Dancing K-Pop with Chinese and “English in Class Please”: Policy Negotiations as Relational-Languaging Episodes

Abstract

Pointing out that language policy negotiations in classroom discourse are an understudied kind of “language-related episode”, and proposing that Tim Ingold’s notion of “meshwork” dissolves a boundary that typically encloses their analysis, this paper examines how a rich and indicative example of student group interaction on a British university campus in China becomes interwoven with multiple threads, including: different languages, Korean pop dance moves, coffee from the campus Starbucks, and the teacher’s repeated attempts at English-Medium Instruction policy enforcement. Our example was discovered in corpus recordings of group activities during classes in English for Academic Purposes, then transcribed for embodied activity (primarily speech and gesture) and further explored in relation to the multiple threads which visibly and audibly became involved. Analysis of the episode shows how students’ relational-languaging behaviours must negotiate, respond, and adapt to the policy enforcement, illustrating some of the tensions immanent to the transnational higher education experience.

Embracing Diversity, Inclusion, Equity and Access in EMI-TNHE: Towards a Social Justice-Centered Reframing of English Language Teaching

“…In this pedagogical piece, Hiller illustrates how translanguaging practices can be incorporated into an English for academic purposes (EAP) writing course, with the goal of promoting the full linguistic and communicative repertoires of students enrolled at the Duke University campus in Kunshan, People’s Republic of China (PRC). That translanguaging is a lived sociolinguistic reality of multilingual and multicultural students at EMI-TNHE institutions is further borne out in McKinley et al’s (2021) and Harrison and Chen’s (2021) PRC-based studies. In both studies, the authors report how Chinese was used to facilitate in-group conversations.…”

“…In the introduction to their edited volume, English-Medium Instruction and Translanguaging , Paulsrud et al (2021: 15) point out that EMI and translanguaging are not mutually exclusive; rather, these two entities can “exist side by side.” They add that we need to study educational contexts and develop, “an innovative understanding of the affordances available for learning, communicating, building identity, [that is made possible through] dismantling hierarchies, promoting social justice, and resisting monolingual ideologies when EMI and translanguaging are allowed to be juxtaposed.” As noted in the previous section, several of the authors in this special issue (Hiller, 2021; Harrison and Chen, 2021; McKinley et al, 2021) report on how translanguaging practices were enacted in the classrooms that they examined. In agreement with Paulsrud et al and consistent with calls to create a culturally inclusive campus climate, curriculum, and instructional practices (Shapiro et al, 2014), we argue that in order for EMI-TNHE to remain a viable educational option, it would need to: (a) acknowledge the translingual realities that characterize such institutions; and (b) ratify the cultural and linguistic diversity that exists within these institutions.…”

“…These inequities, which are also manifested through the use of educational software, are discussed in Winans’ tech review (2021) of “Grammarly’s Tone Detector.” Winans (2021) writes about how this software is skewed in favor of Inner Circle (Kachru, 1992) varieties of English, because texts written in non-Inner English varieties were deemed to be pragmatically inappropriate. Such a deficit perspective to “non-standard” English comes under scrutiny in Harrison and Chen’s study (2021) because the students’ shuttling back and forth between Chinese and English was seen to be in violation of their teacher’s English-only classroom language policy. As Harrison and Chen (2021) rightly note, it is ironic that the Chinese students had to deploy the very interactional competence that their EAP classroom was expected to develop in order to negotiate their teacher’s unbending language policy.…”

“…Drawing on Altbach (2007), Yeo and Newton (2021), for example, point out that EMI-TNHE can, at times, invite comparison to the “McDonaldization” of education. Importantly, these neoliberal impulses, which are also addressed in several other pieces (Harrison and Chen, 2021; McKinley et al, 2021; Reynolds, 2021a; Yeo and Newton, 2021) should not be overlooked.…”

“…Specifically, we ask you, the reader, to imagine how issues related to diversity, inclusion, equity and access (DIEA) can be addressed in a reconfigured EMI-TNHE. This reconfiguration in a post-pandemic era takes center stage in our special issue, which comprises four feature articles (Harrison and Chen, 2021; McKinley et al, 2021; Reynolds, 2021a), an interview with Ernesto Macaro (Sahan, 2021), two book reviews (Gajasinghe, 2021; Randez, 2021), a review of a teaching software (Winans, 2021), and two commentaries (Dewey, 2021; Wee, 2021).…”