Abstract
This chapter synthesises and further develops the themes discussed in Chaps. 6, 7, and 8: language socialisation experience and attitudes towards dialect use in school. In the first section, we critically reexamine the notions of “habits” and the “language environment”, whereby we discuss the role of agency in making language choices which may comply with or counter institutional language preferences. In the second section, we bring in the notion of translanguaging for analysis of the students’ overall language use patterns and the educational consequences of negative attitudes towards such language practice at school.Edwards (Language Diversity in the Classroom, 2010) suggests that the most basic bilingual education programme is no programme, with the children simply “thrown into” schools that teach through languages other than their first languages and left to sink or swim. This is the closest description of the situations found in the two participating schools. A large part of the reason is structural and institutional. For mainly ideological reasons, multilingualism within the Han Chinese population is not officially recognised. Such fundamental denial of linguistic diversity within Chinese inevitably underlies the language problems and education problems we address. However, given the limited scope and space of the current study, we could only scratch the surface here.
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Liang (梁), S. (2015). Schools in the Era of Multilingualism. In: Language Attitudes and Identities in Multilingual China. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12619-7_10
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