Towards more equitable pedagogy: The evolution of Mandarin pre- and in-service teachers’ critical language awareness

IF 1.6 2区文学 Q2 EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

Linguistics and Education Pub Date : 2025-06-25 DOI:10.1016/j.linged.2025.101442

Chencen Cai , Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth

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Abstract

This study explored pre- and in-service Mandarin teachers’ evolving critical language awareness regarding Chinese variation and its relation to pedagogy. The Han Chinese context involves a wide range of language varieties including Standardized Mandarin and fāngyán, often translated to “dialect” in English, a term that differs in definition and scope from its translation. Furthermore, investigating teachers’ critical language awareness can reveal current social inequalities in second/world language education.

Participants were 30 pre- and in-service native Chinese-speaking teachers in the United States, spanning three stages: beginning-stage graduate students, advanced-stage students, and graduates teaching Mandarin in American schools.

Through a constructivist grounded theory approach, we conducted two semi-structured interviews with each participant. They shared varied perspectives about Chinese varieties, which demonstrated development across the three groups. Attitudes towards instruction reflected participants’ sociolinguistic awareness which sometimes revealed inconsistencies. Implications are offered regarding teacher education curricula to support students’ self-esteem and encourage heritage language maintenance as well as developing critical language awareness to connect to equity in socio-political understandings and pedagogy.

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走向更公平的教学法：职前与在职汉语教师批判语言意识的演变

本研究探讨在职及职前普通话教师对汉语变异的批判性语言意识及其与教学法的关系。汉语语境涉及广泛的语言变体，包括标准化普通话和fāngyán，在英语中通常翻译为“方言”，这一术语在定义和范围上与翻译不同。此外，调查教师的批判性语言意识可以揭示当前第二世界语言教育中的社会不平等现象。参与者是30名在职和在职的美国本土汉语教师，跨越三个阶段：初级研究生、高级研究生和在美国学校教授汉语的研究生。通过建构主义扎根理论方法，我们对每位参与者进行了两次半结构化访谈。他们分享了对中国品种的不同看法，这表明了三个群体的发展。对教学的态度反映了参与者的社会语言学意识，这有时会显示出不一致。本文对教师教育课程提供了启示，以支持学生的自尊，鼓励传统语言的维护，以及发展批判性语言意识，将社会政治理解和教学法中的公平联系起来。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Linguistics and Education Multiple-

CiteScore

2.80

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： Linguistics and Education encourages submissions that apply theory and method from all areas of linguistics to the study of education. Areas of linguistic study include, but are not limited to: text/corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, functional grammar, discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, conversational analysis, linguistic anthropology/ethnography, language acquisition, language socialization, narrative studies, gesture/ sign /visual forms of communication, cognitive linguistics, literacy studies, language policy, and language ideology.