type of English constructions that they saw as “advanced” and “beautiful”. The nuances in the concept were brought to light in a scenario discussed in focus group 1: The first time we wrote something, I used some very sophisticated, advanced and cool sentences that I had learned in senior middle school, but it turned out that I failed and I was furious…(Xiaoshan, focus group 1).

Thus we learn that huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) are sophisticated sentences (fù zá jù, 复杂句). The Chinese term fù zá jù, 复杂句, can be translated into English as “complex” or “sophisticated sentences”. For the students, these are the opposite of plain sentences, and thus I translate it here as “sophisticated sentences”. However, since students also talked about the concept from a grammar perspective, I also use the term “complex sentences” according to the grammatical definitions for complex vs compound vs simple sentences. From the concept of huáng jīn jù, 黄 金句 (golden sentences), the importance of sentence-level expressions is foremost in students’ perceptions of good English writing. The use of golden sentences is thought virtually to guarantee a good score for English writing tasks. This explains why Xiaoshan was so angry when he failed the writing assignment despite using golden sentences. Xiaoshan’s story is representative of the views of all the participant students when they talked about their English writing lessons in relation to golden sentences.

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The emphasis on huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) reflects two attributes of English writing in senior middle school that all students mentioned. The first is that local English writing lessons stress sentence-level construction rather than discourse development, as is suggested by students’ use of sentences and linguistic expressions frequently without any structural organisation. They saw the accumulation of accurate and golden sentences as leading automatically to discursive cohesion. The second feature is that rhetorical, flowery expression and apparently advanced sentence structure, such as complex and sophisticated sentences, were particularly important in school-level composition writing. In interviews, some students mentioned examples of golden language, such as “with the development of”, “colourful life”, “what’s more” and “it is undeniable” (as listed by Chuan and Hao). This language is based on formulaic English expressions. The students’ understandings of good English writing echo the remarks of Mohan and Lo (1985), who argue that Chinese students’ school experiences are oriented more to sentence-level accuracy than to developing appropriate discourse organisation. L.  F. Wang’s (2005) review of empirical studies of English writing in China over 12 years reached similar findings. Wang argues that English writing lessons in China often focus on the explicit teaching of relevant grammar and vocabulary while ignoring the content and organisation of the composition. Therefore, some researchers have promoted the replication of English expressions as an important strategy for improving English writing competence (Deng, 2001; Hu, 2005). With regards to structural knowledge of academic writing, some participants (Hua, Chuan and Ting) used “formal stuff” to describe it, and on this basis, they defined the academic writing course as “formal”. Unlike the definition of the formal English writing course with reference to Western English teachers’ identity, as discussed in sect. 4.2, the word “formal” here was explained in relation to the use of technical terms (shù yǔ, 术语) in teaching academic writing. As Chuan noted, foreign teachers spent a long time explaining simple concepts of “dividing the paragraphs”, “thesis statements” and “supporting evidence”, but students still found them difficult to understand: When the foreign teacher explains writing techniques to us in English, it is hard for us to understand. A foreign teacher takes a long time to explain concepts, such as, “dividing the paragraphs”, “thesis statements” “supporting evidence” but a local English teacher can explain them easily [in] one Chinese sentence (Chuan, interview).

Central to Chuan’s argument is that the specialised concepts associated with academic writing are hard for students to comprehend through the medium of English, but that, in fact, they had developed a reasonably good understanding of these concepts in Chinese. In other words, foreign teachers’ use of unfamiliar English terminology renders the knowledge they have alien to them. Moreover, most students believed that learning about essay writing structure is of little importance for developing writing competence. As Fang explained, “what I have gained in foreign teachers’ writing classes is just the essay structure”. The word “just” highlights Fang’s belief that knowledge about academic essay structure is of limited value for developing good essay-writing skills.

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Further addressing the notion of formal English writing lessons, Qing, Chuan and Hua argued that English writing skills were better taught by local Chinese teachers. In their view, Chinese teachers can give a clear explanation of complex writing-related English terms in much less time, explaining them in Mandarin: I think English writing can be taught by local English teachers as writing requires thorough explanations. Otherwise, we don’t know how to write… For example, we have a marking criterion for presentation and writing provided by foreign teachers, we don’t know exactly what it is about. I only roughly know what it is (Hua, interview).

Hua’s remarks suggests that local English teachers not only provide thorough explanations of the content material of academic writing but also clarify the marking criteria for English writing and speaking. His comments implied that a lack of clear and concise knowledge of the marking criteria (provided by foreign English teachers) added to students’ confusion about the requirements of academic writing. The pedagogical strength that the Local English teachers’ have because they share the students’ mother tongue was recognised by both cohorts of English teachers. This analysis, together with participant students’ understandings of “substantive knowledge” in the development of English writing skills (as discussed in sect. 3.3.1), show that they conceived the English academic writing course in the following three ways. First, they argued that English writing skills should be reduced to essential elements of associated concepts and discrete linguistic items. Given the less demanding nature of the basic rules for structuring an essay, students expressed most concern about the accumulation of English linguistic knowledge (substantive knowledge) and in particular, “golden sentences”. They believed that the quality of an English essay is largely determined by the skilful use of rhetoric and flowery sentence structures and expression. Second, they defined the writing course as a formal rather than an informal course. They characterised the latter as involving the teaching of technical terminologies, in marks-based, serious lessons with few playful class activities (as discussed in sect. 4.2.2). The formal nature of the course, to a great extent, influenced their views of the Western teachers’ efficacy. This was because these teachers were unable to explain terminology clearly in Chinese and students’ perceptions of these teachers as “casual” did not match their vision of a proper formal English writing course. Third, the English academic writing course was seen as conceptually easy yet pedagogically difficult. As discussed above, because the students had learned certain writing precepts in Mandarin-medium classes, in terms of conceptual knowledge, the English academic writing course was described as easy. However, the foreign teachers’ expounding of these concepts in English was described as adding complication. The reason may be students’ misinterpretation of both the instructions and the pedagogical practices used by Western English teachers, in particular with reference to “golden sentences”.

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5.3  S  tudents’ Learning Experiences in Academic Writing Lessons In this section, I first present the marking criteria of academic English writing observed by foreign English teachers which reflect the habitus in the Western field of academic writing. Foreign teachers more or less follow the “procedural teaching of the textbook” to familiarise students with the genre knowledge of academic writing as specified in the marking criteria. Chinese students, caught up in their own habitus of English writing skills, must engage in a process of negotiation with the foreign teachers’ instructions about academic essay writing.

5.3.1  F  oreign English Teachers: Procedural Teaching of the Textbook The teaching materials for the English academic writing courses in the Qunxi program were designed by Australian Partner University. Foreign English teachers use certain pedagogical practices to develop student skills in academic writing. The specific skills are clearly indicated in the marking criteria that effectively define a good academic essay. Marking criteria for EAP 3.

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Marking criteria for EAP 4.

These charts show that the essay is marked against four broad criteria: content and organisation, coherence/cohesion, language (grammar and sentence structure, punctuation, capitalisation and spelling, and vocabulary) and academic conventions (originality and register). The content and organisation criteria highlight the structural rules concerning introduction, body paragraphs, conclusion, thesis statements, topic sentences/supporting sentences and so on. The coherence/cohesion criteria concern transition signals (for example, coordinating conjunctions, transition words, phrases and clauses), which ensure that ideas are presented coherently. Regarding language, accurate use of grammar and the incorporation of complex and compound sentence structures are crucial to getting a good score. As for academic conventions, original ideas and the right language style are expected in academic essays. The procedural teaching of the skills as set out in the marking criteria was clearly articulated in focus group 1 discussions (Luo, 2021, p.65): The foreign teacher’s writing class goes like “read the model essay, teach the structure, then [explain] which words/phrases can or can’t be used, teach some transitional words or sentences, give a topic and relevant materials and ask students to write an essay, the peer-­ review and get some feedbacks and copy it again” …we have been learning the conjunctions, “and, but, etc” (Xiaozheng, focus group 1).

In our interview, foreign teacher Alice raised the topic of the procedures for teaching academic writing skills as prescribed in the textbook, saying that she did not have a clear philosophy on this. She described the ways in which she tries to develop

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students’ skills in writing English so that they will be able to communicate in a Western context. The word “Western” indicates that foreign English teachers are bound up with the habitus of academic writing in a Western education context. Alice uses a variety of techniques to familiarise students with all the macro and micro components of the academic essay, and asks them to practice them in class: My types of methods would be, very slowly giving students different skills that they can use to learn how to write and speak in the way that is usually expected in a Western environment… you do a lot of different activities, constructing and deconstructing sentences… then you start to give them big structures, models, you chop them up and they put them together… (Alice, interview).

In fact, Alice’s description of this kind of procedural teaching is what was reported to take place in all classes taught by Western teachers. Though others spoke about their philosophy in a more abstract manner, as embodied in the concepts like “students as whole persons” and “teachers as facilitators” (presented in sections 3.4.1 and 4.3.1), the reality is that the teachers are required to teach specific according to academic guidelines aimed at developing students’ English-speaking and academic writing skills. The procedural delivery of prescribed content within the textbook was evident in classroom observations. In the lessons that I observed, the teachers usually gave explicit instructions for all the designated tasks in the sequence and asked students to complete them in groups. The following observation notes show that these teachers mainly followed the delivery outline in order to instruct students about supporting examples in essay arguments: The teacher asked students to turn to page 114, and said they were looking at steps 9, 10, 11…Turn to page 171. The teacher said, “You need examples to support your own argument” … If students agreed or disagreed with a statement, they were required to find reasons and examples to support their arguments… The 15 minutes’ instructions were followed by 25 minutes group discussion to find arguments and supporting examples in the relevant texts. Teachers walked around and talked with individual groups (Classroom observations 4).

The teacher I observed spent 15 min explaining the relationship between an argument and supporting evidence in an academic essay. This was followed by group discussions of these concepts through analysis of the arguments in certain texts. In the meantime, the teacher paced up and down the classroom aisles, monitoring student conversations and offering advice to individual groups. This procedure took half of the lesson time (25 min). Thus, although sequential teaching of the essay-­ related content is predominant in foreign English teachers’ classes, it is largely done through non-traditional activities. Students are encouraged to explore and absorb conceptual knowledge together with their classmates. This suggests why most of these teachers tended to explain the rationale for classroom activities with reference to their conceptions of viewing students as “whole persons” and themselves as “facilitators”, while paying less attention to superficial description of pedagogical strategies. This may also be explained by these teachers’ TESOL training, which enables them to explain the theoretical underpinnings of their lessons when asked.

