Teachers and Students Enacting Language Policy: A Case Study of a Secondary School in China

Abstract

Language policy has been an issue of critical importance in the People's Republic of China, where 56 officially recognised ethnic groups speak more than 130 languages and dialects. However, to date, little empirical research has investigated the implementation of language education policy in ethnic minority areas. This thesis describes and analyses bilingual education for the minority group at the secondary school level in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of northwest China. It investigates language practices and viewpoints of local teachers and students, to better understand the dynamics between language policy at the governmental level and stakeholders' engagement at the community level. The research takes a case study approach in which the data are collected through classroom observations, interviews, and questionnaires. This thesis first discusses national and regional language policies that have shaped the development of bilingual education in Xinjiang to situate the understanding of the policy context of this research. China's national language policy efforts have been centred around two themes: promotion of Mandarin Chinese as the national language, and preservation of minority languages. Since the 1990s, the national ideology to achieve language unification has substantially affected language policy making across the country. In 2004, the Xinjiang autonomous government announced their regional bilingual education policy with two models: the Mode-1 model in which the minority language and Mandarin Chinese have roughly equal importance in the education of ethnic minority students, and the Mode-2 model in which Mandarin Chinese is prioritised and used in teaching all subjects except for the minority language subject. This thesis finds that, at the time the fieldwork for this study took place in 2017, the case school was implementing two bilingual education programs, following the two models prescribed in the governmental policy. Next, this thesis examines individual teachers' implementation of the governmental policy. It finds that, within the boundary of the policy, the teachers draw resourcefully on the minority language and Mandarin Chinese with constructive flexibility to accommodate their students' academic and communicative needs. They create a supportive sociocultural classroom environment where their students' bilingual and bicultural experiences are respected and valued. What underpins their practices is the teachers' commitment to and support for bilingual education. In addition, this thesis extends the investigation of policy implementation into the students' perspective, analysing their language use in and out of school and their views on language learning. The findings illustrate students' complex bilingual lives in the domains of education and family. Their language choices in class are largely determined by the official policies. Outside of school, students in both programs dominantly use their native minority language to interact with family and friends. They perceive the maintenance of their native language competence as a crucial pathway to identify and interact with their ethnic community. They also present strong desire for learning Mandarin Chinese, mostly because of its associated economic value and related cultural products. A further comparison between the students reveals that students in the Mode-2 model, where they are almost entirely immersed in Mandarin Chinese, tend to have increased use of Mandarin Chinese and decreased belief in their native language, compared to their peers in the Mode-1 model. These findings suggest that given the predominant status of Mandarin Chinese in education and the mainstream society, the minority students' language use seems to be shifting away from their native language towards the national language. Show more