In the mainstream school like Kingsford, the teaching and learning of Chinese culture is on the school curriculum. Some after class activities such as Tai Chi, Kong Fu, Chinese dancing and painting are provided for students to experience ‘Chinese culture’. The ‘Chinese culture’
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in this context is recognized as a national and ethnic related ‘large culture’. The school is experienced in hosting big national events which are related to promoting Chinese language and culture, and some Chinese cultural activities are prepared as performances for invited guests. For example, it was recorded in my fieldnotes that the school used to host a national mandarin language competition, and a lot of participant teams came from all around the country. During that time, a group of staff and students prepared some performances such as Chinese dancing, Chinese singing and Tai Chi for their guests. The following extract is drawn from the fieldnotes I took when I visited the school for the first time. It was the autumn of 2010, I attended the three day training conference organised by Hanban. In order to provide a real environment of how Mandarin had been taught and learned in the mainstream school in the UK, the administrator brought all the participants to this school to observe. My first impressions of this school are recorded in the following set of fieldnotes.
Extract: Observational fieldnotes, Context C, 2010-10-21
The school has a big front courtyard, the teaching building is new and grand. All students are wearing black uniforms, two boys were standing beside door to open the door for us, and greet us in Chinese with warm smiles on their
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faces. There are some Chinese style decorations hanging on the wall in the lobby, such as Chinese paintings, Chinese lanterns and students’ calligraphy work. In addition, there are some HSBC posters standing at the side of the lobby, showing information about the bank and its relationship with China.
The extract shows how the school decorated their lobby from a visitor’s eyes. This extract shows the cultural elements of this school by presenting how the school decorated its lobby and how they distinguished themselves as a special language school, which has a particular interest in teaching and learning Chinese language and culture. The development of students’ cultural component is considered as an important factor in language education (Kramch, 1993). In the field of foreign language education, the cultural component generally means the understanding of target culture or large culture, such as knowledge of geography, history, literature and arts of related nations. The cultural decorations along with some Chinese culture activities such as Tai Chi and calligraphy together serve to provide a learning environment for students to learn Chinese language and culture in this cultural arena.
In addition, this extract also shows an aspect of cultural universe, which may influence the Chinese language teaching and learning in this school. According to Pennycook (2001), the development of a language and the culture it conveys has strong connections with the power and politics of related nations. This extract also shows how the political and economic elements from society influence foreign language education in this school. The connection between this school and the Hanban, or more specifically, with China are reflected in some details and the existence of the HSBC poster in the school. It is acknowledged that HSBC has a close relationship with China, and they have sponsored many events which relate to the promotion of Chinese language teaching and learning organised by Hanban or the British Council. For example, the HSBC Global Education Programme and the British Council worked together to support the HSBC/British Council Mandarin Chinese Speaking
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Competition in 2012, which it argued was ‘an excellent opportunity to give secondary schools and students the chance to test their Mandarin Chinese speaking skills in front of an audience of a panel of illustrious judges and schools from all over the UK’ (British Council, 2012).
Influenced by the economic and political development of China, the status of teaching and learning Mandarin is changing. The Chinese government is trying to establish governmental agencies all around the world to promote Chinese language and culture. Apart from teaching Chinese language and culture to their own students, the Confucius classroom in this school takes the responsibility to provide courses for other schools or organisations in that region. Culture in this context refers to the ‘large culture’, which has a strong connection with related nations (Holliday, 1999). It seems that students enjoy these activities and their learning benefits from these practices. However, whether these cultural practices are actually helpful for students when they are learning in the classroom requires further investigation. The following extract is from the e-mail interview of Alex, the teacher of a class I visited who had just been promoted to the position of head of the language department in 2011. In his e-mail, Alex defined culture as ‘people’s practices’, and he believed that culture is ‘very unstable and cannot be defined’. His understanding of the relationship between culture and language teaching will be shown in the following extract.
Extract 6.8: Interview, the teacher and director of the language department, Context C. WL: What is your perspective of the relationship between culture and language teaching? Do you teach culture in your class? If you do, how? Is that helpful for students’ learning?
