Routine Literacy Practices as a Cultural Agenda: Children’s Experiences of Writing “Difficult” Chinese Characters in Australia

Abstract

This paper illustrates how spaces were created for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to emotionally engage in traditional Chinese literacy practices in a primary school in Sydney, Australia. The ethnographic data allow insight into how ordinary activities organised around character tracing and writing can pedagogically evoke students’ “discomforting” emotions while socialising them into ways of becoming and embodying a “real Chinese.” By providing a range of alternative readings that counter and challenge the hegemonic and essentialised discourses, we instantiate that repetitive, non-challenging Chinese literacy practices are charged with a cultural agenda that teaches the students to think, behave and feel (or be) “more Chinese” in CFL learning and their interface with Chinese communities. Such work has implications for future research agenda in the Australian and global context regarding how students’ emotional experiences help shape and reshape their emerging and dynamic learner identities when pedagogies of discomfort are implemented in foreign languages education.

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