Wen Xu

Shanghai Jiao Tong University | SJTU · School of Humanities

Thematic analysis (TA), as a qualitative analytic method, is widely used in health care, psychology, and beyond. However, scant details are often given to demonstrate the process of data analysis, especially in the field of education. This article describes how a hybrid approach of TA was applied to interpret multiple data sources in a practitioner...

Chinese higher education policy texts appear to suggest that training 'para-diplomats' is a goal of China's international student recruitment. However, few studies have considered the ways such policies are recontextualised and implemented at the institutional (meso-) level and become integral to students' career pathways after graduation. To addre...

Chinese has been the fastest growing modern foreign language in African societies in the last decade, due largely to the perceived rise of China as a global superpower and its recent explosion in investment in Africa. This paper focuses on how African youths’ language beliefs and motivation to learn Chinese as a global language have been affected b...

This paper intervenes in debates on Chinese higher education and social (re)production strategies in the contemporary African diaspora, developing the link between ‘Chinese’ capitals, social status and spatial mobility. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with both disadvantaged and middle-class African international students, I unpack how migrat...

This book explores and analyses Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) pedagogic practices and learning experiences within a cohort of low socio-economic status students within an Australian primary classroom. It demonstrates that, in spite of policy and educational discourses underpinning ‘Asian literacies’, Chinese teaching and learning is a fragile...

The number of international students in Chinese higher education has expanded unprecedentedly over the past decade. As opposed to neoliberal marketisation, this expansion is backed up by a community of shared future for mankind rationale, which is well articulated within the policy rhetoric as well as keynote speeches by Chinese senior government o...

This paper illustrates how spaces were created for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to emotionally engage in traditional Chinese literacy practices in a primary school in Sydney, Australia. The ethnographic data allow insight into how ordinary activities organised around character tracing and writing can pedagogically...

Against the backdrop of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the number of educational migrants from the member states, particularly African international students, has dramatically increased over the past decade in China. Much of previous research on international student mobility (ISM) and its ensu...

This paper provides a bottom-up way of approaching China’s macro-level initiative in the regions of Asia and examines the language ideologies and linguistic entrepreneurship of international students as an agentive response to China’s rise. Using data gathered via semi-structured interviews, we present the narratives of 26 Asian international stude...

While emotional geography is a burgeoning field in educational research, research on foreign languages education, and Chinese language education specifically, has largely ignored emotionality and space. We begin to rectify this situation through nuancing how students' Chinese language learning experiences are (re)shaped by recurrent emotional and r...

This article reports on a single case study of a Nigerian female international student-Sophie's changing second language (L2) learning and use experiences in China, with a specific focus on her negotiation of (non-)participation, competence and identity. Drawing upon [Lave, J., and E. Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participa...

A nuanced description of “what” (the curriculum) and “how” (the pedagogy) to teach in Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education remains unexplored in existing scholarship. This paper addresses this paucity by undertaking a practitioner inquiry to explore the intersection of Eastern pedagogy and Western students in an Australian CFL classroom, w...

While research continues to document the influence of higher education institutions on students’ identities, studies considering how these institutions inform students’ post-study aspirations and career pathways remain limited. This paper engages with a new phenomenon – international students in vocational colleges in China – where we examine how t...

On the one hand, studies of African international students in China document their instrumental role in ‘telling China’s story and spreading China’s voice’ while, on the other hand, this research indicates how their lived experiences are shaped by racialisation and exclusionary practices in social life. However, there remains surprisingly little sc...

This paper discusses germane questions of English language teaching and learning in a non-elite Chinese university. Informed by Freire’s critical pedagogical philosophy, we explore how the English reading classroom in China can provide students with meaningful opportunities to enhance their collective intercultural awareness in multicultural enviro...

Whilst the impact of the 'publish or perish' adage has received considerable attention from academics in the West, it remains under-researched in non-Western contexts, such as China. We address this gap by examining our lived experiences of navigating Chinese academia and academic publishing in the form of a duoethnographic collaborative self-study...

Educational research has been witnessing a ‘spatial turn’ and an ‘affective turn’ which have informed studies on pedagogy and foreign/second language acquisition. Drawing on a teacher-researcher ethnographic study, this paper examines the implications of primary students’ affective engagement in the space of Chinese language and culture learning in...

The proportion of international students in Chinese higher education is increasing, however, there remains little research that explores their motivations and how their learning of Chinese influences their identities and imagined futures. In this paper, we address the need for research on South-South migration—specifically Sino-African relations—...

The growth of the Chinese language in African countries and African students' consequent flocking into Chinese higher education are both emergent phenomena. This partly explains the lack of empirical research on this body of student migrants and their Chinese language learning. This paper applies Watkins' theorisation on pedagogic affect to explore...

Within the field of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) teaching, there has been limited engagement with Global Citizenship Education (GCE). The politicisation of CFL education in today's diverse and multilingual Australian classroom remains a significant cause for concern as it endangers spaces of pedagogic possibility. Drawing upon data from an A...

The 'boy turn' in research on gender and education has sought to understand how social practices and schooling contribute to the process of orientation to particular identities. This paper applies the theories of affect to explore the story of an underprivileged, low-achieving Samoan boy, as he engaged with learning Chinese in an Australian primary...

The global forces shaping international education requires us to explore how transnational pre-service teachers navigate new and unfamiliar education contexts. Within studies of transnational pre-service teacher education, the voice of the Chinese diaspora remains largely on the periphery. This article aims to redress this paucity by applying Fouca...

This paper examines intersecting concerns in global citizenship education (GCE) and English Language Teaching (ELT) in the face of globalisation. While these two educational agendas cannot be assumed to automatically converge, our study signals that promising overlaps emerge from the enactment of dialogic practices in second language education. Dra...

This paper addresses key topics of Chinese as an Additional Language (CAL) education and classroom pedagogical practices. It reports on a three-years ethnographic study within Australian schools to discuss dialogic pedagogical practices and students’ aspirations. Based on Freire’s conceptualisation of conscientização and banking education, the purp...

Affective engagement, as one facet of the engagement model, takes on the role of activating other aspects to facilitate continued action in partaking in learning activities. Recognising the silences of Bernstein's theoretical oeuvre on the affective aspect in the process of cultural transmission, this paper applies his concepts of classification (s...

Despite suspicions concerning the global expansion of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education, the teaching of Chinese is often a mainstay within global citizenship and elite education. With this paradox in mind, the paper draws on theories of classed selfhood and learner identities to explore the possibilities of CFL to influence the learner...

The teaching and learning of Chinese remains a fragile undertaking across all stages of Australian schooling. This paper reports on a practitioner inquiry into pedagogic practices and student engagement with disadvantaged primary school students in a Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) classroom in Sydney, Australia. Drawing upon studies of affect...

Building upon the genre-based research in literacy and English as a Second language (ESL) education developed in Australia in the past three decades, this paper reframes a genre-based approach to teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) in a primary classroom. Grounded in Bernsteinian sociology while also working in transdisciplinary dialogue w...