Bücher der Reihe Palgrave Studies in Teaching and Learning Chinese

This book examines Transnational Chinese Language Education (TCLE) in the Australian context. Taking a post-monolingual perspective, the authors examine Chinese teachers' monolingual and multilingual practices and mindsets in their educational practices. They find that a Chinese-centric monolingual mindset dominates the Chinese teachers, while a multilingual mindset permeates in their classroom teaching, creating an unconscious tension between the two perspectives. The book proposes that it is the responsibility of teacher educators to train future Chinese teachers with an awareness of this issue, as well as suitable strategies to overcome it and be efficient language teachers. This book will be of interest to applied linguists, pre-service and in-service language teachers, as well as students and scholars of Teaching Chinese to Speakers of Other Languages (TCSOL).

This book reports the results of an ethnographic study, focusing primarily on the experiences of four teachers of the Chinese language in Australian secondary schools. The author creates an audience for their voices as they reflect on their own understandings of culture, language teaching, and culture in language teaching through semi-structured interviews, and compares these reflections with written stimulus dialogues designed to elicit 'culture-in-language' reflections, as well as curriculum and policy documents produced by the Australian government. The book's findings indicate that teachers of the Chinese language are diverse in their views on culture, language teaching, and the ways in which culture can or should inform language teaching, and the author argues that language teacher intercultural competence cannot be assessed through a synthesis of the current English-only research literature. This book will be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers of Chinese as a foreign language, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education more broadly.

This book seeks for an alternative perspective in analysing cultural phenomena to supplement the norm of Western dominant theorising and conceptualisation. It engages notions and concepts of culture developed by Chinese cultural theorists when addressing Chinese teachers' cross-cultural experiences in Australian school settings.

Drawing on a case study from Hong Kong, it analyses naturally observed language patterns in CSL classrooms and the attitudes of students and teachers towards prescribed classroom language policies, and thereby demonstrates the importance of mixing Chinese, English and students' home languages to achieve successful second language learning.