Abstract Summary
Using a six-month ethnographic design, this study examines the language ideologies among study abroad students admitted in an English-taught degree program in China. It reveals how the divergent language ideologies impact and are shaped by their investment of learning a second language in the multilingual, multinational space.
Abstract :
As China’s signature policy to expand its global influence, the Belt and Road initiative incorporates plans to drastically increase the number of international students from Asia, Europe, and Africa. Despite many students plan to pursue a career in China, a growing trend in Chinese higher education institutes is to offer programs taught exclusively in English. The motivation is perhaps due to the status of English as a global language par excellence (Kubota, 2016), yet it also implies that the expansion of the Chinese language’s influence depends on English. However, such an ideological assumption is subject to contestation and negotiation in these students’ everyday life.
Given that language ideologies are the mediating links between the micro-interaction and macro political-economic considerations of power (Woolard & Schieffelin, 1994), this study focuses on the divergent ideologies (non-)negotiated between the students and the institute and how the processes impact their access and investment of learning an additional language in this multilingual, multinational space.
Data came from a six-month ethnographic project involving an entire cohort (n=37) from an English-medium program in a university in China, which includes 90-hour-audio-recorded semi-structured interviews, field notes from the classroom (378 class-hours) and participant observation, and students’ and institutional artifacts.
Findings reveal that the power dynamics between languages as well as ideologies embedded in this student-called “Foreign Bubble” environment foreground the contradictions of English dominance and students’ desire to learning Chinese. The paradoxical ideologies of equivalenting these international students as “native” English speakers and assuming their consensus on the importance of Chinese in living in China also conflict with the students’ actual language use situation. The study highlights the role of language ideologies in language learning and provides a holistic understanding of students’ language use in a non-language-oriented study abroad context.
