title: Developing Chinese Students' Metacultural Competence: A Chinese Discourse Analysis Perspective
Creators: name: Jiang, Yu
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: metacultural competence
subject: cultural conceptualisations
subject: English nativisation
subject: ELT textbooks
subject: CE

description: Research by Chinese scholars around cultural distributions and representations in English Language Teaching (ELT) textbooks for university and college education in China in the past decade has argued that these textbooks have been designed to extensively develop Chinese students’ cross-cultural communicative competence. However, it is noteworthy that previous studies have identified that the cultural content of these textbooks has little effect on developing such competence of Chinese students. By analysing the 3rd Edition of the New Horizon College English (NHCE) textbook series (Zheng et al., 2017) used by students whose major is not English, this research contributes towards contemporary explorations in understanding Chinese nativisation and conceptualisation of the English language. This research adopts the iterative rigor of document analysis as proposed by Bowen (2009) which combines aspects of content and thematic analysis. Additionally, for the data from the texts that have associated images, Weinger and Kiss’ (2013) semiotic framework is employed to support discussions around the interrelationship between texts, data, and images. This research focuses on the nativised features of Chinese English (CE) i.e., linguistic features (lexis and coherence) and cultural conceptual features (cultural event schema), and investigates the extent to which these features are presented in the NHCE textbook series (Research Question 1). The research further explores how these features may affect the development of Chinese students’ metacultural competence (Research Question 2). The findings of this study highlight an unequal distribution of linguistic and cultural conceptual features in the texts and translation exercises in each of the four books in the NHCE textbook series. Some units contain only data on linguistic or cultural conceptual ii features. Evidence of CE lexis is categorised, presented, and discussed in three parts: transliterations, loan translations, and nativised Chinese English words. The total numbers of evidence of these three parts are 11, 23, and 7 respectively. Two examples each for transliterations, loan translations, and nativised Chinese English words have been selected for discussion. In addition, evidence of CE coherence which is relevant to aspects of Chinese cultural experiences is presented in two examples (i) living in a university dormitory might cause students a giant headache (complemented by the schema: dormitory) and dedication to society (complemented by the schema: social responsibilities), and (ii) showing kèqi (courtesy/politeness) communicative behaviours when offering food to a guest /refusing food from a host at a Chinese family dinner (complemented by the schema: dining etiquette). Furthermore, the study has found fewer data regarding cultural event schemas compared to that of CE linguistic features. There are two examples delineated in this section (i) tea drinking event schema and (ii) world exploration event schema. All of the identified data are closely associated with various Chinese cultural themes and values such as economy and education. It is also argued that the nativisation of the English language is demonstrated through encoded texts and associated images in NHCE which convincingly identified and described Chinese culture and other relevant cultural concepts in a positive manner (Research Question 1). In addition, as the embedded Chinese cultural conceptualisations could be used to provide students with Chinese characteristics-centred definitions of widely understood concepts, it could be assumed that students would be able to integrate these cultural conceptualisations in future intercultural interactions, and the development of their metacultural competence could thereby be facilitated (Research Question 2). This research has implications not only for ELT textbook writers but for writers of iii Second Language Teaching (SLT) textbooks as well. One implication is that it would be necessary to provide students with cultural content containing lexis based on local cultures in SLT textbooks. Additionally, it is beneficial for SLT writers to provide students with cultural content that is written in a way that reflects the discourse features of their mother tongue. Moreover, values and themes of the source culture may need to be culturally conceptualised in textbooks to help students raise the awareness of internalising widely understood concepts into their own culture and then creating their own interpretations of the concepts. Furthermore, incorporating conceptual variations in cultural content could be considered for inclusion in ELT and SLT textbooks.