Alex: Language is embedded in a cultural context. All parts of life are. My best lessons will have the language embedded in a cultural context. If it doesn’t, the pupils find it hard to grasp where the points are coming from. It helps them to get the ‘feel’ for the language if I embed the language in a cultural context
WL: What elements of the curriculum are important to you as a teacher? Alex: As a teacher, for the exams, the speaking and the writing are
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crucial as these form 60% of their final grade. But as a language learner myself I prefer to focus on the cultural elements. However, this doesn’t get them through the exams!
In this extract, Alex considered cultural context as an important element for students to learn a foreign language, because it provided students with opportunities to get the ‘feeling’ of the language. ‘Feeling’ in this context should be understood as knowledge of the background information of the target language. However, when I asked him about the most important element of the curriculum, Alex’s answer provided a dilemma. On the one hand, he considered culture as a significant element in the process of learning from a language learner’s perspective. On the other hand, he considered that focusing on cultural learning will not get these students through their exam, because 60% of their exam results are based on speaking and writing. In other words, linguistic practices remained as the priority from a teacher’s perspective. Therefore, how to embed cultural elements in classroom pedagogy and linguistic practices should be studied based on classroom activities. According to Holliday (1999), the study of ‘small culture’, which allows teacher and students to bring their own experiences into the classroom and to contribute to linguistic practices, should be the focus of the cultural study. Although national identity is powerful, it works ‘not in institutional practices but in an individual’s speech style, behaviours, values and communicative preferences’ (Piller, 2011: 69). The following extract is an episode from one transcription of classroom observation. Alex is the teacher and the lesson is about travelling and means of transportation. They were practising how to use some Chinese frequency words to make a sentence, and this is an important linguistic point in the GCSE.
Extract: Classroom recordings, Context C, 22/06/2011
A: Ok any examples? Anybody want to demonstrate what they’ve
achieved … Ok, cause you know the vocabulary items. But really, you need to show that you can operate with the sentence … Any examples? How about
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this one? 我每天走路 <I walk everyday>. How about this one, S1, 我常常坐 地铁 <I often take the underground >.
S1: I often take the underground. T: Ok, Nathan, 你说吧 <you say it>. Nathan: 我很少走路 <I rarely walk>.
A: Lazy boy. Take the number 11 bus. Get that? 2 legs. Number 11.
Vivienne, that's one of my favourite jokes during my time in China. 十一路 <Route 11>.Where did you come from in China?
WL: Guangxi province.
A: And in Guangxi, do you talk about the number 11 bus or walking? Student 2: … (words missing, 46:34)
A: How do you say it? Do you say 十一路 <Route 11>? WL: 十一路公车 <Public bus 11>
A: I remember asking my Chinese friends once “How are we going to get there?” And they were like ‘我们坐十一路’ <We will take bus 11>. And then we just carried on walking... I asked ‘Where is the bus stop?’ … We just carried on walking, walking. Anyway, that was a funny joke.
The extract started by the teacher giving instructions and providing examples of how to use frequency words in the textbook. After some practice, Nathan gave an example in Chinese that he rarely walks. His answer leads to a well-known joke from his teacher about ‘the Number 11 bus’. The joke uses ‘number 11 bus’ and refers to going somewhere on foot, and will normally be a long walk. Alex heard this joke when he was studying in China. I was sitting at the back of the classroom, the teacher called my name and asked me if I knew about this joke. In this situation, I participated in the conversation as a researcher and a native Chinese speaker from China who can provide supporting evidence and became part of the intercultural communication in this cultural arena. According to Piller (2011: 69), ‘cultural and communicative styles and values have become diluted and have acquired a mix-and- match flavor as more and more people travel and migrate, and mediated cultural flows criss– cross the globe’.
