Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities: Many pathways to being Chinese(12 AILA Applied Linguistics Series)

This book brings together new theoretical perspectives and bilingual education models from different sociopolitical and cultural contexts across the globe in order to address the importance of sociocultural, educational and linguistic environments that create, enhance or limit the ways in which diasporic children and young people acquire the ‘Chinese’ language. The chapters present a variety of research-based studies on Chinese heritage language education and bilingual education drawing on detailed investigations of formal and informal educational input including language socialization in families, community heritage language schools and government sponsored educational institutions. Exploring the many pathways of learning ‘Chinese’ and being ‘Chinese’, this volume also examines the complex nature of language acquisition and development, involving language attitudes and ideologies as well as linguistic practices and identity formation. Learning Chinese in Diasporic Communities is intended for researchers, teacher-educators, students and practitioners in the fields of Chinese language education and bilingual education and more broadly those concerned with language policy studies and sociolinguistics.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. Contributors; 3. List of figures; 4. List of tables; 5. Introduction (by Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan); 6. Part I. Family socialization patterns in language learning and literacy practices; 7. Chapter 1. Language socialization into Chinese language and "Chineseness" in diaspora communities (by Duff, Patricia A.); 8. Chapter 2. Family language policy: Is learning Chinese at odds with learning English? (by Curdt-Christiansen, Xiao Lan); 9. Part II. Complementary/heritage Chinese schools in diasporas; 10. Chapter 3. Chinese complementary schools in Scotland and the Continua of Biliteracy (by Hancock, Andy); 11. Chapter 4. Chinese heritage language schools in the United States (by Lu, Chan); 12. Chapter 5. Learning and teaching Chinese in the Netherlands: The metapragmatics of a polycentric language (by Li, Jinling); 13. Chapter 6. Language and literacy teaching, learning and socialization in the Chinese complementary school classroom (by Wei, Li); 14. Part III. Bilingual Chinese educational models; 15. Chapter 7. Chinese Education in Malaysia: Past and Present (by Xiaomei, Wang); 16. Chapter 8. Conflicting goals of language-in-education planning in Singapore: Chinese character ( hanzi) education as a case (by Zhao, Shouhui); 17. Chapter 9. Chinese language teaching in Australia (by Chen, Shen); 18. Part IV. Chinese language, culture and identity; 19. Chapter 10. Speaking of identity?: British-Chinese young people's perspectives on language and ethnic identity (by Francis, Becky); 20. Chapter 11. Chinese language learning by adolescents and young adults in the Chinese diaspora: Motivation, ethnicity, and identity (by Li, Duanduan); 21. Index

Review :
This book makes a solid and sustained contribution to not only the burgeoning literature about Chinese as a global language but also our general understanding of linguistic, cultural and educational development in an increasingly multilingual world. Bringing together perspectives from an array of researchers from Asia, Europe, North America and Australia, it sheds new light on the creative and complex process whereby the Chinese language is used, taught, acquired, inherited and maintained in a wide range of socio-cultural-historical contexts. It advances our knowledge of the interaction between transnational migrations on the one hand, and language, identity, family dynamics, formal education, policy and politics on the other. It succeeds in striking a balance between rigor in research and richness in recounting. This book is a very welcome antidote and corrective to recent writing and policy development in response to the rise of economic power of the People’s Republic of China that neglects the large number of geographically dispersed and socio-culturally diverse people who are the speakers of Chinese. In too many societies Chinese speakers are positioned as distant interlocutors to be encountered on foreign travel to conduct business in an admittedly very large but single socio-political entity. But Chinese is a living language of communities all across the world, one of its distinguishing features being the diaspora with its many varieties held together by common writing and some norms of origin, shared tradition and common values. In this diaspora there is also a multiplicity of socio-political realities, independent statehood, transitional autonomies of various degrees and both large and very small immigrant statuses. The authors and editors of this fine collection track the array of family socialisation patterns, complementary/heritage language schooling, diverse models of bilingualism and complex configurations of identity and culture that characterise the Sinophone world, and expand our sense of what it means to say “Chinese” and mean either people, language or culture. This is an important service to scholarship, to good teaching focused on learner needs and to new and more sophisticated language education policies adapted to the trans-national and diasporic realities of languages that have more than states behind them.