An Exploratory Study of Chinese College EFL Teachers’ Multilingual Awareness

ABSTRACT

Teacher Multilingual Awareness (MLA) is attracting growing scholarly attention due to the vigorous development of multilingual education worldwide. However, this concept is largely unexplored in the Chinese context. Adopting a mixed-methods design, the present study investigated Chinese college EFL teachers’ MLA based on a six-dimensional conceptual construct. The questionnaire survey supplemented by interview data revealed a general pro-multilingual orientation of EFL teachers as well as their medium to high levels of MLA. Moreover, Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVAs) were conducted to assess the roles of degree of multilingualism and teaching experience in teacher MLA along six dimensions: (a) crosslinguistic and metalinguistic awareness; (b) awareness of multilingual students’ advantages; (c) endorsement for multilingual education; (d) national identity; (e) awareness of NNESTs’ strength; and (f) multilingual pedagogy awareness. The results showed, rather unexpectedly, that the degree of multilingualism only had a significant impact on the crosslinguistic and metalinguistic dimensions of MLA, and that teaching experience had no differentiating effect on any of the dimensions. These findings underscore the necessity of formulating and implementing teacher training programs that explicitly target the cultivation of each MLA dimension in societies with English-dominated foreign language education systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese college EFL teachers
• crosslinguistic and metalinguistic awareness
• multilingual identity
• sociolinguistic awareness
• teacher multilingual awareness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was declared by the author(s).

Notes

1. China, as a multi-ethnic nation, features various minority languages alongside the majority language Mandarin. While its multi-ethnicity and the complex landscape of Mandarin-minority languages education are of importance, they fall outside the scope of this study. Following the operational definition given by Gao and Zheng (2019), multilingual education in this article specifically pertains to multiple foreign language education.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation (Key Project) of China under Grant No. [20AYY015].

Notes on contributors

Jinfen Xu

Jinfen Xu is Professor of the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology where she teaches College English for non-English majors and graduate courses in English pedagogy and second language acquisition. Her main research interests are foreign language education, instructed second language acquisition, learner autonomy, and teacher development.

Jiaqi Yang

Jiaqi Yang is a PhD student at the School of Foreign Languages, Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on second language acquisition, foreign language education, and teacher development.

Chenxi Pan

Chenxi Pan is now a teacher of English in Mafangshan Middle School of Wuhan. She received her Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Her areas of interest are foreign language education and teacher development.