Multilingualism and higher education in Greater China

ABSTRACT

There have been widespread concerns over the decline of modern languages and waning interest in learning languages other than English (LOTEs) around the world, thought to be partly due to recent political events including Brexit and Trump’s aggressive isolationism in the United States. By contrast, governments in Greater China have energetically renewed their investment in promoting LOTE education, driven by globalisation initiatives such as Mainland China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative and Taiwan’s ‘New Southbound Policy’. Thus, it remains pertinent to explore the policies and practices of multilingual education expansion in this region, as the success or failure of the globalisation initiatives may have profound consequences for the prospects of multilingual and multicultural development at universities in the Greater China region and perhaps around the world. This special issue presents empirical studies in which the authors, as insiders engaged in the new wave of language policy shifts, offer diverse perspectives on issues including foreign language curricula, learners’ motivational identities and teachers’ professional development. We contend that to sustain the increase in multilingual education, the tensions between global English and LOTEs, between individual identity and contextual variation, and between instrumental orientation and translanguaging/transcultural values of language learning need to be addressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Multilingual education
• higher education
• Greater China

Introduction

On 23 February 2017 the Times Higher Education published an article entitled ‘Do we need modern language graduates in a globalized world?’ The six authors, all applied linguists and modern language experts from the United Kingdom, the United States, Denmark and Australia, offered their perspectives on the ‘decline’ of modern foreign language learning in the current populist climate and in the age of the global spread of English. The perceived decline is evidenced by facts such as that the number of UK school students taking at least one modern language to age 16 decreased from 55% in 1995 to 22% in 2013, and the number of Danish students who left secondary school with three modern languages plummeted from 40% in 2000 to only 4% in 2016 (Kelly et al., 2017; also see Tinsley 2018). These concerns about the decline of modern languages reflect a tension caused by the rise of global English, which occupies a key position in school curricula around the world (Graddol 2006) combined with a waning interest in learning other languages. Two recent seismic political events, the British exit from the European Union (Brexit) and Trump’s aggressive isolationism in the United States, may add more uncertainties to the future of multilingual education around the world, particularly with respect to teaching and learning languages other than English (LOTEs) (Lanvers, Doughty, and Thompson 2018).

In contrast, governments in Greater China (a region including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan) have renewed their commitment to globalisation and promoted new initiatives such as Mainland China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative and Taiwan’s ‘New Southbound Policy’. These developmental strategies are often accompanied with languages other than English being given new value, as well as with reinvigorated investment in teaching and learning these languages. It is unlikely that these developments will directly challenge the dominance of English language education in the Asian context (Cheng 2012), but these new initiatives may help to check the global decline of LOTE learning and teaching, which deserves close attention in research.

Foreign language education in Greater China

Due to its large population, Greater China has probably the largest number of foreign language learners in the region. The age of globalisation has witnessed significant growth in numbers of English language learners around the globe; the number of English speakers at a useful level has been put at around 1.75 billion people – a quarter of the world’s population (British Council 2013). Among them, Asia has the largest number of English speakers in the world (Cheng 2012), with China having nearly 400 million English speakers at varying proficiency levels (Wang 2015). In Mainland China, English has been a compulsory subject in the secondary and tertiary curricula since the early 1980s, and was made a compulsory school subject on the nationally prescribed primary curriculum in 2001. English language education is related closely to the Chinese government’s efforts to widen and deepen China’s participation in political, economic and cultural activities in the international arena (Bolton and Graddol 2012).

A similar emphasis has been placed on English language education in Taiwan. In 2001 the Taiwanese Ministry of Education launched the Nine-Year Joint Curricula Plan to make English a required course for all students from fifth-grade onwards, as opposed to such classes only starting in junior high schools before then (Chern 2002). Two years later, in 2003, the age at which formal English language education began for Taiwanese elementary school children was further lowered to the third grade (Chou 2008). These changes have resulted in English becoming the most commonly studied foreign language in Taiwan, as well as the only required foreign language at all levels of Taiwan’s education system (Chern 2002).

The language education scenario sketched above highlights the predominant role of English in the foreign language education landscape in Greater China – and in turn this region plays a critical role in promoting and sustaining the global dominance of English. What has often been neglected, however, is that this region may also become a key player in promoting and sustaining the learning and teaching of LOTEs, given the large population of language learners overall. For instance, the Japan Foundation estimates that in 2012 China had the largest number of Japanese language learners (1.046 million out of a total of 3985 million Japanese language learners worldwide), a 26.5% rise since 2009 (Lv, Gao, and Teo 2017; Gao and Lv 2018; Teo et al. 2019). Mainland China also sends the largest numbers of students to non-Anglophone countries such as France, Germany and Spain. In 2014, 19,792 students took college Russian tests and tests for Russian majors, 17,649 students took college German tests and tests for German Majors, 10,741 students enrolled in the tests for French Majors, and 10,563 students were in Spanish major programmes at different levels (undergraduate, Master’s and PhD) (Wang and Xu 2015). As such, it is evident that Greater China not only makes the most significant contribution to sustaining English as a global language (Cheng 2012), but may also play a key role in promoting the learning and teaching of LOTEs as well.

