Journal of Asian Pacific Communication - Volume 18, Issue 1, 2008

This paper reports on a study into the motives underlying the formation of a weekly English discussion group organized by mainland Chinese research students in Hong Kong as a strategic effort to improve their English. Adopting a sociocultural approach, we compared our interpretations of semi-structured interview transcripts and other data, focusing in particular the participants’ strong English learning motivation. It was found that their motives were very complex and could best be explained by the notion of investment (Norton, 1995). These motives also became the primary forces that transformed the weekly event from a learning event into a variety of activities that moved beyond improving their English speaking skills for individual participants. The paper argues that a more sociocultural or sociopolitical perspective on learning strategy should be adopted to deepen our understanding of language learners’ strategic learning behaviour.

Within the English language teaching profession there is now general acceptance of the advantages of integrating language and content teaching. Yet challenges continue over how such integration can be accomplished within individual classrooms. In Asian universities using English as the medium of instruction (EMI), one of the key barriers to integration is the alleged reticence of learners to participate in spoken discourse within the classroom. If the language policy aims of these institutions are to be realized, these constraints need to be acknowledged. This paper uses a multidimensional investment framework to investigate the oral participation of one group of foreign language learners within their English for academic purposes (EAP) classroom at an EMI university in Hong Kong. Drawing on data from interviews, classroom observations, audiovisual recordings of classroom interaction, and documentary analysis, this paper argues that the successful integration of language and content teaching should include an appreciation of the institutional forces that constrain and enable learners’ oral investment, how learners deploy a variety of knowledge, skills and understandings in support of this investment, and the degree of freedom learners enjoy in shaping the processes and products of their investments. The implications of this research for classroom practices are explored.

This paper reports on a qualitative study that investigated the identity negotiation and English learning investment transformation of learners in a Chinese university. The informants included three female undergraduate students from English and Bioscience majors enrolled in a Chinese university. Recordings of conversation, students’ self-reports, and interviews were collected over one and a half years. This paper draws on ideas from the framework of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), and employs the notions of identity, investment (Norton, 2000). The paper examined how English second language (L2) learners constructed multiple identities to position themselves in a Chinese educated urban community and an English speaking Christian community. It analysed how their participation and identities in the two communities were constructed, and how their motivation for learning English was transformed. The study reveals how, in an era of globalization, and specifically in the rapidly changing economic, sociocultural and political context of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), English language learning entails complex and intertwined issues of motivation, identity and culture, which demand further exploration.

In a highly mobile and globalized educational market, Australian secondary schools attract increasing numbers of international students, the majority of whom are from China (Australian Education International, 2007). Most of these Chinese international students undertake two years of senior secondary education in this English medium context as a step towards entry to Australian tertiary institutions, but their increasing heterogeneity in terms of linguistic and academic ability is resulting in increasing frustrations for them and their subject teachers alike (Arkoudis & Love, 2004; Love & Arkoudis, 2006). This paper explores the language and learning needs of Chinese international students in one popular senior school subject, Specialist Mathematics, using student and teacher interviews focusing on a written examination. The interviews were examined through two theoretical lenses, that of Norton’s (2001) imagined communities and van Langenhove & Harre’s (1999) positioning theory, in order to explore how the imagined communities of the students and their teacher influence their investment in the teaching and learning context. The analysis highlights that the teacher and students’ actions and identities are influenced by their different imagined communities, which affect their motivation and investment in their current community of the Specialist Maths class.

While the commodification of English as a global language may give rise to varying degrees of political and economic benefits for language learners, a simultaneous “cost” of this return may be a continued perpetuation of various forms of hegemony. In this vein, this one-year case study investigated a Canadian post-secondary English as a Second Language (ESL) program that analyzed the interconnections between language and culture through a critical dialogic approach. Classroom observations, however, revealed that disjunctions existed between the pedagogy as it was conceptualized and the practices of the instructors teaching there and suggested that the “critical” discourses mediated within the language classrooms essentialized culture and, subsequently, the identities of the students. This paper presents the voices of students from Mainland China as they attempted to negotiate their local and global identities within the larger sociopolitical contexts of the English language, generally, and English language education, in particular. I argue that classroom discourses can (re)create subordinate student identities, thereby limiting their access not only to language-learning opportunities, but to other more powerful identities. This paper thus highlights how ESL pedagogies and practices might address and contest hegemonic discourses and concomitantly reimagine student identities in more emancipatory ways.