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5.3.2  Students’ Negotiation of the Academic Writing Lessons Living in their local habitus of English writing, students engage in a complex negotiation during foreign teachers’ writing lessons. This process is manifested in the way the widespread notion of huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) is disrupted and dismissed by these teachers’ instructions about academic writing. I discuss the disruption from two perspectives: the definition of academic writing and evolving perceptions of grammar. First, most of the participant students expressed confusion about what constitutes academic writing in relation to golden sentences. According to Qing, such sophisticated English sentences were symbols of high English proficiency in senior middle school, but they are not allowed to use them in the foreign teachers’ academic writing tasks at university. This made her worry that her English writing would regress, led to confusion about “what academic writing is”. Qing’s confusion is a sign of the ambivalence created by the contradictory instructions coming from their local English teachers in the past and their present foreign English teachers: I feel I am even worse than [I was] in senior middle school, as I used some sophisticated English sentences in senior middle school… I have no idea what academic English is (Qing, interview).

Qing’s confusion was shared by most of the participant students. Ting, for instance, said that all she learned in foreign teachers’ classes was that the huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) that she was encouraged to use in senior middle school are not academic English. As to writing, the only thing I have learned from the foreign teachers’ classes is that we are not allowed to use the golden or universal sentence structures we were encouraged to use in middle schools… However, people use those golden sentences in English speaking competitions, perhaps… [whereas] we are learning academic English (Ting, interview).

Because nearly all participant students talked about the importance of huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) in English writing in senior middle schools, the foreign teachers’ feedback on such sentences created doubts among them about what constitutes academic English. The foreign teachers disregarded these golden expressions which, for the students, are symbols of a high quality written English that guaranteed a good score in English compositions in senior middle school. It seems that they were unable to discard the English writing conventions developed during these school years––the emphasis on perfection of expression, characterised by flowery and beautiful expressions and delicacy in sentence-level writing. The students had learned to regard such sophistication and structural beauty as keys to successful academic writing. We can surmise that they were most concerned about one of the four marking criteria (Language, i.e. spelling, grammar and vocabulary) and less concerned about the content, organisation and coherence of the essay. Second, students’ perplexity over Western English teachers’ instructions for writing academic essays was associated with their new perceptions of grammar. As explained in focus group e6, the English grammar that the students learned at

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schools was not quite accurate. As Xiaoding pointed out, she thought her essay was fine grammatically, but it was returned with many errors marked in red (Xiaoding, focus group 6). This led the students to surmise that English grammar has nuances that can only be understood by native speakers of English, what Xiaofeng (focus group 6) called “conventions”, which Chinese students have no means of acquiring at school. This explains the delicate problem that the Chinese students believed that their grammar was correct based on what they had learned from their Chinese English teachers at school, but it was incorrect in terms of the conventions of English grammar: I think their English has [a] grammar that only foreigners can understand. [It] can be sensed but cannot be articulated clearly, just like we Chinese also have our own grammar… Sometimes, we can only use “that”; sometimes, we can only use “which”. The teacher said it is a convention. We could not understand (Xiaofeng, focus group 6).

In this comment, Xiaofeng demonstrates the disruption of her notions of grammar created by the “conventions” determining the use of “that” and “which” in constructing attributive clauses. Her choice of the word “only” suggests that in students’ minds, these two words are interchangeable, but according to the Western English teachers’ instructions, they are not. Lack of knowledge of these conventions appeared to cause various communication problems between Chinese students and Western English teachers, including teachers’ misinterpretations of students’ meanings, students’ being puzzled over teachers’ revision advice, and mutual misunderstandings: When I wrote one paragraph in one essay, my understanding is this, but the foreign teacher’s understanding was a different one. Then the foreign teacher revised the whole sentence. Because his interpretation was different from my intended meaning, he changed the meaning of the sentence… Sometimes, they like us to break sentences into shorter ones. Sometimes, they would like us to combine them. We are confused and can’t understand… we cannot understand each other properly in the process of explanations (Xiaozhu, focus group 6).

New perceptions of grammar are manifested in the fact that Western English teachers’ instructions were at odds with students’ understandings of the marking criteria for language that encourage the use of simple sentences but also award bonus points for attempting compound and complex sentences. However, as discussed in focus group 1, Chinese English teachers at school saw structures limited to compound sentences using “and” and “but” as indicative of poor written English skills: The foreign teacher told me [we] need to use some basic forms, like “and, but”. In senior middle school, I saw these simple sentences as signs of low English proficiency. Our school English teacher often said, “if you always use ‘and’ and ‘but’, you are only at the level of junior middle school or primary school” (Xiaoshan, focus group 1).

Moreover, knowledge of the use of these features was described by students as being far too “easy” and thus not worthy of explicit teaching at all. As explained by Ting, “the foreign teacher teaches us how to use ‘and’ and ‘but’. It is as easy as A.B.C….” With regard to more complex sentences, students’ preconceptions of huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) add to the confusion. As Xiaoliu mentioned

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in focus group 2, the complex sentences that were taught and required to be used in foreign teachers’ writing classes seemed to be totally different from the huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) learned in senior middle schools; that is, there appeared to be two distinct types of complex sentences in English: … we are expected to use sophisticated sentences in foreign teachers’ writing classes, but the complex sentences learned in senior middle school are not appropriate for academic writing (Xiaoliu, focus group 2).

Xiaoliu is describing a disjunct between Chinese students’ and foreign English teachers’ perceptions of complex sentences. The disjunctive understandings may be explained by the differing underlying rationales for the use of simple and complex sentences. In senior middle schools, simple and complex sentences, according to students, were primarily seen as demonstrations of English proficiency, whereas in the foreign teachers’ academic essay writing classes their purpose is to build a clearer and stronger argument, not a meaningless show of so-called “good” language. Hence, foreign teachers’ instructions about sentence structures conflict with students’ understandings of their value. Taken together, student confusion about the English writing course may be attributed to the mismatch between the objectives of Western teachers’ lessons and students’ English writing habitus. EAP classes, for which foreign English teachers are responsible, focus on genre writing, specifically the academic genre. The primary goal of these lessons is to teach discourse development rather than accurate sentences and flowery expression. At sentence level, the different rationales underpinning the use of simple or complex structures add to the confusion. Students end up feeling constrained by the new and different instructions, as explained by Xiaoxi, who stated that they could not write freely because there were so many new rules to follow. The dissonance caused by the problems associated with “golden sentences” resulted in students making ambivalent assessments of foreign English teachers’ writing classes. On the one hand, most participant students agreed that they had learned essay-related concepts, such as structure, thesis statement and supporting paragraphs, so from the vantage point of genre writing, the classes were effective. As a student in focus group 2 said: Though the essay format is right, the content is hollow; we are writing to meet the amount of words. … I dare not use the beautiful sentences I used in senior middle school because of the criteria… It is different from writing in senior school where beautiful expression was encouraged (Xiaosong, focus group 2).

However, as described above, many students felt that the concepts crucial to academic writing could be taught more clearly and in less time by Chinese English teachers, in Chinese. Thus, foreign English teachers’ unclear explanations of the complicated genre concepts greatly undermined the effectiveness of their lessons. In addition, the conceptual knowledge delivered in the English writing classes was undermined by many students who saw it as being of limited value in the acquisition of writing skills acquisition.

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Chinese students know the world of “English writing” so well that it is like a familiar habitat. However, when confronted with the habitus of “English writing” formed in a different world, they are like “fish out of water” and struggle to negotiate different aspects of their original habitus. The negotiation processes are revealed in how the students re-appropriate and re-evaluate the Chinese metaphor huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) in the foreign English teachers’ lessons. The destabilisation results in students feeling that their academic writing skills have not much improved.

References Bourdieu, P. (1988). Vive la Crise!: For heterodoxy in social science. Theory and Society, 17(5), 773–787. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00162619 Bourdieu, P. (1990). In other words: Essays towards a reflexive sociology. Polity Press. Bourdieu, P.(2000). Pierre Bourdieu: Pascalian meditations (trans R Nice). Cambridge: Polity. Deng, L. M. (2001). Emphasis on the input of recitation, overcome the negative transfer in English writing [注重背诵输入 克服英语写作的负迁移]. Foreign Language Education, 22(4), 42–44. Hu, G.  W. (2005). English language education in China: Policies, progress, and problems. Language Policy, 4(1), 5–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-­004-­6561-­7 Luo, Y.  M. (2021). Towards innovative English language teaching: Multilingualism and the re-­ conceptualisation of the Chinese/Western binary. In R. Arber, M. Weinmann, & J. Blackmore (Eds.), Rethinking languages education directions, challenges and innovations (pp.  58–72). Routledge. Mohan, B. A., & Lo, W. A. Y. (1985). Academic writing and Chinese students: Transfer and developmental factors. TESOL Quarterly, 19(3), 515–534. Wang, L. F. (2005). Emphirical studies on L2 writing in China: A review. Foreign Languages in China, 2(1), 50–55.

Chapter 6

Confined Lively Butterflies

Abstract  In this chapter, I investigate how students’ English learning experiences are shaped and mediated through the situated discourses revealed in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5. We see how people’s lived realities are framed within situated contexts, and how their conceptions of the world are maintained and negotiated through language, discourse and identity. I use the metaphor “confined lively little butterflies” to show unique features of Chinese learners and their everyday learning behaviours. To understand better the interaction between different discourses embodied in the Chinese perceptions, I first elaborate on the multilingual perspective that I add to Hall’s discursive approach to representation and then examine how this helps us to understand students’ constructions and negotiation of their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program. The complex negotiation process the students go through is also seen in the nuances of their learning behaviours, from which I unpack three Chinese concepts: passive learning, silence and critical thinking skills. In this chapter, I investigate how students’ English learning experiences are shaped and mediated through the situated discourses revealed in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 above. The chapter highlights how people’s lived realities are framed within situated contexts, and how their conceptions of the world are maintained and negotiated through language, discourse and identity. I use the metaphor “confined lively little butterflies” (bèi shù fù de huó pō xiǎo hú dié, 被束缚的活泼小蝴蝶) to highlight unique features of the Chinese students and their everyday learning behaviours. This is a metaphor that a participant Western English teacher (Alice) used to describe her observations of Chinese university students. To understand better the interaction among different discourses as embodied in the Chinese perceptions elicited from data analysis, I first elaborate on the multilingual perspective that I add to Hall’s discursive theory of representation. I then examine how this theoretical lens helps us to understand students’ constructions and negotiation of their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program. The complex negotiation process they experience is also evident in the nuances of their learning behaviours, from which I unpack three Chinese concepts bèi dòng xué xí,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_6

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被动学习 (passive learning), chén mò, 沉默 (silence) and pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批 判思维能力 (critical thinking skills). In the light of representation theory with a multilingual perspective, the nuanced meanings of these three concepts emerge from analysis of the situated sociocultural, educational and institutional practices.

6.1  Representation with a Multilingual Perspective In Sects. 3.1 and 4.1, I discussed Hall’s representation theory that meaning is constructed and mediated through language, culture and discourse, and that representations of different culture are negotiated and maintained using identity stereotyping frames. In the cross-cultural and multilingual context in my study, the representational practices involve an even more dynamic interplay of all these factors, resulting in unique perceptions of people and things. Student participants used Chinese concepts and metaphors complexly to convey their localised understandings of English teachers, English courses and effective English language pedagogies. My analysis of the nuanced meanings of certain Chinese linguistic terms highlighted the multilingual influences in people’s conceptualisation of the world, which Hall did not discuss. In this section, I review the multilingual perspectives that recent scholars have adopted in linguistic, cultural and educational research. I focus on the post-­ monolingual methodology that explores how linguistic repertoires in multiple languages can provide additional conceptual resources for theorising and knowledge construction.