Shifting socio-political conditions and LOTE education

Volatile socio-political conditions in the world today have resulted in discrepant language policy measures, but most contexts worldwide are characterised by funding cuts for LOTE education. As mentioned earlier, the UK faces a continuing decline in modern languages in terms of both the number of learners and the institutional support for such programmes, and this situation may be exacerbated during the post-Brexit era (Lanvers et al. 2018). Fifteen senior representatives of modern languages in the UK wrote to The Guardian, a popular national newspaper, to express alarm at recent planned staffing cuts targeting modern language teachers at the University of Manchester, which has one of the most reputable modern language programmes in the country (Rawlinson 2017).

In the US the monolingual English-only mentality is resurgent, evidenced by the removal of multilingual content from the White House webpage (Kelly et al. 2017) and prospective funding reductions for the 70-year Fulbright exchange programme, which aims to enhance language and cultural exchange between the US and the rest of the world (Morello 2017). Financial cuts in modern language programmes have been reported as well. In March 2018 the Modern Language Association publicised an official letter on its website, written by its director and endorsed by 22 other organisations, addressed to the University of Wisconsin Stevens Point and urging the university administration to reconsider its recommended elimination of 13 undergraduate humanities majors, including three modern language programmes. Researchers are concerned that the major Anglophone countries are increasingly cutting themselves off linguistically from other parts of the world, which may indicate a dangerous resurgence of othering and the erasure of language diversity (Lanvers et al. 2018).

By contrast, governments in Greater China demonstrate aspirations to achieve further economic and social development during the globalisation process. For instance, initially in response to US containment, the Mainland Chinese government has embarked on an alternative globalisation strategy that intends to push Chinese trade influence across Central Asia via the historic Silk Road (the Silk Road Economic Belt) and naval trade routes across the Indian Ocean and Africa to Europe (the twenty-first century Maritime Silk Road). Collectively these strategies are known as the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. Similarly, the government in Taiwan has adopted a new ‘Southbound’ developmental strategy to expand its trade and business exchange with countries in South East Asia. These developmental strategies mean that Greater China will be focusing more on interacting with people who speak many foreign languages other than English.

These emerging social, political and economic needs have triggered the governments’ renewed investment in developing programmes in languages other than English in higher education institutions. For instance, each university in one Mainland Chinese province has been asked to provide one major LOTE programme, such as Russian or Turkish, as a part of the implementation of the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative (editors’ personal communication). In July 2016 the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) issued the plan of ‘Developing Educational Cooperation along the Belt and Road’, stressing the need to expand multilingual education in China’s secondary- and tertiary-level institutions. In April 2017 the MOE approved more than 20 foreign language degree programmes, including Hebrew, Persian and Serbian, in more than 30 Chinese higher education institutions. These Belt and Road languages used to have very low visibility in China’s foreign language education landscape. Favouring policies, such as early admission schemes or lower passing scores in the National Matriculation Test, were enacted to encourage secondary-school graduates to enrol in LOTE major studies. The most recent reform stipulates that three more LOTEs must be included in the National Matriculation Foreign Language Test (MOE 2018), adding French, German and Spanish to the existing English, Russian and Japanese. Given the high stakes of the national matriculation tests, the availability of five LOTEs as foreign language subjects shows the government’s willingness to expand LOTE education from the tertiary to the pre-tertiary level of education.

Such massive expansion of LOTE programmes at the pre-tertiary and tertiary levels is unprecedented. Its failure or success is likely to have a profound influence on the prospects for multilingual and multicultural development at universities across Greater China. Given the dearth of research on foreign language education other than English, this special issue addresses the issue of multilingualism (with a particular focus on the learning and teaching of LOTEs) and higher education across Greater China. We are interested in exploring how LOTE learning and teaching may contribute to sustaining and promoting multilingualism in the post-Trump and post-Brexit world. Of course, we are aware that many other researchers are also working on a spectrum of topics associated with foreign language education in higher education in this setting, and it is not possible to cover all the relevant issues and languages. For this reason, we are particularly interested in exploring how the learning and teaching of LOTEs are promoted at the policy level, how individual students approach the learning of LOTEs, and how the implementation of new language policies impacts individual teachers. By addressing these questions, we believe that we may infer whether these multilingual education initiatives are sustainable in their specific contexts, and whether they might be able to reverse the decline of LOTE learning and teaching elsewhere.

