Results by title
3 books match the query 'Chinese speakers'
Doing Difference Differently
Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and AffordancesZhaozhe Wang
Utah State University Press, 2024
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
Multilingual Writing in Entanglement
Becoming With Others Through Chronotopic Figuring and Unpredictable EncountersXiqiao Wang
Utah State University Press, 2025
This longitudinal qualitative study follows Morgan and Leo through their undergraduate careers, collecting rich ethnographic data across private, academic, and digital spaces. The resulting theoretical framework conceptualizes multilingual writing as simultaneously strategic, agentive, creative, diffused, contingent, and messy—a phenomenon shaped by dynamic interplay between ephemeral encounters and established practices. Employing chronotopic figuring as a methodological tool, Wang illuminates aspects of multilingual writing often elided in research: fleeting encounters that energize composition, reciprocal relationships that distribute writing labor, unexpected detours that redirect the writing process, and the layering of writing and identity practices across multiple historical trajectories. This approach moves beyond examining writing in isolated moments to trace how meaning emerges across languages, modes, and spacetimes.
Multilingual Writing in Entanglement offers crucial insights into how international students strategically and improvisationally reconfigure their semiotic and rhetorical repertoires to write multilingual lives into meaning. This work is influential for scholars and educators in composition, literacy studies, multilingual education, ESL, and linguistics.
Writing in the Devil's Tongue
A History of English Composition in ChinaXiaoye You
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
Winner, CCCC Outstanding Book Award
Until recently, American composition scholars have studied writing instruction mainly within the borders of their own nation, rarely considering English composition in the global context in which writing in English is increasingly taught. Writing in the Devil’s Tongue challenges this anachronistic approach by examining the history of English composition instruction in an East Asian country. Author Xiaoye You offers scholars a chance to observe how a nation changed from monolingual writing practices to bilingual writing instruction in a school setting.
You makes extensive use of archival sources to help trace bilingual writing instruction in China back to 1862, when English was first taught in government schools. Treating the Chinese pursuit of modernity as the overarching theme, he explores how the entry of Anglo-American rhetoric and composition challenged and altered the traditional monolithic practice of teaching Chinese writing in the Confucian spirit. The author focuses on four aspects of this history: the Chinese negotiation with Anglo-American rhetoric, their search for innovative approaches to instruction, students’ situated use of English writing, and local scholarship in English composition.
Unlike previous composition histories, which have tended to focus on institutional, disciplinary, and pedagogical issues, Writing in the Devil’s Tongue brings students back to center stage by featuring several passages written by them in each chapter. These passages not only showcase rhetorical and linguistic features of their writings but also serve as representative anecdotes that reveal the complex ways in which students, responding to their situations, performed multivalent, intercultural discourses. In addition, You moves out of the classroom and into the historical, cultural, and political contexts that shaped both Chinese writing and composing practices and the pedagogies that were adopted to teach English to Chinese in China. Teachers, students, and scholars reading this book will learn a great deal about the political and cultural impact that teaching English composition has had in China and about the ways in which Chinese writing and composition continues to be shaped by rich and diverse cultural traditions and political discourses.
In showcasing the Chinese struggle with teaching and practicing bilingual composition, Writing in the Devil’s Tongue alerts American writing scholars and teachers to an outdated English monolingual mentality and urges them to modify their rhetorical assumptions, pedagogical approaches, and writing practices in the age of globalization.