Abstract
The foreign language teaching profession is grappling with two contradictory demands. On the one hand, teachers have to prepare their students to interact with native speakers whose national language, history, geography, culture, and literature are different from their own. On the other hand, teachers have to prepare their students to enter a global economy in which national boundaries have lost the importance they once had; standard languages are permeated with English as a global language; national borders now include people who speak a variety of regional, ethnic, and immigrant languages; and the students’ interlocutors are likely to be other multilingual speakers rather than monolingual native speakers. Local efforts to come to grips with the contradictions of globalization, such as translanguaging and multilingual practices, have not addressed the fundamental institutional and epistemological tensions between teaching language as a cultural icon of national unity and teaching language as a tool of global communication. To explore these tensions, we compare the case of foreign language education in France and China, two traditionally centralized national educational systems, one in the European, the other in the Asian context, each with their strong tradition of monolingual literacy education and their historical and ideological reservations about the benefits of multilingualism and multiculturalism. Based on concrete examples taken from the teaching of Mandarin and French as foreign languages, we examine the possibility of redefining the glocal contact zone in a way that honors both universality and particularity, plurality and specificity.
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Notes
- 1.
Foreign language here includes English when it is taught as the dominant language of English-speaking countries, not English as a global language or English as a Lingua Franca.
- 2.
Unfortunately, to fight against “elitism”, the 2016 reform plans to eliminate the European sections and reduce the number of classes that teach two foreign languages as early as the fifth grade. See http://eduscol.education.fr/cid87584/le-college-2016-questions-reponses.html.
- 3.
Hence, the compulsory two foreign languages that all school children have to learn in France.
- 4.
Needless to say, between this ideal and the reality in the schools there is a gap that some like Joelle Aden attempt to bridge through an approach that is both intellectual and embodied/affective like theater (Aden 2014).
- 5.
Retrieved from http://www.gov.cn/english/laws/2005-09/19/content_64906.htm.
- 6.
The Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895) was a period of institutional reforms initiated during the late Qing Dynasty, the purpose of which was to promote economic and military modernization in China.
- 7.
Informed by the collective spirit of Chinese culture derived from Confucianism, the Chinese notion of humanism emphasizes the relational nature of the self. At the core of this particular humanistic tradition, there lies an argument that the identity and dignity of an individual do not exist as single entities, but are dialectically related to the identity and dignity of his or her nation. In this light, the enactment of self-cultivation is indissolubly linked to a conscious awareness of one’s subjective position vis-à-vis others.
- 8.
Dawson, R. (1993). Confucius: The analects. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- 9.
García and Leiva (2014, p. 202), like Aden, draw their inspiration from Maturana & Varela’s notion of “structural coupling”, a feature of all living systems coupled with their environment. But they interpret “structural” to mean the interaction between individual structures (molecules, speakers) and their environment. By contrast, Aden, a French researcher, draws on the affordances of the French language to highlight two meanings of the original term: Fr. structurel refers to the interaction between structures, Fr. structural refers to the internal organization or autopoeisis of living systems. It is this second meaning that she builds on to develop her argument.
- 10.
The contemporary Chinese dictionary (6th Ed.). Beijing: The Commercial Press.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to thank Joelle Aden, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Paris XII, and Zhu Hua, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck College, University of London, for their gracious and valuable feedback on an earlier version of this chapter.
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Kramsch, C., Yin, P. (2018). Teaching Foreign Languages in the Glocal Contact Zone: The Case of France and China. In: Selvi, A., Rudolph, N. (eds) Conceptual Shifts and Contextualized Practices in Education for Glocal Interaction. Intercultural Communication and Language Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6421-0_2
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