Abstract
Ouyang Huhua: "Understanding the Chinese Learners’ Community of Practices: An Insider-Outsider’s View"
Almost all schools and universities that Chinese learners come from are danwei, a state-owed unit standardized across the nation ever since 1950’s, yet few studies have looked into this social institution and its socialization impact constitutive of and constituted by the Chinese learners as social beings. Motivated by critique of the over-emphasis of the psychometric or cognitive nature/aspect of ESL/EFL as a result of relying on linguistics as its framework (eg, Richards and Nunan, 1990), this study is based on anthropological (Lave & Wenger, 1991), socio-political (Chao & Chen, 1997), and socio-psychological (Bond, 1991) frameworks, and my own longitudinal ethnography in a university in south China (Ouyang, 2004).A characterization of some features of all Chinese schools/universities as a community of practices is construed, including:
- enclosed walled-in community with little mobility,
- extended family like collectives of class and dormitory,
- system of personal dossier, political instructor, class committee,
- inner- vs outer- group politeness,
- hierarchically proportionate voices,
- interaction rules of favor and reciprocity,
- conflicts avoidance and third party intermediary,
- argumentation by empathy appeal,
- contrary functions of communication designated to public versus private spheres,
- paternalist leadership consisted of contrary and compensatory parental roles,
- all-compassing surveillance and fairness maintenance,
- information exchange circles and secrecy,
- familial rather than contractual relationship, and
- long term consequence for one’s behavior.
I will illustrate how these mutually reinforcing and perpetuating practices of the danwei community determine many Chinese learners’ behavior in in-/outside class participation/interaction pattern with their teacher and peers, in group collaboration, in academic writing, or in supervision communication. I argue that native English speaker teachers from a civil society type of community of practices, with their often taken for granted norms of individualism, egalitarianism, mobility, contractual relationships, instrumental communication, free spirited truth inquiry and open debate, and liberalist education ideology, need to address the nature/aspect of dare not, and will not, not only the can not of ESL/EFL for learners from China and other East Asian Confucius culture nations.
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