In this extract, the teacher brought his own experience into the classroom, and he also involved me as a cultural resource to support his joke. The joke Alex brought into the
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classroom not only provided students with an example of the linguistic pattern they were practising, but also offered them an opportunity to understand the exact meaning of “number 11 bus” in Chinese culture. This joke became a cultural marker which signified a cultural reality and contributed to the construction of small culture in this classroom. My fieldnotes recorded that the students enjoyed this joke, some children were whispering about telling this joke to other friends.This extract shows that the joke and the conversation between participants formulated a particular ‘small culture’ in this particular environment. The negotiation of this ‘small culture’ should be encouraged because it brings intercultural communication to the level of linguistic practice (Piller, 2011).
4.5 Conclusion
This chapter provides some examples related to culture and intercultural communication in the multilingual classroom across the three educational contexts of my study. It is believed that culture and language shape, and are shaped by. each other while participants are involved in the classroom interaction. The term ‘small culture’ (Holliday, 1999) plays an important role from a methodological perspective, since it offers a tool to study culture across three contexts based on the activities emerging on the ground. In the context of the Chinese complementary school, parents, teachers and students need to negotiate an understanding of culture with more tolerance, which allows young people to understand culture from their own perspective. In the community centre class and the secondary school where students are learning Chinese as a foreign language, intercultural communication needs to be specified in the classroom activities to minimise the misunderstandings of teaching and learning. However, as Piller (2011: 69) argues, people’s ‘speech styles, behaviours, values and communicative preference which are the locus of intercultural communication advice are
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increasingly decoupled from the nation’ in this globalised and transnational word. Cultural studies and intercultural communication in the classroom are influenced by the economic and political elements of society. According to Piller (2011: 144), intercultural communication is ‘characterized by multilingual practices, is embedded in beliefs about language, and place in the political economy of language’. In these circumstances, language and culture are not tied to any particular nation or ethnicity. In fact, language diversity and cultural harmony should be considered as part of the pedagogical goal.
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Chapter Five: Data Analysis II
Identities of Teachers and Students in Multilingual Classrooms
5.1 Introduction
Research focusing on analysing people’s identities becomes increasingly important in this fast-changing and interconnected globalised world. Taylor (1992: 25) interprets the term identity to mean a ‘person’s understanding of who they are’, and understandings are continuously being shaped through the social contexts in which they are embedded. As Greer
argues, these social contexts are interactional contexts: ‘By communicating with those around them, people are able to foreground and
background identity through interactional practices associated with membership categories. Likewise, those with whom they interact have a role to play in casting them into a certain identity category, which may be subsequently accepted or challenged, again through the details of the talk itself.’
(Greer， 2007: 119)
The membership categories which I will investigate across the three settings comprise the social categories of ‘teachers’, ‘students’ and ‘researcher’. In addition, other ideological categories such as national identities, heritage identities and gender will be discussed along with these social identities to explore the process of participants’ identity development. In the classroom, interactional discourse is one of the key mediums through which students and teachers’ identities are constructed. This chapter will discuss teachers’ and students’ identities across three educational settings by drawing on discursive data from these environments. Researcher’s fieldnotes, interview transcripts and classroom recordings will be the main
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resources of analysis, and several analytical points will be made from both ‘emic’ and ‘etic’ perspectives.See chapter three for the full discussion (Harris, 1976: 331).
This chapter will be divided into two sections based on the identity categories suggested by Blackledge and Pavlenko (2003). Section one will focus on imposed identities of teachers and students. According to Blackledge and Pavlenko (2003:21), imposed (or non - negotiable) identities are ‘the ones that individuals cannot resist or contest at a particular point in time’. For example, some participants from the complementary school in my study, considered English as their first language. However, because their parents viewed them as Chinese, they needed to go to school every Saturday afternoon to learn Chinese, because this was constructed as their mother tongue. A second identity position introduced by Blackledge and Pavlenko (2003:21) is negotiated identities, which refer to ‘all identity options which can be – and are – contested and resisted by particular individuals and groups’.
The negotiated identities reflect the multiple and ‘on-going’ character involved in the various processes of individual identity development. Examples will be outlined and analysed to indicate how these three types of identities has been understood and constructed in my study.