Conclusions: Moving Beyond the Enduring Dichotomies in ELT

Abstract

In the previous chapters, I have analyzed the practices and policies of English language-teaching and learning as they are reworked in the CSU context. In so doing, many of the classroom examples and participant narratives illustrated the ways teachers, students, and administrators in China were seeking to use and control English as a symbol and signification of modernity and progress. I started the book with chapters that discussed the history of English in China and how the PRC has used English in its education policy as a means to meet the needs of the state and further its goals in terms of the “four modernizations” in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology (Mao and Min, 2004). In many ways, the chapters have attempted to examine not simply how Western or state conceptions of modernity have been applied or resisted; rather, I have looked for instances in which a dialogue about teaching or a classroom practice has revealed how progress, modernity, and internationalization is being constructed and framed both in relation to East–West oppositions and outside of them. As Ong (2005) has noted in other writings on Chinese culture, I have looked into the “everyday practices of having a modern Chinese subjectivity” (p. 27), and analyzed how, in those practices, English learning and teaching have come to signify divergent aspects of having an international perspective and identity in China for different participants both local and foreign—from my student Guy, to myself, to Vice-Chancellor Tsing, to the Chinese MOE.