6.1.1  Multilingual Perspectives The interdependent relationship between language and culture in making sense of the world was once taken to its extreme—and well-articulated—in the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which posits that language determines the way people categorise, perceive and experience the world: …it [language] powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes… [Human beings] are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society… the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The world’s different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached (Sapir, 1949, p. 68–69).

As Kramsch (2004) notes, the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has been heavily criticised and largely discarded, as it is evidently possible to translate across languages, and people from different language communities can communicate with each other. The weak version of linguistic relativity, as described in Sect. 3.1, is more widely accepted.

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Nevertheless, Aneta Pavlenko (2016) points out that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis has been misconstrued to some extent, because the multilingual awareness in Benjamin Whorf’s original articulation was lost. Whorf’s key concern was the validity of generalisations made by others on the basis of their own experience (p. 596). In other words, explanatory constructs and theories based on data from speakers of the privileged language (English) might not explain what is happening in multilingual contexts. Pavlenko (2016) argues that the locations of second language acquisition (SLA) studies should be expanded to include contexts other than “Western” ones; speakers of other languages can cooperate with Western researchers in the construction of SLA theories. This echoes Steven May’s (2013b) call for a multilingual turn in applied linguistics research to problematise the “normative ascendancy of monolingualism underpinning the study of language acquisition and use and related educational and assessment practices” (p.  2). In order to achieve this, May notes that in this globalised world there is “a need for more nuanced ethnographic understandings of the complex multilingual repertories of speakers in urban environments” (p. 1).

6.1.2  Post-Monolingual Methodology As portrayed in representation theory, knowledge is constructed and represented through language and culture. That is to say, Western theory and knowledge about language pedagogy is derived from a specific social and historical context, which does not necessarily fit into different educational contexts. Recently, scholars have challenged the legitimacy of applying Western educational theories to non-Western contexts (Chen, 2010; Luke et al., 2005; May, 2013a, b; Singh, 2015). Allan Luke, Yoshiko Nozaki and Roger Openshaw (2005) point out that in the literature on education in the Asia-Pacific, researchers have principally used two approaches: the first focuses on the “descriptive and comparative discussion of policy, history and context” (p. 1) between the East and the West, and little attention is paid to the politics in curriculum and pedagogy at macro and micro levels; the second approach tends to present comparative views of Asia from the perspectives of Western or Northern epistemologies and disciplines. Both approaches, they argued, are indicative of a legacy of comparative education and Western area studies. Luke et al. assert that, in this increasingly globalised world, there is an urgent need to move beyond the taken-for-granted “efficacy of the center/periphery, inside/out force that emanates from the North and West” (p. 3); researchers should instead engage with local education discourses and practices in theory and critical analysis of curriculum and pedagogy. In recognition of an increasing awareness of the heterogeneity of local practices across regional and national contexts and the rise of postcolonial research trends, Chen Kuan-hsing (2010) proposed the revolutionary notion of “Asia as method”. He depicts the ways in which Western imperialism promotes a one-way flow of knowledge between the East and the West; that is, the West is treated as the knowledge and

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theory producer, whereas Asian knowledge production constantly uses Western knowledge as its reference point. To move beyond postcolonial imperialism, Chen proposed that, rather than using Western theories as starting points, Asia should use its own cultural and historical resources to construct theory and knowledge in Asian contexts. However, as Lin (2012) points out, Chen is a cultural studies scholar, who does not inquire into education or curriculum; his primary concern is decolonisation, de-Cold War and de-imperialisation. Nonetheless, Chen’s notion of Asia as method is useful for my study in that, when Chinese students and their local English teachers construct pedagogical knowledge, their local social, cultural and institutional contexts, rather than Western TESOL theories, should be used to understand their conceptualisations. The work of the scholar Michael Singh, who is interested in pedagogical and curriculum innovation, aligns with Chen’s proposals to overcome Western intellectual hegemony. However, Singh (2015) also criticises Chen’s Asia-centricity, pointing out that it aims to create a new framework to compete with and “beat” the West in cultural terms and thus “offers little chance for breaking away from the East-West binary structure” (p.  145). Singh argues that researchers must move beyond the binary classification of the West and the rest; in this way, we should no longer think or interpret the world in these binary categories (Lin, 2012). Singh advocates the production of theoretical and linguistic knowledge, taking what he calls a post-­ monolingual and a post-Euro-American-centred approach to the theorising of knowledge; that aims to explore the “the incorporation of non-Western theoretic-­ linguistic resources and conceptual contributions by non-Western scholars” by using the diverse intellectual resources within their cultures (Singh, 2015, p.158). This post-monolingual knowledge co-production does not deny the usefulness of Western knowledge, which he regards as one intellectual resource among many others, but rather it seeks to promote a worldly approach that aims to transform the privileging of “Euro-American theorizing and modes of critique in the field of education” (Singh, 2015, p.158). Post-monolingual research methodology is an important tool for promoting theory and knowledge production; “the concepts, metaphors, images, modes of critical thinking” from diverse languages can be used as vehicles for the production of theoretical knowledge (Singh, 2017, p. 1). With this methodology, multilingual researchers can make use of their full linguistic repertoire and the plurality of intellectual cultures in their theoretical constructions (Nguyen, 2017; Singh, 2017). This is what May (2013b) describes as the potential synergies in SLA and TESOL that advocate more social and critical conceptions among these disciplines. Similarly, May (2013b) states that multilingual researchers should make use of their complex linguistic repertories with the aim of challenging the normative ascendancy of monolingualism that underpins language educational theories and practices. Essential aspects of post-monolingual research methodology were used in the present study. Participants used certain concepts (in Chinese and English) to show their understandings of English language pedagogy. For instance, as discussed in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5, the concept of “effective” English language pedagogy (yǒu xiào yīng yǔ jiào xué fǎ, 有效英语教学法) was defined by student participants using the

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following Chinese terms: obtaining “substantive knowledge” (shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识); demonstrating “logic of the lesson” (kè táng luó jí,课堂逻辑); free of “buzzing class activities” (wēng xiǎng de kè tang huó dòng, 嗡嗡响的课堂 活动); having the characteristics of “real learning” (zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学); Chinese and foreign teachers delivering different English courses (informal/ formal English courses); learning huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (“golden sentences”). By interrogating these Chinese concepts and their nuanced meanings in local contexts, I have shown the potential of conceptual divergences in Chinese and English languages to theorise English language pedagogy differently and to expand Western pedagogical theories.

6.2  D  iscursive Construction of Chinese Students’ English Learning Experiences Because analysis of my data involved negotiating representation processes through Mandarin and English, I adopted a discursive approach to representation with a multilingual lens as the theoretical and methodological framework to investigate how participants’ perceptions of the world were produced by competing discourses and embodied in different languages (Hall, 1997a, b, c; Singh, 2015). This theory enabled me to analyse how the students’ constructions of their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program were mediated and framed within three discourses (as presented in Chaps. 3, 4 and 5). They used Chinese words, meanings and metaphors to describe their perceptions of English teachers’ pedagogical practices. Language is reflexive, embodied and multidimensional, so their linguistic expressions are a product of local social practices (Pennycook, 2010) and reflect their normative understandings (discourse) developed within everyday experiences in local sociocultural and institutional contexts (Gee, 2008). I examined how the students, when embedded in each discourse, conceptualised the different English language education provided by local Chinese and Western English teachers. My data analysis suggests that three discourses framed the participant students’ English learning experiences in the Qunxi program, which are embodied in three Chinese metaphors: méi tóu cāng yíng, 没头苍蝇 (headless flies), wài guó yǒu rén, 外国友人 (foreign friends) and huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences). These discourses were produced in local contexts and examples of their use have revealed students’ tacit understandings of “right” and “normal” ways of being, doing and behaving in three different domains: English language education, foreign English teachers’ teaching and English writing. Students used the metaphor of headless flies to allude to the distortion of English education and education caused by foreign English teachers’ pedagogical practices (Chap. 3). Unpacking the notion of foreign teachers as foreign friends shows how their identity as Others muddles students’ perceptions of their lessons (Chap. 4). In Chap. 5, I examined the ways that foreign

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teachers’ instructions on English academic essay writing confused the students’ ideas about good English writing skills and the importance of golden sentences. Through these discourses, the students used Chinese words and concepts to describe English teachers’ lessons. Local English teachers’ lessons (Sects. 3.5 and 4.4), were mainly considered effective because they were congruent with local norms of English language education as embodied in Chinese concepts of shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (substantive knowledge) and yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí, 英语课堂逻辑 (logic of English lessons). However, certain non-traditional class activities introduced by Chinese teachers were regarded as ineffective. Behind this view were two discursive factors: the dichotomised construction of Chinese and Western English teachers in the local context, and Chinese English teachers’ views of these “peripheral” classroom activities. The students’ learning experiences with foreign English teachers involved more dynamic interaction between these discourses. English speaking and writing classes taught by Western teachers were criticised as contributing little “substantial” improvement in English language skills, and thus were disparaged as “play”. Within an Occidentalist discourse, the foreign English teachers satisfied students’ curiosity about the Other, which gave them greater confidence to converse in English. Yet, their English lessons were still depicted by students as “play” because of their identity as Others. If English writing lessons are evaluated according to the students’ ideas about English writing, then they were considered as not having contributed much to the improvement of their English writing skills. In brief, foreign English teachers’ lessons were successful within the metaphorical parameters of “foreign friends”, which explains some students’ positive comments. However, different conceptualisations were applied to the same pedagogical behaviours, and mediated through local educational discourses. The complexity of the students’ constructions of their learning experiences supports the notion that people’s knowledge about things is the outcome of struggle between competing discourses (Hall, 1992, p.203). Nevertheless, the students did not subscribe equally to these discourses; views of Western teachers’ pedagogical behaviours varied. As explained in Chap. 3, the central assertion of most students was that they did not learn much from Western English teachers’ classes––their comments were mediated primarily through the metaphors of headless flies and golden sentences. Their views reflect the dominance of local educational discourses in Chinese students’ receptions of English language pedagogical behaviours and explain their ambivalent remarks about foreign teachers’ lessons. While the less measurable improvements made in foreign English teachers’ classes might be recognised, including increased conceptual understanding of academic writing, improved confidence, presentation skills and intercultural communication skills, these were not regarded as core learning outcomes in English language training, which most students view as the accumulation of substantive knowledge. In contrast to the common critical views about the effectiveness of Western English teachers’ lessons, two respondents (Chuan and Wei) reported satisfaction, mostly speaking about the teachers using the foreign friends metaphor, that is, an Occidentalist discourse. Chuan strongly criticised the oppressive education school

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system in China. His motivation for learning English was to go abroad and thus spare his children the challenges of a painful schooling system. He hailed foreign teachers’ teaching methodology as “ideal” because, for him, they represented a radical departure from the educational norms in Chinese middle schools. Thus, Chuan regarded foreign teachers as the embodiment of a Western vision of education that was different from the Chinese one. Wei was a weak student of English who said that he could only understand half of the foreign teachers’ instructions, but he mainly spoke positively about the foreign teachers’ lessons. He exhibited a strong tendency to treat foreign teachers as foreign friends and “representatives of a different country”. Thus, unlike most of their peers, Chuan and Wei situated themselves in an Occidentalist discourse while talking about foreign teachers and thus formed different views about their lessons. The complexity arising from conflicting discourses led students to construct fragmented identities for foreign English teachers: on the one hand, as the embodiment of “Western stuff”, they should show the foreign attributes of Western Others and Western styles of teaching; on the other, they were expected to conform to the norms of good English teachers according to e educational discourses, because a Western teaching approach was considered unable to produce to satisfactory learning outcomes. We can theorise these discursive constructions of teacher identities with reference to the non-essentialist view of identity, which explains how identity is positioned and constructed by different discourses (Hall, 1996; Varghese et al., 2005). Such ambivalence is evident in focus group 2 discussion about their foreign teacher, Beth: We expect younger and more energetic and humorous teachers, but our teacher (Beth) is too conservative. I think she is just like the Chinese teachers, but from a foreign country. She teaches the same way as Chinese teachers do (Xiaohui).

