A New Representation of Chinese Learners

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xviii

   PDF

2. Is This Your Idea of English Teaching?

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 1-31

3. Setting the Scene: The Qunxi Program

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 33-45

4. Headless Flies

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 47-71

5. Foreign Friends

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 73-93

6. Precious Golden Sentences

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 95-106

7. Confined Lively Butterflies

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 107-124

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

   • Yingmei Luo

   Pages 125-138

This book examines Chinese tertiary students' experiences of learning English in Sino-Australian programs in China. Using an institutional ethnography, the book examines one well-established Sino-Australian program based at a Chinese university. The book explores the ways that participant students used the Chinese words, tropes and their meanings to describe their English learning experiences with both local Chinese and foreign English teachers. This book introduces an innovative theoretical framework, “representation theory with a multilingual perspective”, to analyse how Chinese students' everyday experiences are constructed and mediated through language, discourse and identity. This framework also highlights graphic examples of how concepts are created in both Chinese and English, and thus serves as a powerful tool for deconstructing dichotomies between China and the West. The aim of this book is, then, two-fold: to show how a novel theoretical lens can help us to developmore nuanced understandings of Chinese students, and to propose a new methodological and theoretical framework through which one can challenge the monolingual subjectivity and parochial views of both Chinese and Western conceptions.

• Chinese learners learning English
• Chinese students' lived experiences in learning English
• Chinese learners and English learning experiences
• transnational higher education
• representation theory
• multilingual awareness
• English language pedagogy
• discourse analysis of chinese learners
• multilingual production of knowledge
• multicultural production of knowledge
• learning English in Sino-Australian programs
• Sino-Australian programs in China
• TESOL and Chinese learners

​"This book powerfully positions Chinese learners of English at the crisscross of multilingual, transcultural, and inter-pedagogic zones. Contextualised in a well-established Sino-Australian Transnational Higher Education program, Luo’s ethnographic analysis of rich, triangulated data sources prods and probes the collusions and collisions between the local and the Other(ed), the representation and reflexivity of Chinese learners, and the attractions and distractions of the East-West penetrations. Despite the current disruptions and uncertainties brought about by the global pandemic, Luo’s book sustains its value in transborder context of language learning and teaching." — Guanglun Michael Mu, Principal Research Fellow & Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

"Luo complicates current understandings of Chinese learners of English in diverse multilingual, intercultural, and transnational contexts. Her innovative integration of representation theory with post-monolingual research methodologies allows her to grapple with both the value and violence of Western TESOL pedagogies in globalised higher education programs. In particular, Luo’s book offers a novel theoretical lens, through which researchers situated in various sociocultural and educational contexts are able to construct and validate their own educational concepts and knowledge." Luo complicates current understandings of Chinese learners of English in diverse multilingual, intercultural, and transnational contexts. Her innovative integration of representation theory with post-monolingual research methodologies allows her to grapple with both the value and violence of Western TESOL pedagogies in globalised higher education programs. In particular, Luo’s book offers a novel theoretical lens, through which researchers situated in various sociocultural and educational contexts are able to construct and validate their own educational concepts and knowledge." — Angel M. Y. Lin, Professor & Canada Research Chair in Plurilingual and Intercultural Education, Simon Fraser University  

• School of International Education, Henan University, Kaifeng, China

  Yingmei Luo

Dr Luo Yingmei is interested in analysing how people’s experiences are framed and mediated within local sociocultural, educational and institutional contexts. She has adopted and adapted a theoretical framework that allows her to explore the intricate relationship between language, culture and people’s perceptions of the world. This framework enables her to see how alternate perceptions of the world can be embodied differently in different languages. Conceptualisations that are conveyed through different languages have great potential to augment current understandings of social realities, and to counter polarised cultural viewpoints in this globalised world. Taking a socially-oriented approach to researching teachers, learners and pedagogy, she is passionate about questioning the dominance of Western conceptions and theories in non-Western communities. This framework is particularly useful to examine the complexity of social realities in multicultural and multilingual contexts.

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