This polity study is about the language policy situation in the People's Republic of China (China) with a focus on one official minority language, Zhuang. The paper offers an examination of the language policy and planning (LPP) framework nationally as it relates to official minority languages, and regionally as it relates to the Zhuang minority…

The decolonization of knowledge is increasingly high on the agenda of applied and sociolinguistics. This article contributes to this agenda by examining how peripheral multilingual scholars confront their linguistic and epistemic exclusion from global knowledge production. Based on the product of such a challenge -- a Chinese-centric special issue…

Based on a larger ethnography (Li, 2017. Social Reproduction and Migrant Education: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography of Burmese Students' Learning Experiences at a Border High School in China. (PhD), Macquarie University. http://www.languageonthemove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/LI_Jia_Social_reproduction_and_migrant_education.pdf) and…

Although the notion of Global Englishes (GE) has been widely discussed in the literature, few books consider how GE can be translated into educational practice. This book addresses the incorporation of GE into language policy and curriculum, pedagogy and assessment practices, and focuses on a wide range of geographical and language contexts.…

This paper analyzes dialogues between insurance sales agents and their clients in transformational rural China from the perspective of interactive frames, footings and discourse identities. Through the analysis of three types of talk, namely, friendship talk, institutional talk and task-oriented talk, the ambiguous and conflicting identities that…

This paper provides an ethnographic understanding of harmony as language policy in China, grounded in a historical analysis of "harmony" ([character omitted] "he") as a distinct traditional Chinese (Confucian) ideal that gradually finds its new expressions through the policy of Harmonious Society ([characters omitted]…

This article reports the findings of a sociolinguistic ethnographic inquiry into the constructions of internal rural-to-urban migrant students by one urban public school in China, and how these students positioned themselves to these constructions against the background of the school's neoliberal transformation. This inquiry finds that, due to the…

Little research has focused on extended concurrent speech, unexpected floor taking, or topic switching, since it has been deemed rare (Schegloff 2000. "Overlapping talk and the organization of turn-taking for conversation." "Language in Society" 29(1). 1-63.) or inappropriate (Goldberg 1990." Interrupting the discourse on…

Key "generic" assessment task words such as "discuss" and "critically evaluate" are integral to higher education assessment. Although sources such as study skills guides give generic decontextualised glossaries of these words, much research rightly argues for greater dialogue between students (particularly…

The study of language contact epitomizes the dynamics of language as a system of human communication. The competing linguistic forces at work when speakers of different language varieties come into contact can be narrowed down to two basic concepts--convergence and divergence. Looking at linguistic areas using a macro approach, languages in…

The People's Republic of China (PRC) has often been considered a monolithic, monolingual state but, in fact, it is linguistically and culturally diverse. Despite the size, there is still a lack of sociolinguistic studies on the Han Chinese in the PRC. Therefore, this study focuses on the language attitudes of Cantonese-speaking students in…

This article will reflect on the risks of a careless application of "safe-talk", a fruitful analytical concept that has been widely used in classroom discourse studies to link chorus-like repetition sequences with certain institutional and social processes related to either post-colonialism or migration. The discussion will draw on a…

How can the education of teacher-researchers from China be framed in ways so that they might make Chinese learnable for primary and secondary school learners for whom English is their everyday language of instruction and communication. The concept "making Chinese learnable" and the characters of the language learners are explained in the…

In this article we examine ideologies of English in present-day China with a special focus on textbook discourse. The research framework is informed by critical theories on language and education. Critical discourse analysis is applied as a methodological approach characterized by a socially committed attitude in the explanation and interpretation…

This paper presents a case study of a group of Chinese ESL learners in China, who study English by immersing themselves regularly and rigorously in English television drama. A self-directed learning pedagogy has been developed and discussed, which seems to have signposted an effective and economic way for ESL learners to improve linguistic,…