Despite the fact that foreign English teachers are often expected to adhere to the (local) situated norms of English teaching and learning, Beth, who was described as using the same teaching methods as those of Chinese English teachers, did not gain students’ favour. As Beth herself explained, her lessons adhered to a clear procedure of modelling the way of doing the task, followed by students’ practice. Hence, the similarity that Xiaohui mentioned lay in her clear and predictable lesson procedures. For Xiaohui, Beth should embody the Occidentalist image of an energetic and humorous Western teacher. The story about Beth highlights the predominance of Occidentalist discourse in Chinese students’ definitions of good Western English teachers. As described in Chap. 4, foreign teachers were seen as more suited to English speaking or casual conversation than formal academic writing; failure to live up to these expectations caused students to comment negatively. In addition, having the identity of a native English speaker was highlighted as another important reason for foreign teachers to teach English speaking skills. The data suggest that the professional identity of being a teacher of spoken English was, to a large extent, determined by this native-­ speaker status rather than by any demonstrated pedagogical expertise.

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From the discussion in this section of the ways that three competing discourses interacted to affect students’ perceptions and negotiations of their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program, and the role that teacher identity plays in students’ constructions of “good” foreign English teachers, and how Chinese students’ learning experiences are shaped and embedded in particular sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts, we can conclude that it is problematic to dichotomise Chinese and Western students using educational concepts that are embedded in Western contexts (Clark & Gieve, 2006; Marton et al., 1993; Ryan, 2010; Ryan & Louie, 2007). The limitation of Western theorising is explicitly revealed in the way students talked about their learning behaviours in the program, as discussed in the following section, which offers another response to this study’s driving question: how do Chinese university students experience their English language education in Sino-Australian joint programs?

6.3  “We Are Similar to Western Youngsters” Let’s now apply our theoretical lens to explore nuances of Chinese students’ learning behaviours by unpacking three Chinese concepts: bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (passive learning), chén mò, 沉默 (silence) and pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判思维能力 (critical thinking skills). In focus groups, I asked students to comment on the characteristics commonly ascribed to Chinese learners, such as “passive learners”, “silence” and “lack of critical thinking skills”. The specific characteristics of Chinese learners were also revealed when participant students and teachers discussed teaching and learning practices in the Qunxi program and in China in general. Chinese learners’ specific features are recognised and well-articulated in foreign teacher Alice’s comment that Chinese students are “confined lively little butterflies” (bèi shù fù de huó pō xiǎo hú dié, 被束缚的活泼小蝴蝶): So they are kind of like little butterflies who are not quite free. They are very lively. …these are the stereotypes of Chinese students: they don’t want to be different to anybody else, they don’t want to be assertive. Many of my students, they are very assertive, they have strong opinions… but they do not always voice them. You can feel that (interview).

Central to Alice’s description is that Chinese students are different from the stereotypical descriptions prevalent in the extant literature. The word “lively” suggests that Chinese learners are not obedient or passive but dynamic, with their own understandings of the world. She portrays Chinese learners as energetic butterflies confined by something. Most students seemed to agree with Alice’s counter-stereotypical view of Chinese learners, though a small number identified themselves with the stereotype. As participants in focus group 1 made clear, most students dislike what they see as a tendency to homogenise them; they see themselves as dynamic human beings just like their Western counterparts:

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But I don’t agree with the view that Chinese learners are obedient. In terms of individual characters, we all have distinct personalities, we are not the so-called obedient girls and boys… from Western TV series. I think we are similar to Western youngsters (Xiaoxi, focus group 1).

Xiaoxi’s comment “we are similar to Western youngsters” suggests that the dichotomisation of Chinese and Western students with reference to their countries of origin has little value. In the following sections, the unpacking of the nuanced meanings of aforementioned three Chinese concepts—bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (passive learning), chén mò, 沉默 (silence), pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判思维能力(critical thinking skills)—continues to challenge such binary views.

6.3.1  T  he Concept of bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (Passive Learning) Many students and Chinese English teachers who participated in this study spoke about bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (passive learning), which conveys the notion that Chinese students are not proactive and need to be pushed to learn. Lili, local English teacher and coordinator of the Year 1 English reading course, said “our students are in the state of passive learning… they have to be pushed to learn… they lack proactivity”. Students seemed to identify with this notion; Fang, a student who described herself as highly motivated, commented, “I need a teacher who pushes me to learn”. However, the word “push” here should not be interpreted simply as an indicator that she is a passive learner; indeed, most students seemed to be strongly motivated to learn English, as they said in discussions with focus group 5: I really want to learn English well, but I don’t know how. Many students want to learn English, but due to time constraints, they don’t have time to learn out of class (Xiaocheng, focus group 5).

These comments suggest two reasons for the acceptance among Chinese students of the need to be pushed. The first is that they do not have sufficient language learning strategies, so they need teachers to provide a pedagogical structure within which they can translate their motivation into learning practices. The second reason is that students are fully occupied by the institutional timetable and without a push, are more likely to direct their attention to other subjects. It appears that students invite teachers to push them in order to motivate them even further, which was evident from comments that most students were satisfied with teachers’ mechanisms for memorising words (the dictation task): Dictation is a way to push us to recite the words. Without this, many students would not memorise the words. It is better to be pushed to memorise some words than to do nothing (Xiaodeng, focus group 5).

Most students said that prior learning experiences had accustomed them to the idea that teachers provide the learning structure and guidance. But “push” does not

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signify “passive”, rather it is a useful means to turn motivation into learning practices. As students in focus group 5 explained, dictation was regarded as a most effective way to push students to memorise the written forms of English words, and to reinforce the sound–spelling relationships of words as well. This suggests that both teachers and students are aware of the importance of an external push for students’ learning. So, Chinese English teachers design tasks to be completed outside the classroom as pushing mechanisms that will contribute to good final exam scores and the overall grade. As Lan, one participant Chinese teacher, explained: The final exam accounts for fifty per cent, dictation ten per cent, classroom attendance ten per cent; online assignment ten per cent, that includes film review, audio-clips of their own pronunciation, translation; preview task ten per cent; mid-term exam ten per cent (Lan, interview).

Not all push mechanisms were as welcome as the dictation tasks and pushing became forcing in some instances. For example, many students complained about the mid-term exam,1 which was designed to force students to review the linguistic items they had been taught up to then. According to the English teachers, the underlying rationale of the mid-term test was as a group push mechanism so that students would do their utmost to master the items of linguistic knowledge. Ting said that many students disliked the “fake group work” (jiǎ de xiǎo zǔ huó dòng, 假的小组 活动) format of this exam. She explained that “fake group work” meant that the good students did most of the work to furnish the answers, and that poor students reduced the group score when called upon to answer questions. She asserted that students’ passivity should be attributed not to any lack of desire to do the work, but to the teachers’ mode of pushing: Like the mid-term exam, the teacher required us to complete the hundred and twenty questions in groups, but the reality is that I stayed up late for three nights to complete all the tasks and then I sent them to other group members…However, we get a score for the whole group in the mid-term exam so some low-proficiency students could be a drag on the whole group (Ting, interview).

The above interpretations of “passive learning” suggest that Chinese learners are not proactive learners, and can therefore be seen as passive ones. However, this apparent passivity contains many complexities that have been overlooked. The analysis above suggests that active elements are present in seemingly passive learning behaviours, and that active and passive coexist in students’ enunciations. The concept of bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (passive learning) in relation to Chinese students embodies nuances embedded in  local sociocultural and educational discourses. Watkins and Biggs (2001) advance a similar argument from a pedagogical point of view—that the observed passivity of Chinese students does not mean that they are

1  The mid-term exam format was that 120 linguistic test items were handed out to groups (5-6 students per group); group members were expected to figure out the answers together and memorise them. On the day of the test, group members took turns to answer randomly selected questions from the list of 120 items and all the members shared the same group score.

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passive learners, but that they participate actively in large classes in ways that are different from how learning occurs in a Western context. Chinese students use concentrated listening and Chinese teachers use vicarious learning, timed questions and associated activities to allow students to be active even in large classes.

6.3.2  The Concept of chén mò, 沉默 (Silence) The apparently unresponsive behaviour of students in foreign English teachers’ classes was discussed in focus groups following the classroom observations. My observations were that most students did not respond even to quite simple questions that their foreign teachers asked. They offered multiple explanations for their silence in these classes, including the content of the lesson, their low comprehension skills, the foreign teachers’ identity as Others, peer pressure, the influence of previous English teaching methods, and cultural factors. Lesson content was commonly given as a reason for students’ reticence in class. For example, Xiaolong commented that students were often unresponsive because they were not listening to what the Western teacher was saying. Xiaolong argued that the teacher’s discussion was often of little interest and therefore unworthy of the students’ attention. Xiaolong’s statement that he liked the foreign teacher’s classes when he taught something interesting suggests that the teacher’s treatment of certain topics (in this case, nuclear energy) lacked substance and did not warrant a response. Most of us did not listen … when the foreign teacher asked a question about the word “afford” … I like a foreign teacher’s classes if he teaches something that interests us… When we keep silent in class, it is because we don’t bother to speak and the topic is of no interest at all (Xiaolong, focus group 1).

