“Post-monolingual education” (Singh, 2017) emerges as a perspective to deconstruct the English-only monolingualism in academic environment. Singh’s (2017) idea of “post-monolingual education” differs from monolingualism in that (a) he values students’/teachers’ multilingual capabilities in foreign language teaching practice, while (b) he acknowledges the on-going tensions posed by monolingual practices in languages education. By bringing Singh’s notion into the field of second language education, this paper claims that “post-monolingualism” endorse (a) the function of learner’s native language capacity in foreign language learning and communication; (b) the merit of learning and using diverse foreign languages and cultures other than English; and (c) mutual information transmission between the foreign language learner and the native speaker of that target language. This paper mainly deals with the latter two features when post-monolingualism is concerned, as it is a study on China’s foreign language education policy.
Taking the perspective of “policy as practice” (Heimans, 2011), this study intends to explore the relationship between different stakeholders involved in China’s foreign language education practice. Employing critical discourse analysis as its overall research method, this paper firstly identifies the post-monolingual shifts in foreign language curricula at secondary and tertiary education levels issued in 2017. Then it attributes these features to the changing themes in China’s political agenda (Shen & Xia, 2015) and the accordant development in International Education Section of the annual work plans issued by China’s Ministry of Education (2013-2017). The new trend in China’s national English examinations is also provided to serve as a triangulation. This paper ends with a suggestion for further research on teachers’/learners’ conception of these language policies.
Keywords: Post-monolingualism; foreign language education policy; political agenda; curricula; national English examination;
Reference
Heimans, S. (2011). Education Policy, Practice, and Power[J]. Educational Policy, 26(3): 369–393.
Singh, M. (2017). Post-monolingual research methodology: Multilingual researchers democratizing theorizing and doctoral education. Education Sciences, 7(1), doi: 10.3390/educsci7010028.
Shen, Q. & Xia, T. (2015). Strategic transformation for the construction of our national foreign language competence under the guidance of the strategy of “One Belt and One Road”. Journal of Yunan Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences), 47(5), 9-13.
