Recently, Assoc. Prof. Mao Yanfeng, Deputy Director of the Department of English, from the School of Foreign Languages, Jiangsu University (JSU), had a research paper titled “It’s difficult but important”: toward a model of African students’ Chinese language identity development in higher education published in the prestigious Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, April 2022 edition.
Prof. Wendy Adair, School of Psychology of the University of Waterloo, Canada, and Prof. Su Jianhong, Overseas Education College of JSU, are co-authors of the article.
The Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development is a recognized interdisciplinary bilingual/multilingual research journal and one of the leading journals in the field of linguistics. The journal ranks 22nd on a list of 192 SSCI journals in linguistics published in 2021.
The paper traces how 12 multilingual African students developed their Chinese language identity (CLI) during their first year at a Chinese university, and finds that the gradually decreasing interference items and the increase in promotion items, as well as the gradual increase of two-way items, have played a significant role in both interfering with and promoting the development of CLI. Studies have shown that the CLI of African students generally develops in a positive direction, and the manifestations of their CLI is highlighted in the the following dimensions: in terms of dimensions of language identity, Chinese language expertise and a positive affiliation with the new language increased over time without change in the students’ original language inheritance, and there is no obvious Chinese language inheritance tendency.
From a microscopic perspective, this paper explores some of the development rules of CLI of African students attending Chinese universities, which has a positive guiding significance for helping international students to adapt across cultures lines, formulating effective international student language policies and improving the efficiency of teaching and management of international students.