Low English proficiency was offered as another important rationale for tepid responses to Western teachers’ questions. As Xiaochao explained, “we would like to speak, but we don’t have enough language to explain…” (focus group 1). Inadequate English language skills were identified as a key factor that discouraged students from talking in class. Here, students’ understandings about the relationship between linguistic knowledge and language communicative skills emerge, as extensively discussed in Chap. 3. It seems that for these students, only when linguistic knowledge is properly “stocked” can they participate in English speaking activities. Students’ lack of experience with Western teachers’ pedagogical approaches was cited as another factor that impinged on their active engagement in class: It is because of the influence of teaching and learning modes in [Chinese] middle schools— teachers teaching and students sitting there and taking notes. Twelve years of education in such a mode, we have been used to that… If I ask my foreign teacher something, his explanation will make me even more puzzled. I will go to Baidu [a Chinese online search engine] for a translation, it is clear and easy to get the meaning… (Xiaoyun, focus group 1).

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This remark suggests that students remained silent in class because they feared making matters even more confusing if they asked their teacher for an explanation. It seems that students did not trust that a foreign teacher’s interpretations and rephrasing of instructions in English would result in the desired thorough comprehension. This was because they had become habituated to teaching methods in China, which are based on grammar–translation English teaching methods. As Xiaoyun explained, it was often easier to understand what the teachers were saying by looking up translations on their laptops. The comment that “[foreign teacher’s] explanations would make me even more puzzled” adds weight to the deduction that translation is required for teaching instructions as well as new words. The teachers’ identity as foreigners was alluded to as another factor in students’ unwillingness to talk in class. As discussed in Chap. 4, the students saw themselves as hosts to foreign teachers. For example, Wei said that he must treat them with politeness and respect, because they are foreigners. This made him even more reluctant to speak because he was afraid that his inappropriate questioning would make his “foreign friends” uncomfortable. This explains why, although Wei was unable to communicate with the foreign teachers well, he did not comment negatively on their teaching: I feel that foreign teachers are really amiable and kind-hearted. I feel that I must treat them well, we must treat them with politeness and respect. Because we are Chinese, we should not lose face in front of foreigners. I cannot communicate well with foreign teachers. I am afraid that if I say something wrong, it would affect the foreign teachers’ mood… (Wei, interview).

Wei’s emphasis on “face” reflects patriotic sentiment and his construction of Western teachers as Others, as discussed in Chap. 4. Qing raised peer pressure as another reason for students’ silence in class. She explained that silent but capable students are more popular. She defined capability as sufficient competence to achieve good scores in examinations: We students don’t like those who are very responsive to teachers as if the lesson is exclusively for them. On the contrary, we like those students who are silent in class but are capable getting a good mark in the exam. We like those “silent capable students”. If those responsive students do not get good marks, then the other students would say “very responsive, with no good results” as a kind of mockery. Students neglect the process and keep an eye only on the product (interview).

The idea that responsive students who do not achieve good results will be mocked highlights the hidden peer pressure among students. The argument about a product versus process approach to learning brings to light the fact that the students are primarily concerned about the exam marks (the product), which constitute the dominant criteria for judging teaching and learning practices. Students in focus group 1 gave other reasons for their reluctance to talk in class, including cultural influence and personal lack of initiative: … because of cultural influences, we do not talk directly to the teachers… I would not speak when given the opportunity, because I lack initiative (Xiaoji).

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Xiaoji explained that Chinese students hesitate to engage in direct conversation with teachers because of the traditional hierarchical relationship between Chinese teachers and students. In addition, Xiaoji said that she personally lacks the motivation to learn English. Xiaoji’s explanations foreground the macro and micro interpretations of students’ apparently unresponsive behaviours within the classroom. Nevertheless, students in focus group 1 emphasised that their seemingly unresponsive behaviour did not suggest that they were only good at doing exams; rather, they described themselves as energetic and intelligent: I think we are full of ideas. Most of the students are silent but filled with smart ideas. I don’t agree with the idea that Chinese students achieve high scores [but] are not capable of handling other issues (Xiaoyi).

Students’ explanations reveal the way that teaching materials, students’ perceptions of English skills acquisition, the exam-oriented norms of English education, teachers’ identities as Western Others and cultural factors came together to create the unresponsive behaviours I observed in their English lessons. Recent scholars have remarked upon the complexity of class “silence” among Chinese learners. As Ha and Li note (2014), the theme of silence and the Chinese learner has been researched extensively and different reasons have been advanced to explain it, including learning styles, language barriers, intercultural adjustment issues, and differences in classroom expectations. My study suggests even more complexity and nuance in this silence, particularly the students’ imagined constructions of Western teachers.

6.3.3  T  he Concept of pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判思维能力 (Critical Thinking Skills) Most focus group participants argued that Chinese students can create and develop their own arguments, which suggests that they refute the view that Chinese students lack critical thinking skills. Some students explained that contemporary parents are open-minded and thus, rather than confining children to academic learning only, they also pay attention to developing their independent thinking skills. In addition, the Internet exposes students to diverse ideas, thoughts and trivia. Many students argue that contemporary Chinese learners tend to have diverse views in relation to certain issues, rather than conforming to the orthodoxy. This point was supported in focus group 1 in relation to the notion of “respect for teachers”. Students explained that despite the cultural tradition of respecting teachers, they have “distinct feelings for different teachers––we like some teachers and dislike others”. Chinese students make critical judgements of their teachers, which indicates that they have some capacity for critical thinking. However, they added that “because of cultural influences, we will not tell the teacher directly” about their dissatisfaction. What students alluded to, can be termed “culturally silenced critical thinking skills”:

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Contemporary students have exposure to large amount of information, so they have their own ideas…Many students have critical thinking skills. We are not obedient (Focus group 6).

The analysis of data on apparent obedience reveals two reasons for students’ silenced critical thinking skills. The first is related to Chinese cultural reverence for teachers. Out of respect for teachers, students will not express their own critical ideas. Moreover, it appears that Chinese teachers themselves demand this form of respect. Participant students in focus group 5 said that Chinese teachers usually do not like students who critique their classes: we need to respect the teacher and be polite to the teacher. I think we dare not express our true feelings…I think Chinese teachers do not like students who are critical of what they are teaching. So we just let them go. I think this is Chinese tradition. We have our own ideas, but we don’t speak about them out loud (Xiaoliu).

This comment shows how Chinese students’ critical thinking is repressed by cultural traditions. The point was evident during an incident that I observed after a class. The teacher was using the group scoring scheme in the lesson, wherein group members all get the same score when a member answers a question correctly. After the lesson, a student attempted to dispute the appropriateness of group scoring, whereupon the teacher became very angry and the conversation became conflictual. Similar classroom incidents were alluded to in conversations with other participant Chinese teachers’ about the group scoring for mid-term exams. It appears that the notion of teacher authority is still pervasive among both participant teachers and students, and questioning teachers in public runs counter to the usually invisible mindset. The second reason is that critical thinking skills are somewhat discouraged in middle schools by the exam-oriented system. Students stated that demonstrating critical thinking skills means running the risk of losing marks in the exams, thus there seemed no good reason to raise their own voices. What students are expected to do is to follow the textbooks and the teachers’ instructions, which will, to a great extent, guarantee the right answers (zhèng què dá àn, 正确答案) in the exams. Because of such school experiences, students argue that they are ill-equipped for critical thinking. In junior or senior middle schools, we had clear goals––to pass those most important exams.... Nothing else has any importance at all. For example, if you say you don’t agree with the viewpoints in the textbooks, then you will simply get the answers wrong in the exams. At the beginning, you might think it is meaningful to ask the question, but the teachers will just say that it was not relevant to the exams and tell us to ignore them. So gradually, we just lost critical thinking skills (Xiaoma, Focus group 4).

Xiaoma’s words highlight the way that critical thinking skills are discouraged in the exam-focused education system in China. The word “lost” indicates that, Chinese students feel that critical thinking skills are innate in them gradually disappear because of the repressive schooling system. Chuan’s depiction of his “rebelliousness” in a Chinese writing composition exemplifies the repression of critical thinking skills in senior middle school. Once, Chuan ignored his teacher’s advice to

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incorporate values advocated in class and instead expressed his own ideas in his composition, for which he received a mark of zero from an experienced teacher, though a novice teacher gave him a relatively high mark. It seems that a challenge to the orthodoxy can lead to disastrous results. Chuan argues that the positions that students take in Chinese compositions should align with the values and beliefs espoused in the Chinese classics; this is the only way they can achieve a good score in the Gaokao composition exam. Our teachers said that our stances in essays should be in accordance with widely-accepted values in Confucius and Mencius and other classic literature; they said that the objective of attending Gaokao is to get high scores, and if we follow the teacher’s instruction, then we will get a good mark (Chuan, interview).

This study has shown that Chinese students’ interpretations of critical thinking skills have been hampered by cultural traditions and a rigid exam-oriented system. Because of this educational atmosphere that discourages critical thinking, the analysis reveals how these skills are conceived at an elementary level among Chinese learners, whether they agree or disagree with canonical statements. Some students believe that critical thinking skills are innate, and that a goal of the local educational system is to repress critical thought from the outset. In contrast, in Western literature, critical thinking skills are seen as skills that are developed as an intellectual process of conceptualising, applying, synthesising and evaluating information (Scriven & Paul, 2007). My analysis of three concepts, bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (passive learning), chén mò, 沉默 (silence) and pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判思维能力 (critical thinking skills), unearths the way in which Chinese students’ learning behaviours are negotiated within situated contexts. It also suggests that the “confinement” of participant students’ behaviours is related to the local educational situation, certain cultural traditions and students’ negotiations with foreign Others. As argued in Chap. 1 (Sect. 1.3.1), the teaching and learning mechanisms in Chinese classes are different from those we see in Western contexts and much more is happening than is immediately apparent (Chan & Rao, 2009; Watkins & Biggs, 1996, 2001). Therefore, as many scholars have argued, Chinese students should be studied in situated sociocultural and educational contexts if we are to do justice to their full complexity (Chan, 2009; Clark & Gieve, 2006). My study does this by exploring the nuances of Chinese students’ learning behaviours as embodied in Chinese conceptualisations of education. The subtle meanings of the concepts in local social communities discussed in this book are indicative of the limitations of Western attempts to explain teaching and learning behaviours in China’s classrooms. This has been noted by researchers who have investigated the paradox of Chinese learners (Watkins & Biggs, 1996, 2001). Two interpretations have been offered to explain the unique characteristics of Chinese learners (Chan, 2009). The first is based on a systems model, arguing that Chinese students need to be examined within a system, in particular with reference to Confucian Heritage Culture. The second questions the legitimacy of the use of

