Localised, student-centred curriculum construction : a case study of making Chinese learnable for Australian primary school students

Abstract

With the turn to 'zho ng we'n re' - ???' (Chinese fever), Chinese is now the most commonly spoken second language in Australia. There has been a concomitant growth in interest in the learning of the Chinese language in local schools. However, it has been reported that there exist huge difficulties and challenges in making Chinese learnable for the predominantly Englishspeaking learners in Australia. The high dropout rate from Chinese language courses presents evidence of this. Consequently, this case study has been conducted in a local public school of New South Wales through the Australia-China educational partnership program entitled ROSETE. Specifically, the purpose of this case study is to draw on the local students' social practices, undertaken in English, for establishing what to teach in the Chinese language classroom. The aim is to construct an appropriately learnable curriculum which will assist to enrich students' learning of Chinese. In doing so, this study focuses on local students' daily recurring sociolinguistic activities and their funds of knowledge in the school-based community through addressing and answering the overarching research question: how can the use of students' sociolinguistic activities and funds of knowledge contribute to curriculum construction to enrich the learning of the Chinese language? Guided by this question, the study initially investigates particular forms of local students' daily sociolinguistic activities, performed in English at school, then utilises them as the learning content sources. In effect, it gives priority to mobilising students' knowledge base in order to adapt their preferred instruction strategies to make them suitable for the local educational milieu. Furthermore, it is suggested that this process of generating Chinese learning materials can and should be adjusted, and then applied to more broadly to emergent second language learners of Chinese around the world, in accordance with their diversified cultural and educational environments. The case study suggests that local students' potential translanguaging capabilities between English and Chinese are evolving and becoming powerful due in part to the effort exerted by their engagement in this form of situated learning practice. Thus, not only can Chinese be made learnable, but a specific localised vocabulary can become the base for more extensive language learning.

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English