Introducing the special issue

Since our contributors are insiders engaged in the new wave of language policy shift towards promoting multilingual and multicultural development in addition to the English-dominant curriculum, we believe that they will be able to share their emic perspectives and insightful observations with potential readers. We encourage readers to first gain insights into the challenges and opportunities that the new strategic development initiatives will bring for the teaching and learning of non-English foreign languages in Mainland Chinese universities. Then, readers may appreciate how learners and teachers construe learning and teaching a foreign language in addition to English in Mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively.

In the lead article, Yawen Han and Xuesong Gao offer a critical examination of the expansion of LOTE programmes in Mainland Chinese universities during recent years. From the perspectives of ‘the learner, the teacher, and the curriculum’ (Pauwels 2011, 247), they combed through 830 documents comprising archive data and website information. The cross-sectional and cross-institutional comparisons of the documents revealed that, despite considerable aspirations for success, Chinese universities have to address three major challenges created by the rapid expansion of LOTE programmes – unrealistic curricula, teacher shortages, and attracting high quality applicants. Han and Gao conclude that it is imperative to develop long-term planning and coordinated efforts to sustain the drive to promote the learning and teaching of LOTEs in Chinese universities.

The following three articles focus on the learner, with particular attention directed to what motivates Chinese learners to get engaged in learning LOTEs. Shu-Chen Huang’s questionnaire-based study in a Taiwanese university foregrounds the prominent role of learning experience in shaping learners’ motivation. Within the framework of the L2 Motivational Self System (Dörnyei 2009), she compared and contrasted the motivation for learning eight LOTEs in three language clusters (Southeast Asian, Northeast Asian, and European languages) among 1655 Taiwanese students who voluntarily chose an LOTE course after completing their university English requirement. Analysis of questionnaire responses revealed that learning experience was the strongest predictor for Taiwanese learners of all the LOTEs, followed by ideal self and cultural interest, whereas instrumentality was not found to be a significant predictor. These findings showcase a unique situation of LOTE learning in Taiwan, and in Greater China in general, where the languages being studied are rarely used in day-to-day life and the major source of motivation is derived from their interaction with teachers and peers in the classroom, thus highlighting the key role of immediate learning context. Notably, despite the government’s encouragement of learning Southeast Asian languages, the learners do not particularly favour this language cluster. This finding raises doubt about the extent to which the government’s top-down efforts to promote LOTE learning can actually affect the individual learner’s motivational behaviour, thus partially addressing the concern voiced in Han and Gao’s article.

Yongyan Zheng, Xiuchuan Lu and Wei Ren’s study on profiling Mainland Chinese university students’ motivation to learn Spanish extends our understanding of LOTE learning motivation by integrating a macro-sociological perspective into the self-based approach to motivation, and by reinstating the Other-Own standpoints originating from Higgins’ (1987) Self Discrepancy Theory. They recruited two groups of Chinese university students – voluntary and non-voluntary learners of Spanish as a third language. The Q methodology was applied to profile these two groups’ multilingual selves, with four motivational profiles emerging from the analysis. Their findings showed that multilingual posture, a concept extended from that of ‘international posture’ derived from English-language learners’ motivation (Yashima 2009), can be a strong motivator for self-motivated learners’ investment in learning an LOTE in addition to English. These learners are able to envision a multilingual user identity related to an international community mediated by multilingualism. Quite differently, the other-motivated learners are mostly subjugated to institutional coercive power, and overtly instrumentalise Spanish learning instead of appreciating the potential values of multilingual and multicultural development or crafting a multilingual user identity.

In the next article Wenhong Huang and Dezheng Feng probed into Chinese university learners’ construal of Japanese learning. They used a cross-sectional design, recruiting three cohorts of university learners and exploiting a combined use of elicited metaphor analysis and stimulated interviews to compare and contrast the motivational patterns of Chinese students’ motivation for learning Japanese as they proceeded with their study. The metaphor and interview data illustrated a gradual shift from a more integrative cultural interest among first-year students to a more instrumental orientation towards Japanese learning among third-year students. Their findings enrich our understanding of LOTE learning by showing two unique features involved in the process: close ties with the target language community, and interference from the learning of global English. The shifting motivational patterns can therefore be seen as a result of the constant interaction between the self-reflective learner and the complex web of learning experiences in the classroom, and the conflicting influences of global English and the Japanese culture at the societal level. Learners of LOTEs may have to balance their priorities under the influence of these contextual forces to allocate their motivational resources.