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Western constructs to study Chinese learners, for example, surface/deep approaches to learning and memorisation–understanding. My study finds that a novel combination of the two interpretations mentioned above can elucidate the complex characteristics of Chinese learners. First, I used a systems model to examine how different components of the situated context interact to influence students’ perceptions of English learning in the Qunxi program. Second, by examining how students articulated their experiences, I revealed the situated meanings of three concepts that are frequently discussed in the relevant literature: passive learning, silence and critical thinking skills. By unpacking the nuances of these conceptions, my study challenges the established understandings that pervade the existing literature and contributes to a more holistic understanding of Chinese students. Moreover, my study provides an additional theoretical tool with which people can challenge stereotypical descriptions of Chinese students by interrogating taken-for-granted assumptions. Chinese learners may be “confined little butterflies” and, due to their long-term “confinement”, it is not easy for them to retain their liveliness. So, to outward appearances, Chinese students tend to follow classroom instructions and reserve their views even if they have differing opinions. However, their behaviours embody complexities that have been overlooked in extant literature. As Xiaoyue argued, Chinese students are not simply “obedient boys and girls” as depicted in the literature, they are the products of situated environments. My findings represent a radical divergence from the “large culture” approach in which the learning behaviours of Chinese students have generally been studied until now (see Pei, 2015; Rao, 2006). In this chapter, I have added a multilingual perspective to representation theory and explored how the interaction of three discourses underpinned students’ discussions about their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program. The complex interaction between the norms of the discourses and the institutional conditions resulted in the participant students’ differentiated perceptions of their teachers’ lessons. Local educational discourses play a dominant role in Chinese students’ representations of effective TESOL pedagogy. Therefore, the pedagogical practices of both Chinese and Western English teachers can be differentiated conceptually. Chinese English teachers’ lessons that conform to the normative terms and conditions of English language pedagogy were represented as zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的 学(real learning), normal and effective classes, from which students attain a sense of achievement. In contrast, foreign teachers’ teaching methods that contradict these norms were constructed as wán, 玩 (play) and méi luó jí, 没逻辑 (illogical), indicating their disruptive nature. These words represent students’ contrasting learning experiences in Chinese and Western teachers’ classes. These terms are not only the means by which students speak about their English teachers’ teaching practices, but also the principal means through which students’ everyday lives are performed and experienced. Despite the predominance of local educational discourses in Chinese students’ construction of meaning in effective language pedagogy, foreign English teachers’ professional performances were also understood and assessed within an Occidentalist discourse. This explains students’ ambivalent commentaries

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on foreign English teachers’ lessons and their images of “good” foreign English teachers. Students’ English learning experiences in the Qunxi program were also examined via their learning behaviours as represented in three Chinese concepts: bèi dòng xué xí, 被动学习 (passive learning), chén mò, 沉默 (silence) and pī pàn sī wéi néng lì, 批判思维能力 (critical thinking skills). In highlighting how students’ learning experiences are shaped and negotiated within local discourses, this book suggests a move away from the pervasive images of Chinese learners in the literature and shows how new understandings can be arrived at through a multilingual perspective.

References Chan, C. K. K. (2009). Classroom innovation for the Chinese learner: Transcending dichotomies and transforming pedagogy. In C. K. Chan & N. Rao (Eds.), Revisiting the Chinese learner: Changing contexts, changing education (pp.  169–210). Comparative Education Research Centre/The University of Hong Kong & Springer. Chan, C. K. K., & Rao, N. (2009). Revisiting the Chinese learner: Changing contexts, changing education. Comparative Education Research Centre/The University of Hong Kong & Springer. Chen, K. H. (2010). Asia as method: Toward deimperialization. Duke University Press. Clark, R., & Gieve, S.  N. (2006). On the discursive construction of “the Chinese learner”. Language, Culture and Curriculum, 19(1), 54–73. Gee, J. P. (2008). Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in discourses. Routledge. Ha, P. L., & Li, B. (2014). Silence as right, choice, resistance and strategy among Chinese “me generation” students: Implications for pedagogy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 35(2), 233–248. Hall, S. (1992). The west and the rest: Discourse and power. In S.  Hall & B.  Gieben (Eds.), Formations of modernity (pp. 185–227). Polity Press/The Open University. Hall, S. (1996). The meaning of new times. In K.  H. Chen & D.  Morley (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies (pp. 221–236). Routledge. Hall, S. (1997a). Introduction. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 1–11). Sage Publications. in association with The Open University. Hall, S. (1997b). The work of representation. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 14–74). Sage Publications. in association with The Open University. Hall, S. (1997c). The spectacle of the “other”. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices (pp. 223–290). Sage Publications. in association with The Open University. Kramsch, C. (2004). Language, thought, and culture. In A.  Davies & E.  Catherine (Eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 235–261). Blackwell Publishing. Lin, A. (2012). Towards transformation of knowledge and subjectivity in curriculum inquiry: Insights from Chen Kuan-Hsing’s “Asia as Method”. Curriculum Inquiry, 42(1), 153–178. Luke, A., Nozaki, Y., & Openshaw, R. (2005). Struggles over difference: Curriculum, texts, and pedagogy in the Asia-Pacific. State University of New York Press. Marton, F., Dall’Alba, G. A., & Beaty, E. (1993). Conceptions of learning. International Journal of Educational Research, 19, 277–300. May, S. (2013a). Disclinary divides, knowledge construction, and the multilingual turn. In S. May (Ed.), The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education (pp. 7–31). Routledge.

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May, S. (2013b). Introducting the “multilingual turn”. In S.  May (Ed.), The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and bilingual education (pp. 1–6). Routledge. Nguyen, T. H. N. (2017). Divergence of languages as resources for theorizing. Education Sciences, 7(23), 1–16. Pavlenko, A. (2016). Whorf’s lost argument: Multilingual awareness. Language Learning, 66(3), 581–607. Pei, Z. (2015). Classroom discourse in college English teaching of China: A pedagogic or natural mode? Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 36(7), 694–710. Pennycook, A. (2010). Language as a local practice. Routledge. Rao, Z. (2006). Understanding Chinese students’ use of language learning strategies from cultural and educational perspectives. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 27(6), 491–508. Ryan, J. (2010). “Chinese learners”: Misconceptions and realities. In J. Ryan & G. Slethaug (Eds.), International education and the Chinese learner (pp. 37–56). Hong Kong University Press. Ryan, J., & Louie, K. (2007). False dichotomy? “Western” and “Confucian” concepts of scholarship and learning. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 39(4), 404–417. Sapir, E. (1949). The status of lingusitics as a science. In D. G. Mandelbaum (Ed.), Culture, language and personality: Selected essays. Universtiy of California Press. Scriven M, Paul R (2007). Defining critical thinking. The Critical Thinking Community: Foundation for Critical Thinking. Singh, M. (2015). Against Asia-centric methods: Australia–China theoretic–linguistic knowledge co-production. In H. Zhang, P. W. K. Chan, & J. Kenway (Eds.), Asia as method in education studies: A defiant research imagination (pp. 144–162). Routledge. Singh, M. (2017). Multilingual researchers internationalizing monolingual English-only education through post-monolingual research methodologies. Education Sciences, 7(1), 1–4. https://doi. org/10.3390/educsci7010029 Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B., & Johnson, K. A. (2005). Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of language, Identity, and Education, 4(1), 21–44. Watkins, D., & Biggs, J.  B. (Eds.). (1996). The Chinese learner: Cultural, psychological, and contextual influences. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong/ Australian Council for Educational Research. Watkins, D., & Biggs, J. B. (Eds.). (2001). Teaching the Chinese learner: Psychological and pedagogical perspectives. Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong/ Australian Council for Educational Research.

Chapter 7

“Making Biscuits or Milkshakes”: Towards More Nuanced Understandings of Chinese Learners

Abstract  In my concluding chapter, I summarise how representation theory with a multilingual perspective can be applied to local Chinese and foreign English teachers’ shared and differentiated philosophies—students as whole persons, teachers as facilitators and procedural teaching of the textbook. This theoretical lens allows us to see how students’ English learning experiences are mediated and framed within three discourses produced in the local context. I emphasise that people’s everyday experiences are the product of situated sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts, and thus the homogenisation or stereotyping of Chinese students should be refused. By showcasing how effective English language pedagogy is defined locally with reference to Chinese concepts, and seeing the nuances of Chinese students’ learning behaviours as embodiments of Chinese discursive constructions, this book provides a novel framework for exploring how theory and knowledge are constructed in languages other than English. Representation theory with a multilingual perspective may enable researchers to access and apply their own social, cultural and historical resources to facilitate the process of knowledge construction.

This chapter brings together the various points discussed in this book. I first reflect on my multilingual journey learning and teaching English, and exploring student learning experiences in the Qunxi program. Then, I demonstrate how representation theory with a multilingual perspective can be used to understand local Chinese and Western English teachers’ shared and differentiated philosophies—students as whole persons, teachers as facilitators and procedural teaching of the textbook, as discussed in chapters 3, 4 and 5. This theoretical lens has enabled me to analyse how students’ English learning experiences were mediated and framed within three discourses constructed in a local context. I emphasise the fact that people’s everyday experiences are the product of situated sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts, and thus homogenisation or stereotyping of Chinese students should be denounced.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 Y. Luo, A New Representation of Chinese Learners, Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education 13, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-2152-9_7

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By showcasing how effective English language pedagogy is defined locally with reference to Chinese concepts, and how the nuances of Chinese students’ learning behaviours are embodiments of Chinese ideas, this book provides a novel theoretical framework for exploring how theory and knowledge are constructed in languages other than English. Representation theory with a multilingual perspective will enable researchers to access and apply their own social, cultural and historical resources to facilitate the process of knowledge construction. Finally, I discuss the significance of this book for an increasingly multicultural and multilingual world and point out some of the policy implications for the multitude of transnational education programs in China.

7.1  My Multilingual Journey My journey of exploration between two languages and cultures has involved constant reflection on how social realities, and in particular education, are framed in different languages. This in turn has led me to research the experiences of students of English in a specific institutional context, where local and imported pedagogical styles are employed in a formal joint program. As I have shown, learners’ lived realities are mediated through sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts. Conceptual understandings expressed in the interviews with Chinese and Western teachers—and by the learners themselves—suggested intricate connections between language, local practices and individual perceptions of the world not explored in previous research. In the case of the learners, certain powerful metaphors emerged in the interviews and focus groups. My knowledge of both Mandarin and English enabled me to capture the subtleties of students’ understandings of different pedagogies, and my analysis of the discourses in which these metaphors were embedded sheds light on their experiences and occasional confusion when learning with Western English teachers. In Chapter One, I shared my experiences as a learner of English in China, before becoming proficient in English and becoming a faculty member at a Chinese university. As learners, my colleagues and I looked forward to meeting teachers who spoke English as a first language, and perhaps we had naive expectations; they would be “foreign friends”, and yes they would do things differently from our own teachers, who were constrained by our local education system. Hua, a participant in this study, imagined that foreign English teachers’ lessons would be about “making biscuits or milkshakes” before she experienced them, and was later confused that they were in fact about academic writing, or the formal stuff. “Making biscuits or milkshakes” here indicates that the Western English teachers were imagined by some students as teachers who use childlike activities to teach simple daily English. I use this metaphor in the title of this final chapter to conclude my exploration of how Chinese students represent their understandings of Western English teachers and their pedagogical practices and compare them with local teachers.

