Through analysis of student and teacher experiences, the presentation reveals the impacts recent nationalist policies have had on ELT in China, and we point to pedagogical interventions that balance internationalist and nationalist desires in China, a binary that many language educators and policy makers find themselves in across the globe.
In recent years, officials in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have focused on numerous overseas projects and alliances, from the Belt and Road Initiative to the opening of military bases and development projects around the world. At the same time, recent education policies have moved away from internationalization and foreign languages and focused on maintaining traditional Chinese values and promoting languages spoken in China. In this context of resurgent nationalism in China, this presentation analyzes the following questions: 1) how has the teaching of foreign languages, particularly English, changed in recent years at Chinese universities?; and 2) how might the field of applied linguistics reaffirm a commitment to multilingualism in an era of increasing nationalism and isolationism? Specifically, the presentation offers a brief history of English language teaching (ELT) in China, focusing on discussions among scholars in the 1990s and early 2000s about the role of English in the internationalization of Chinese universities (Bolton, 2003; Feng, 2011). Next, we examine changes in ELT policies through analysis of interviews with instructors and students at a coastal university in southern China named here China Southern University (CSU). CSU was founded as part of the economic reforms in the 1980s in China, and throughout the 1990s and 2000s, it focused on English learning in an effort to connect with international networks of scholars and teachers. More recently, however, the university has scaled back its English teaching programs and internationalization plans, including reducing the number of foreign instructors. Through analysis of student and teacher experiences, the presentation reveals the range of impacts that recent nationalist policies have had on ELT in China, and we point to pedagogical interventions that seek to balance internationalist and nationalist desires in China, a binary that many language educators and policy makers find themselves in across the globe.
