Raising native cultural awareness through WeChat: a case study with Chinese EFL students

Abstract

This article reports the study of a novel way of raising tertiary-level students’ native cultural awareness (NCA) via an informal mobile learning community. Through two cycles of action research at a teacher-education university in East China, the study drew upon the Community of Practice (CoP) theory to form a synchronous English chat group. Students were encouraged to share their understandings and to construct knowledge of Chinese cultural topics with teacher guidance while using WeChat. To probe the students’ perceptions of how the WeChat learning community influenced cultural exchange and learning, chat logs, semi-structured interviews data and a teacher’s journal were analyzed. Findings suggest that the CoP concept played a positive role in raising NCA among the participants. Students became more willing to participate in their English chat community with a rise of trust and familiarity of group members over time. Students were motivated to use their personal, local and world knowledge through peer and multimodal discussions in order to share and learn new English expressions within a Chinese cultural context. Areas of improvement and pedagogical implications for building online CoPs with WeChat applications are discussed at the end of the article.

Keywords:

• Native cultural awareness
• synchronous chat
• CoP
• peer discussion

Acknowledgment

We would like to thank Glenn Stockwell and Jinlan Tang for their support and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. Special thanks also go to Christoph Hafner, Graham Lock, Siew Ming Thang, and Mark Feng Teng who offered some suggested changes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See a brief introduction to the One Belt One Road Initiative: https://beltandroad.hktdc.com/en/belt-and-road-basics

² Although our study contains aspects of both intercultural (Cycle 1) and intracultural (Cycle 2) communication, we focus mainly on the latter in this article. We agree with one reviewer who stated that the Taiwanese-Mainland Chinese cultural exchanges were ‘proper’ cultural settings. Even if they are not seen as two different cultures, they are two different microcultures.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by City University of Hong Kong under Grant 000618.

Notes on contributors

Junjie Gavin Wu

Junjie Gavin Wu is a PhD candidate and Research Associate at City University of Hong Kong. He has had tertiary teaching experience in China and has worked for the British Council in Shanghai. He currently serves on the committee board of GLoCALL International Conferences, ALT Annual Conference (Edinburgh) and OER 19 Conference (Galway). Gavin also received awards from the Hong Kong Association for Applied Linguistics (HAAL) and the GLoCALL 2019 International Conference. He has reviewed manuscripts for Journal of Educational Computing Research (SSCI) and Virtual Reality (SCI). His research interests are mobile-assisted language learning and learner autonomy. His publications can be found in Language in Society, TESOL Journal, TESL-EJ, EAI Transactions on e-Learning and The Journal of Asia TEFL. He is currently editing an upcoming Springer book on the topic of language learning with technology with Lindsay Miller.

Lindsay Miller

Lindsay Miller is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. His main areas of research have focused on self-access language learning, and academic listening, and he has published widely in these areas including Establishing Self-Access: From Theory To Practice (1999) CUP; Second Language Listening: Theory and Practice (2005) CUP; Managing Self-Access Language Learning (2015) CityU Press; and English in the Disciplines: A Multidimensional Model for ESP Course Design (2019) Routledge.