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To explore the complexity of Chinese students’ representations, I applied a multilingual lens, necessarily, because their experiences involve the relationships between Mandarin and English. I added a multilingual perspective to aspects of Hall’s representation theory, which accounts for how people’s perceptions of the world are negotiated and produced through constructs of language, discourse and identity. This adapted theoretical lens proved a valuable tool for understanding Chinese learners’ intercultural learning experiences; it allowed me to explore issues in more nuanced ways than has been done in most research to date. Much of the literature has tended to identify and explain certain gaps between different cultures in a simplistic manner. In the following section, I summarise how Western and Chinese English teachers’ understandings of English language education influence students’ learning experiences. The shared and differentiated conceptions of English language pedagogy between these two cohorts of English teachers provide a new angle from which to dismantle the binary constructions of native speaker and non-native speaker English teachers. Then, I demonstrate the interstices of participant students’ English learning experiences that exhibited multiple significant disruptions and outline the discourses that underpin students’ discussions of their lived experiences in an intercultural context in China.

7.2  “We Are Not the So-called Obedient Boys and Girls” In this section, I describe students’ negotiations of their English learning experiences in the Qunxi program and point out the discourses that informed those experiences. I use one participant student’s phrase “we are not the so-called obedient boys and girls” to show how students’ lived experiences are shaped in the situated contexts.

7.2.1  S  tudents’ Negotiation Between Local Teachers and Western Teachers Students in the Qunxi program must negotiate their English teachers’ views of how to teach English language. Conversations with the two cohorts of English teachers (local Chinese and Western English teachers) indicated that even from slightly different philosophical positions, they shared more or less the same conceptual understandings of teaching English, expressed in the themes of “viewing students as whole persons”, “teachers as facilitators”, and “procedural teaching of the textbook”. This is partly because they talked about both practical English language teaching and education per se.

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In terms of students as whole persons, one obvious difference between the two groups is that Western English teachers demonstrated their understandings of “learner-based” pedagogy, while Chinese English teachers largely talked about this concept in relation to local instances of English language programs. In Western English teachers’ statements, the relationship between individual learners and English language learning was emphasised repeatedly, showing their profound understanding of this pedagogy that demands that English teachers take note of individual students’ characteristics in their lesson planning. The classes run by the Western English teachers who attended to individual students’ learning needs in class were invariably described by the students as “random” and “chaotic”. However, in the Chinese teachers’ articulations, the concept of xué sheng shì wán zhěng de rén 学生是完整的人 (students as whole persons) was interpreted primarily as a means of countering the shortcomings of prevalent English teaching methods in Chinese middle schools. Despite increasing awareness of the active role of learners, Chinese English teachers were still more comfortable with traditional teaching methods. Their students referred to their lessons as systematic and logical. The notion of teachers as facilitators took central position in Western English teachers’ articulations; indeed, along with the precepts viewing students as whole persons and procedural teaching of the textbook, it dominated their discussions about English language pedagogy, whereas in local teachers’ perceptions of English education, it is marginal. It seems that the primary function of Western teachers’ classes is to guide and assist students, to make the learning process productive and to develop students’ independent learning skills. To perform their role as facilitators, Western teachers consider the individual characteristics of learners, and organise and promote interactive classroom exercises, such as vocabulary learning activities, group work, presentations, and songs. However, because of students’ misinterpretations of such classroom activities, these lessons were viewed as contributing little substantial improvement in their English language skills. Nevertheless, most students enjoyed Western English teachers’ relaxing and cheerful teaching styles. The concept of lǎo shī shì cù jìn zhě, 老师是促进者 (teachers as facilitators) was peripheral in Chinese English teachers’ conversations because the teachers themselves are doubtful about its efficacy in teaching English. Chinese teachers saw the incorporation of classroom activities as the main expression of teachers as facilitators. However, these classroom activities function merely as add-ons to the procedural delivery of linguistic items. This point is further evidenced in Chinese teachers’ scepticism over the value of interactive classroom activities; they were concerned that students might not learn much through these activities, and that the teachers’ lack of conviction might also be communicated to students. Hence, local English teachers might not take up, might even dismiss their role as facilitators. Therefore, the facilitative role of teachers was primarily understood by Chinese English teachers as making lessons appear more interactive and lively. These exercises were called “buzzing class activities”. Chinese teachers’ perceptions of such activities caused students to have ambivalent feelings about them: on the one hand, they had

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positive expectations of a more lively class atmosphere but, on the other, they were sceptical of the purpose and effectiveness of the activities. In relation to “teaching of the textbooks”, foreign English teachers talked about it as peripheral, whereas local English teachers regard it as central. I saw this in the stark contrast in the amount of time each group spent elaborating this point. Descriptions of how the textbook is taught took up most of the local English teachers’ conversations, while only one foreign teacher (Alice) explicitly described the procedural teaching of the textbook in discussions about her teaching philosophy. For Western English teachers, “teaching of the textbook” is predominantly concerned with developing students’ English writing and speaking skills by engaging them in various class activities. Hence, it was highly connected to conceptions of learners as whole persons and teachers as facilitators and spoken about with reference to them. Western English teachers did not regard teaching of the textbook as an important principle in teaching English. More importantly, it did not include much teaching of tangible knowledge from the textbook; rather it was enacted largely by asking students to do the relevant class activities designed to develop their English speaking and writing skills. However, students felt that in Western teachers’ classes, they were not taught enough to enhance their skills in English communication and thus they described them as ineffective. The centrality of the concept of jiāo kè bě, 教课本 (teaching of the textbook) in Chinese English teachers’ understandings of English language learning, means that their lessons focus on the systematic transmission of linguistic items contained in the textbook. The textbook is considered the vehicle to language knowledge. This aligns with Chinese students’ normative understandings of effective English language pedagogy and gives them a sense of achievement. This analysis shows how students’ learning experiences in the Qunxi program were mediated and negotiated through their teachers’ perceptions of English language education. Here, I have described the participant students as negotiating both the teachers’ approaches and the knowledge content of the lesson. By emphasising the dynamics between students and particular others (teachers, teaching methods and lesson content) in the classrooms, we arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Chinese students as advocated in “small culture” approach and shift away from homogenising them as occurs in “large culture” studies. The teachers’ conceptions of English language pedagogy (in Mandarin and English) have been revealed as both shared and differentiated in significant respects. However, due to the different social and cultural discourses in which these groups of teachers were embedded (Chinese teachers within a local Chinese context in which traditional grammar–translation teaching methods persist, Western teachers in a context where CLT is the norm), these concepts have different nuances. Similar concepts differently nuanced in the two languages highlight the socially and culturally mediated nature of meaning, as expounded in the discussion of Hall’s representation theory (cultural relativism) in Sect. 3.1. The research findings in relation to the two groups of English teachers in the Qunxi program contribute to the literature on NS and NNS English teachers in a novel way. Scholars have challenged the dichotomy of NS and NNS English

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teachers from both linguistic and sociocultural perspectives (see Moussu & Llurda, 2008) as well as the conceptual legitimacy of the native/non-native binary (see Selvi, 2014) and interpretations of the professional strengths and weaknesses of NS and NNS teachers (see Ma, 2009, 2012; Moussu, 2006). My findings confirm that Chinese and Western teachers’ conceptions of English language education are both shared and differentiated at the same time in most significant respects. The nuances embodied in these similar/dissimilar conceptions provide a justification and a methodological approach for researchers to further question the dichotomising of NS and NNS English teachers.

7.2.2  S  tudents’ Negotiations of English Learning in the Qunxi Program The students’ perceptions and negotiations of English teachers and their teaching methods were found to be conceived and managed within constructs of the East and the West, mediated by the contingent systemic and normative conditions of local contexts. The complexity of perception and negotiation experienced by participant Chinese students is associated with disjunctive understandings of the aims of education, language and language skills acquisition, “effective” English language pedagogy, “good” English writing and “good” foreign English teachers. These disjuncts were revealed in students’ use of Chinese words and metaphors when comparing foreign English teachers’ pedagogical practices with those of Chinese English teachers. Students’ understandings of education per se, framed by an exam-oriented system, affect their perceptions of their English learning experiences. For the students who participated in this study, the aim of education is to get good scores in their exams, and classes delivered by foreign English teachers disturbed this normative understanding. Western English teachers were imagined as cheerful, interesting and humorous, but not suitable for teaching serious lessons or preparing students for exams. Given the primacy of students’ concern about marks and exams, they felt that the enhancement of personal qualities developed through foreign teachers’ lessons—such as improved confidence and better intercultural communication skills— were of limited value. Understandings of language and English skills acquisition, particularly how English speaking and writing skills can be improved, play a central role in students’ negotiation and construction of their English teachers’ language pedagogy. The students’ perceptions of these two language skills were shaped by how language and language learning are understood in the local context. Chinese students perceive the learning of language as the accumulation of discrete linguistic items. They consider the development of English communicative skills (speaking and writing) as dependent chiefly on the amount of linguistic knowledge acquired. Western English teachers’ speaking and writing courses focus on language skills acquisition, and

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were hence seen by the Chinese learners as omitting key procedures in English language learning; they were thus construed as ineffective. Evidently, students’ understandings of language learning and skills acquisition were at odds with tenets of the communicative language teaching method applied widely by Western teachers. In CLT, language is not seen merely as a bundle of grammatical structures and vocabulary items; CLT emphasises its functional and communicative meaning in interaction and communication. In this schema, English competency is acquired through using language communicatively (Savignon, 2002). Stanley (2013) found such mismatches between Chinese students’ and Western English teachers’ views of language learning in his research; he found that Chinese learners see the development of additional language skills as consisting of accumulating knowledge of sufficient tangible linguistic items before they can be used in communicative activities. The negotiation between Chinese and Western conceptions of effective English language pedagogy influenced students’ everyday English learning experiences in the program under study. The class activities that Western teachers see as effective for English language learning were conceptualised in Chinese by participant students as wán, 玩 (play) and méi luó jí, 没逻辑 (no logic). In addition, other TESOL concepts (in Chinese), such as shí zhì xìng de zhī shi, 实质性的知识 (substantive knowledge), yīng yǔ kè táng luó jí,英语课堂逻辑 (logic of English lessons), zhēn zhèng de xué, 真正的学 (real learning), fēi zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 非正式的英语 课 (informal English course), zhèng shì de yīng yǔ kè, 正式的英语课 (formal English course) and huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences), were used to elaborate on localised understandings of English language pedagogy. The Chinese students’ conceptual constructions of English language pedagogy diverged from Western theorisations exemplified in CLT, which echoes the post-method pedagogy in TESOL research (Canagarajah, 2005; Kumaravadivelu, 2001; Lin, 2013). The local theorisation of English language pedagogy is mediated by the situated sociocultural and educational discourses and ensuing understandings of language and language skills acquisition. Such conceptual divergence means that Western English teachers fail to address some of the core elements of English teaching as Chinese students understand it. Chinese students see writing as perhaps the most important English skill, because of its crucial role in examinations (see Cheng, 2008; Li, 2014). Their views on “good” English writing, therefore, affect their learning experiences with Western English teachers. The students’ perceptions of “good” English writing conflicted with foreign teachers’ instructions. To students, “good” English writing skills were primarily manifested in the use of sophisticated language. However, foreign English teachers’ writing lessons are intended to teach students the genre of academic essay writing, which has little to do with sophisticated language per se. Western English teachers instruct students about grammar, organisation, content, and the conventions of academic writing. Given the “easy” nature of this knowledge, perceived as worthless by many of the students, these writing lessons were seen as being of little value for the improvement of English writing skills. Students’ perceptions of “good” foreign teachers played an important part in their perceptions of foreign English teachers’ professional practices. According to

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students, good foreign teachers should display the characteristics of Western Others and teach “casual” English speaking courses rather than the “formal” writing courses. In other words, they were expected to adopt the casual teaching styles that were assumed to be linked to their cultural identities (Woodward, 1997). This phenomenon was identified in Stanley’s (2010, 2013) study, conducted from Western English teachers’ perspectives; Stanley argues that the primary purpose of foreign teachers is to perform the expected “fun foreigners” role and entertain students. Despite the fact that my student participants expected Western teachers to demonstrate the imagined personalities, I also found that Chinese students’ expectations included genuine improvements in English communicative skills through a more interactive class atmosphere rather than just a “fun” and “entertaining” one, as Stanley asserts. What the students expected from Western teachers’ classes was the casual Western teaching styles that were believed to enhance their English speaking skills.