Also focusing on Japanese learning, Kazuyuki Nomura, Shin Kataoka and Takako Mochizuki approached the issue from a critical pedagogy perspective. They targeted fluent speakers of Japanese choosing to enrol in beginner-level courses in a university in Hong Kong, and used in-depth interviews to understand their motivation underlying this choice. The findings showed that the fluent speakers made this decision because they perceived those lessons as a ‘safe house’ for them, which enabled them to engage in course activities, extend their Japanese-related social networks, and negotiate alternative identities to circumvent the GPA-oriented system enforced by the university’s institutional culture. Subversive identities as motivational forces have been reported among Anglophone learners engaged in LOTE learning (Lanvers 2016; Thompson 2017), but the present study makes a unique contribution to the LOTE motivation literature by linking the individual level of learner resistance with a social dimension, namely the critical pedagogy concept of safe houses. In this light, it would be a promising future direction for L2 motivation researchers to collaborate with researchers from the field of critical pedagogy to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of language learning motivation.

The next article, contributed by Jian Tao, Ke Zhao and Xiuwen Chen, directs attention to LOTE teachers. They adopted the theoretical perspective of Language Teacher Possible Self Theory (Kubanyiova 2009) to examine seven LOTE teachers’ professional selves (e.g. teacher self and researcher self) in a top-tier Chinese university. Their findings highlight that it is the LOTE teachers’ ought-to self, rather than the ideal self that has been commonly reported by English-language teachers, that motivates their continuing professional development. The LOTE teachers’ language teacher ought-to self is mainly built on students’ expectations, while their researcher ought-to self is derived from the shifting teacher appraisal policy prioritising English-language research publications. The study on the motivating impact of LOTE teachers’ ought-to selves on their professional life expands the theoretical perspective on language teacher possible selves, which has mainly been validated by English-language teachers. Similar to findings on LOTE learners and other studies on Chinese humanities researchers (Gao and Zheng 2018; Zheng and Guo 2018), contextual forces including global English at the macro-level, institutional policies at the meso-level, and classroom teaching and learning experiences at the micro-level all seem to assume a greater role in LOTE learning and teaching.

This special issue concludes with two book reviews. Citing Li reviews an edited volume, Japanese Language and Soft Power in Asia, which is among the few in the field of language education that examines the relationship between language learning and soft power. This book offers a panoramic perspective on geopolitical, sociocultural, economic and ideological aspects of Japanese language learning in diverse contexts, which provides some complementary background on the two aforementioned research articles on Japanese-language learners’ motivational identities in Mainland China and Hong Kong. The other review, contributed by Yuli Feng, discusses a monograph entitled Multilingual Hong Kong: Languages, Literacies, and Identities. This book addresses the key debates on Hong Kong’s ‘bilingualism and triliteracy’ policy, and reveals the complexity of the existing language-in-education policy by evaluating its motivation and outcomes. This book may afford readers a broader perspective on the challenges and prospects of promoting multilingual education in the Greater China region.

Concluding remarks

As can be seen in the brief description above, the studies in this special issue revolve around three aspects of foreign language education policy: the curriculum, the learner, and the teacher (Pauwels 2011). We can see how individual learners and teachers construct their motivational identities against the backdrop of the rapid expansion of LOTE education in Greater China. The six articles, although from diverse theoretical perspectives, all highlight deep-seated tensions between the learning of global English and LOTEs, between individuals’ self construction and contextual variations, and between the instrumental orientation and the appreciation of translanguaging/transcultural values of language learning. In contrast to the growing English-only monolingual mentality in the major Anglophone countries, Greater China has embarked on a journey to diversify their people’s foreign language repertoire. Given the large learner population in this area, we are hopeful that the numbers of learners of an LOTE may even one day surpass the native speakers of this language, and may ultimately tip the balance of the multilingual education landscape around the world. However, if this drive is to continue and succeed, the questions and challenges raised in this special issue deserve full research attention in the future.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Prof. John Edwards for his generous support, without which this special issue would not have been published. We would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude to all the authors for their trust, cooperation, and admirable professionalism during the process. Our work is generously supported by a Short-term Vistorship at the School of Education, the University of New South Wales (Australia) for Professor Yongyan Zheng and the Eastern Scholar Research Fund Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning [grant number JZ2015008] awarded to Dr. Xuesong Gao through Shanghai International Studies University. Last, our thanks go to all the reviewers we have asked for anonymous review. We deeply appreciate their timely and constructive feedback to the manuscripts despite their busy schedules. All these have made this special issue possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yongyan Zheng http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0664-3942

Additional information

Funding

Our work is generously supported by a Short-term Vistorship at the School of Education, the University of New South Wales (Australia) for Professor Yongyan Zheng and the Eastern Scholar Research Fund Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning [grant number JZ2015008] awarded to Dr. Xuesong Gao through Shanghai International Studies University.