Studying in China but in an English Program: Language Ideologies among Study Abroad Students in China in the Age of Belt and Road

Abstract

As China’s signature policy to expand its global influence, the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) incorporates plans to drastically increase the number of international students to study in China. Following the BRI, a growing trend among Chinese institutions of higher education is to offer programs taught exclusively in English for study abroad students, many of whom are from non-Anglophone countries in Asia, Europe, and Africa. While this trend may seem to reflect neoliberal ideals that assume English to be the global language in the marketing of study abroad (Kubota, 2016a), it simultaneously presents an intriguing reality in the context of China, where the BRI itself is intended to expand China’s economic and cultural influence globally. By drawing from the theory of language ideology (e.g., Gal, 1989; Kroskrity, 2004, 2010), this dissertation investigates this phenomenon of study abroad in English programs in China against the backdrop of BRI. Defined as beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use (Kroskrity, 2010), language ideology is a useful tool to understand how individuals negotiate language use vis-à-vis powerful social structures in specific contexts (Douglas Fir Group, 2016). In the case of study abroad, language ideologies can operate as organizing principles to recruit students and direct them toward certain destinations but not others (Park & Bae, 2009), and yet these ideologies may also become contested and negotiated in multilingual realities (De Costa, 2016). This dissertation focuses on study abroad students’ everyday academic, social, and professional life in China. The participants were thirty study abroad students and eight other stakeholders in a business program at a public university in Shanghai, China. Data were collected over the course of six months from questionnaires, 87-hour interviews, field notes from the classroom (213 class-hours) and participant observation, and artifacts. The findings here reveal perplexing and oftentimes contradictory language ideologies in institutional discourses and the students’ everyday practices. Due both to the linguistic segregation that separated them from local Chinese students, who were prohibited to enroll in English-only degree programs within China, and to these students’ own belief that English should be the international language, these students formed a so-called “foreign bubble” environment for both academic learning and social purposes. Yet their belief of English as an international language was immediately challenged by their perceived reality that Chinese people do not speak good English and that Chinese is necessary for living in China. In the professional domain, some of these students came to China with long term career goals and even hopes for immigration. However, employers stereotyped the English-only business program to be academically compromised and its students to be linguistically and professionally less qualified than their peers in China’s regular programs taught in Chinese. Meanwhile, those students in the program who were actually proficient in both English and Chinese were often hired to do simple language services (e.g., translating) (Heller & McElhinny, 2017) and represent the companies’ international image, rather than their specialization in business. These results show the coexistence of both neoliberal ideologies and another set of thinking that is associated with China’s rising power in the world. These findings not only add insights into the existing scholarship on the use of English in academic programs; but more importantly, they show inconsistencies in China’s language and education policies that sometimes promote the Chinese language as a tool to enhance China’s soft power abroad (Hubbert, 2019) but in other instances -- such as the case in this study -- the language is seen as an obstacle that needs to be removed in order to promote China’s influence.