Introduction
We use the term ‘localising Chinese’ for the title of this book to denote that the globalisation of China is finding expression in local educational efforts to make Chinese learnable. Localising Chinese is used alongside the notions of ‘global China’ and its strategies for securing its economic and political interests internationally, and the Anglosphere, a notion that refers to the angst-ridden dream of the UK and the USA to build a coalition of cultural, economic and strategic interests outside Europe (Vucetic 2011). The increased mobility of people to and from China since 1979 has made teaching students how to learn Chinese possible in many localities throughout the world. The rise of global China makes the learning of Chinese by school students throughout Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA an advantage and a source of prestige. Teaching students how to learn spoken Chinese is always situated in specific nation-states in particular school communities. Through investigating how and where to locate Chinese language learning in Australia, a variety of practices for localising Chinese are brought to the fore in this book. We explore approaches to localising Chinese that mobilise the knowledge and learning strategies of English-speaking school students in particular. However, nation-states such as Australia have only made piecemeal responses to their citizens’ educational needs for learning Chinese, and have a stronger role to play in the construction of Chinese as a local language. The localisation of Chinese language learning is necessary to address curriculum questions concerning what forms of Chinese should be taught and the methods of teaching to be used, taking note of the diversity of students around the world. Chinese now communicate knowledge about global China and the humans who use Chinese locally.
Global China, Localising Chinese
China is now a knowledge -producing superpower, an important source of advances in science (Hollingsworth et al. 2008). Since 1979, the country’s government has invested in becoming a world leader in education, research and development, especially in addressing global problems such as climate change and food security. As an integral part of this strategy, students in China are encouraged to undertake overseas study and research in order to gain cutting-edge knowledge and access to leading-edge knowledge-producing networks. But when will non-Chinese speakers learn to call China Zhōngguó (中国)? Is Zhōng Wén (Chinese 中文) always going to be ‘foreign’ to us?
‘Foreignness’ reinforces the sense that Zhōng Wén (Chinese 中文) is superfluous to education throughout the Anglosphere, a grouping that has linguistic similarities to the Angles and Saxons. Moreover, ‘foreignness’ fortifies the mistaken view that part of the linguistic repertoire of multilingual higher degree researchers (HDRs) from Zhōngguó (China 中国) is extraneous to their education and research in Australia or the UK. The insistence on Zhōng Wén as ‘foreign’ suggests that knowledge of and in that language is separate from their other research studies. Furthermore, making Zhōng Wén ‘foreign’ is strange for HDRs who are enrolled in a programme where they are teaching English-speaking school students how to learn Chinese. But their multilingual capabilities have a place in the writing of their theses—in terms of evidence and analytical concepts. The full linguistic repertoire of multilingual HDRs warrants incorporation into their teaching and research (Singh 2016). Making Chinese learnable should be thought through locally:
Making Chinese learnable means having students learn forms of Chinese they can use in their immediate context. I taught them the Chinese names for the food they brought to school for their daily lunches. They learned to talk about their everyday food in Chinese. A girl ordered her favourite drink in Chinese at the school canteen. (Huì 慧 intelligent, wise)
Categorising Chinese as a local language is preferable to designating it as alien. Thus, Localising Chinese opens up the possibility of exploring Chinese that is being taught to learners as a local language. In particular, we have used pīn yīn (拼音) and Hàn zì (汉字) throughout this book to signal the marginalisation of researchers’ multilingual capabilities through the exclusionary drive for English -only research, teaching and learning.
There are now many international education and research partnerships between researchers in China and their worldwide diasporic compatriots. This intra-ethnic research cooperation is beneficial for Chinese–Chinese interactions. There is a major difficulty in promoting Chinese–non-Chinese interactions because ‘few scientists in the US or elsewhere speak Chinese or understand the country’s research culture’ (Gupta 2016, p. S8). To address this problem, universities that cater largely for English-speaking students while providing international education need to institutionalise mechanisms for affecting interethnic bridging between Chinese and non-Chinese students. They have had since 1979, when China and the USA established full diplomatic relations, to do so. In a China-centred world of knowledge production, politics and economics, Chinese (Zhōng Wén 中文) is more important than ever (Gil 2011; Kumaravadivelu 2012). In many localities throughout the world, educators want their students to access the knowledge that China (Zhōngguó , 中国) is producing, and are exploring the problems of making Chinese learnable.
From Limerick to Gothenburg to Karachi, people around the world understand that China is, once again, a superpower. People from China now live all over the world, and non-Chinese people’s imaginations are being reshaped accordingly. Human co-habitation is being reconstituted as Chinese and non-Chinese interact daily in their local communities. In getting to know Chinese people, non-Chinese are coming to understand their life and work, and the increasing importance of China in the world today (Scrimgeour 2014). This has convinced millions of students to learn Chinese as a local language. The quotes that follow are indicative of this shift:
- 1)With China’s rise as a superpower, Ireland’s students are being readied for the continuing challenges that global changes produce locally. Chinese is being taught across Ireland, from Dundalk, Sligo, Maynooth, Kerry, Limerick and Cork to Dublin. Students are being prepared for the ever more changes that are coming (McGuire 2012).
- 2)China’s cultural, economic and political influence is increasing throughout Scandinavia. The Chinese automobile company Greely bought the Gothenburg-based Volvo car manufacturer. The Swedish government has boosted Chinese language education in schools (Törnkvist 2012).
- 3)Soon after Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan in May 2011, Pakistan’s government produced plans to make Chinese compulsory for schoolchildren from Class 6 onwards (10- and 11-year-olds). Urdu, English, Arabic and Sindhi are already among the local languages taught in its Sindh province. Moreover, this decision was made despite the country having few teachers of Chinese language. The aim was to capitalise on the growing influence of Chinese companies in building nuclear reactors and supplying military equipment (Crilly 2011).
The globalisation of China poses the new educational problem of teaching non-Chinese speakers how to learn the Chinese language. In English, the official language of Zhōngguó (中国 China) is referred to variously as Chinese and Mandarin. However, a complex array of terms is used by Zhōng guó rén (中国人 Chinese people). Zhōng Wén (中文) refers to the standardising, modernising, nation-building language of Zhōngguó . Of course, no one actually speaks the formally standardised version of any national language, except perhaps television newsreaders. Pŭ tōng huà (普通话) refers to the country’s commonly spoken language, even though it is based on the phonology of the Beijing dialect. Thus, a person speaks pŭ tōng huà, but does not write it. Hàn zì (汉字) is the written script. In English, Hàn zì is referred to as ‘characters’. Pīn yīn (拼音) is the Romanised script for pŭ tōng huà.
How to teach and learn Chinese are challenges , given that ‘native speakers of Chinese find it difficult to learn, retain, and reproduce [Hàn zì ] correctly’ (Duff et al. 2013, p. 12). Building on earlier reform efforts, in 1958 the government promulgated the alphabetical scheme of pīn yīn (拼音 Romanised script) ‘to promote early literacy teaching in schools’ (Zhao and Baldauf 2008, p. 46). Integral to making Chinese learnable on a mass scale throughout China, pīn yīn was introduced in early primary schooling, and frequently used Hàn zì were simplified and modernised by shape (stroke reduction), pronunciation and semantics. These officially authorised changes have been directed at managing China’s internationally oriented modernisation through educational reforms alongside language use. Although contested, these class-based sociolinguistic reforms successfully reduced illiteracy and disseminated nation-building knowledge. Here it is important to emphasise that pīn yīn was devised to meet the educational needs of people in China, and thus it does not provide the best vehicle for English speakers to learn spoken Chinese.
Spoken and written Chinese have separate and distinct teachin...