Abstract
Occupying one sixth of China’s total land mass, Xinjiang is officially designated as the Uyghur Autonomous Region. While traditionally Uyghur was used as the medium of instruction in schools dominated by Uyghur children, bilingual education as it is enforced in these schools, as well as in ever-increasing merged schools, has increasingly come to mean using Mandarin Chinese as the medium of instruction (as well as teaching it as a school subject) throughout its education system. Uyghur children’s home language is taught only as a school subject. To gain first-hand information about the models used in schools, case studies were conducted in some secondary schools and universities accessible to the authors in Xinjiang. Findings approved commonly reported realities such as limited accessibility to trilingual education for Uyghur students. Using a combination of concepts such as cultural and symbolic capitals, identity and investment, the authors analysed the data to argue that, in many situations, Uyghur students actively reposition languages as economic, symbolic or cultural capital for investment and negotiate identity and power in the society.
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Appendix: List of Student Research Questionnaire Statements
Appendix: List of Student Research Questionnaire Statements
Statement 1. Minority language teaching and learning should be promoted more seriously in my school.
Statement 2. Chinese language teaching and learning should be further enhanced in my school.
Statement 3. English language teaching and learning should be improved in my school.
Statement 4. More teachers of minority nationality should be employed by my school because they know minority pupils’ needs better.
Statement 5. More teachers of Han nationality should be employed by this school because they are generally better than minority teachers.
Statement 6. More equipment such as computers and language labs should be provided for my school.
Statement 7. There should be more schools with pupils of mixed nationalities so that we can integrate better.
Statement 8. There should be different syllabuses for Han and minority pupils, even in the same school, because their learning abilities differ.
Statement 9. Minority children should know their own minority language first, then Chinese and English.
Statement 10. Minority pupils cannot learn English as well as Han pupils. So English should be dropped from the school curriculum for them.
The responses are measured on a scale of 1–5:
1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither agree nor disagree, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly agree
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Sunuodula, M., Cao, Y. (2015). Language Learning and Empowerment: Languages in Education for Uyghurs in Xinjiang. In: Feng, A., Adamson, B. (eds) Trilingualism in Education in China: Models and Challenges. Multilingual Education, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9352-0_4
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