7.2.3  T  he Underlying Discourses of Students’ Learning Experiences According to Hall’s (1997a, 1997b, 1997c) discursive approach to representation, people’s everyday lives are constructed and mediated through competing discourses. I argue that the Chinese students’ negotiations of their English learning experiences, discussed in this book, were embedded in three discourses: a discourse of English education, a discourse of English writing skills and an Occidentalist discourse. First, the students’ knowledge of English education is produced and embedded in specific sociocultural and educational contexts in China. Due to the backwash effect of China’s English exams, they conceptualised English education as an orderly, sequential and systematic transmission of English linguistic items. English teachers were perceived primarily as knowledge transmitters who should deliver the contents of the textbook in a systematic and efficient manner; the learners were regarded as recipients of knowledge. These statements form the discourse of English education within which the students talked about their teachers’ pedagogical practices. The Chinese English teachers’ teaching practices conformed to the norms and conditions of this discourse and thus their lessons were defined as zhèng cháng de yīng yǔ kè, 正常的英语课 (normal classes). In contrast, Western English teachers’ classes were not congruent with the way English language pedagogy was thought about and practised in local contexts and so were viewed as deviant, and conceptualised as wán, 玩 (play) and méi luó jí, 没逻辑 (no logic). Second, an Occidentalist discourse underpinned students’ misinterpretations of Western English teachers, whose cultural identity was fixed as Other. Foreign English teachers were often assumed to have personal and professional attributes

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that differed from those of Chinese English teachers: casual and lively versus formal and conservative. They were conceived as a homogenous group possessing the characteristics of Western Others. The way they were thought and spoken of was indicative of their being imagined through an Occidentalist discourse. Within this discourse, Western English teachers were not regarded as “proper” teachers or educators, because the strengths of their pedagogical practices were seen as related to their cultural identity rather than their professional attributes. (Conversely, Chinese English teachers were perceived as culturally ill-equipped to use interactive teaching methods.) Moreover, the students’ understandings of English teachers conflicted with institutional arrangements: foreign teachers were allocated to teach the formal English writing course, and class hours for the so-called casual English speaking course were limited. Third, the students’ knowledge about good English writing skills were framed and mediated by the conditions of English education in China. To address the problems of English exams, Chinese senior middle students are often encouraged to memorise and use huáng jīn jù, 黄金句 (golden sentences) in writing exercises. This flowery, formulaic, and showy “sophisticated” style at sentence level is seen as good writing. These features form the discourse of English writing skills through which the students discussed foreign teachers’ academic writing lessons. Lacking this emphasis on golden sentences, their lessons were perceived as being of little value and thus described as play. Representation theory with a multilingual lens offers a fresh theoretical perspective for intercultural education research because it allows researchers to explore intercultural phenomena from multiple angles. This was the intention of my study. My analysis of how participants represent their experiences sheds light on situated discourses and how their norms play out in people’s intercultural learning experiences. By examining normative thinking in different domains, I considered students’ intercultural learning experiences in a holistic way that few researchers have attempted. In extant literature, Chinese students in intercultural contexts have often been researched in the framework of a “large culture approach” (see Hu, 2002; Rao, 2006; Parris-kidd & Barnett, 2011). As an example, students’ responses to Western pedagogies have been researched from cultural, pedagogical and educational perspectives, and the ensuing disparities and miscommunications between Chinese learners and Western teachers have been revealed (see Heffernan et al., 2010; Li, 1999; Shi, 2009). My study, by revealing Chinese students’ multi-layered interpretations of foreign English teachers’ lessons, brings new perspectives to the literature on Western English teachers teaching in China. More important, my study shows the complexity with which participant students experienced intercultural learning in a local context.

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7.3  M  oving Beyond the China/West Dichotomy in Theory and Knowledge Construction Representation theory with a multilingual perspective offers a new framework for exploring how theory and knowledge are constructed in languages other than English. First, representation theory elaborates on how people’s everyday lives are implicated in the creation of shared conceptual and linguistic systems (language and culture) within a community and explains how meanings of the world are constructed through the lenses of language and culture. It facilitates further exploration of how identity is negotiated as a multidimensional and reflective construct defining and shaping normativity and difference. Representation theory enables researchers to focus on people’s lived experiences and investigate how their perceptions of world are mediated by dynamic constructs of language, discourse and identity. Second, post-monolingual research methodology, as Singh (2015) argues, is concerned with how the concepts, metaphors, and modes of thinking embodied in languages other than English can be incorporated into theory and knowledge construction in this globalising world. It proposes that we recognise the values of intellectual resources from other linguistic and cultural communities in the process of knowledge theorising. Nonetheless, a post-monolingual research method does not provide a theoretical basis for analysing how the concepts, metaphors or mode of thinking in other languages are brought into being by local practices and activities. Representation theory, by foregrounding the interdependent relationship between language and discourse in meaning production, offers a necessary theoretical tool for analysing how concepts from other languages are produced in  local contexts. In an increasingly multilingual world, this theoretical framework provides an innovative way to make use of diverse linguistic and cultural resources for theorising social reality. For example, it could be used to interrogate the relationships between Chinese and Western conceptions (Biggs, 1987; Marton et al., 1993; Ryan, 2010). Western conceptions expressed in the medium of English are born of Western social practices and thus are not necessarily useful in Chinese contexts. The specific features of Chinese contexts give birth to conceptions that may not make sense in a different context. Hence, researchers need to engage with the local discourses and practices in knowledge and theory construction, rather than hold on to and perpetuate the East–West dichotomy.

7.4  Significance and Policy Implications In the larger research context, understandings of Chinese university students’ learning experiences in transnational higher education programs in China are important for two reasons. First, the COVID-19 pandemic is posing new challenges for the internationalisation of higher education: we need to find novel ways for international collaboration, or ways that we can bring diverse teachers and curricula to

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home institutions without crossing national borders. Now, more than ever, we should be investigating the foundational practices and mechanisms of the internationalisation of education in  local settings. My research findings contribute to a better understanding of localisation of education against the background of the internationalisation of higher education. Second, research into Chinese learners’ intercultural learning experiences has primarily been done in highly developed Anglophone countries, and thus acculturation has been the dominant research paradigm. An enhanced understanding of how Chinese students negotiate and construct intercultural learning experiences in their local contexts, through the lens of language and culture, is a timely contribution. Improved understanding of Chinese students can also inform policy and several policy implications arise from the research findings. First, curriculum designers in Sino-Australian transnational programs should understand that students are ambivalent about Western teachers’ lessons. They find their relaxed and cheerful teaching styles agreeable, but they do not like the feeling that they are losing sight of the purposes of the English courses. Therefore, curriculum designers should work towards enabling teachers and students to have a better understanding of the pedagogical nuances at work within the classroom, so that both parties can participate more effectively in the program. Specifically, students in the program should understand that they are not engaging simply with the content of the lesson, but with different ways of educational thinking. With an enhanced understanding of such nuances, students may engage better with the program. For instance, the ways that Chinese students perceive Chinese and Western English teachers should be taken into consideration in institutional arrangements. Second, institutions should take steps to eliminate the binary divides inherent in the establishment of the roles of Chinese and Western English teachers. Mechanisms for regular communication between Chinese and Western English teachers could be created to foster mutual understanding. Attending Chinese English teachers’ lessons could help foreign teachers to understand better how English teaching and learning is usually carried out in the larger educational context within which they work. Such understandings would enhance their awareness of local educational approaches. Conversely, attending Western English teachers’ lessons would enable Chinese English teachers to catch a glimpse of what the TESOL theory and knowledge, which they are keen to learn, look like in action, and help to demystify their conceptualisations of Western theories. To facilitate further knowledge exchange, regular research seminars could be organised so that interested English teachers can discuss their insights into English teaching and learning in the transnational educational context in China. In this way, an important transnational research site, with great potential for generating internationalised curriculum and pedagogy, could be established. As some researchers (Leask, 2004; Henderson & Pearce, 2011) have argued, the task of internationalising the curriculum and pedagogy lies in the hands of engaged teachers and educators.

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7.5  Towards a More Profound View My journey exploring Chinese university students’ experiences in Sino-Australian programs in China taught me how the social world is interpreted differently by people from diverse social and cultural contexts; it also allowed me to see how alternate perceptions of the world can be embodied differently in different languages. Conceptualisations conveyed through different languages have great potential to augment our understandings of social realities, and to counter polarised cultural viewpoints in this globalised world. Moreover, the contemporary world is increasingly fluid, and culture is not static, so it is necessary to refresh our perceptions of language and culture continually. The internationalisation of education, an important site of globalisation, entails ever more contact between teachers and students from different linguistic and cultural communities. Negotiating cultural interaction successfully requires understanding perceptions and ideas as represented in different languages. It is therefore necessary to be conscious of differences in ideologies and beliefs born from local sociocultural contexts as they are encountered. The metaphor that makes up part of the heading of this final chapter, “making biscuits or milkshakes”, suggests that students construct Western English teachers as playful Others adept at using childlike teaching methods. In-depth analysis of the use of these Chinese terms in students’ conversations has given us a deeper understanding of the complexities of Chinese students’ learning that are negotiated within constructs of identity, language and discourse. The approach I used to analyse Chinese students’ intercultural learning experiences directed me into a research domain within which people and things are examined in a highly nuanced manner. Such an approach may help to dissolve the existing static, exclusive and homogenous binaries of learners, teachers and teaching methods. The heterogeneities and specificities of people, social groups and organisations can then be considered in more depth and also become more respected in this increasingly interconnected world.

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