Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un)Real Estate in Contemporary China

Dancing K-Pop with Chinese and “English in Class Please”: Policy Negotiations as Relational-Languaging Episodes

“…Subsequent research into Second Language Acquisition and Development has shown that such episodes are important moments of meta-linguistic talk in which students challenge, develop, and otherwise negotiate their knowledge of the “target” language (Edstrom, 2015; Leeser, 2004; Swain and Lapkin, 1998; Williams, 1999). The notion of a “target” language for “acquisition” evokes for us a view of English as pressurised and commodified that fits well with this Special Issue’s concerns about EMI / Transnational Higher Education (see Fleming and Harrison 2020: ch. 5).…”

“…The particular group of students in this example are all Chinese women and we can assume they are either at or very close above/below IELTS 6.5 level. Building on our previous discussions of this example (Chen et al, 2019; Fleming and Harrison, 2020, Ch.5), we aim to perceive how language policy threads might interweave with a relational-languaging episode on the micro-scale of sense-making behaviours. The richness of this example warrants a single case analysis, leaving other forms of discourse analytical and corpus research for future endeavours.…”

“…Multiple intermeshing reals were similarly evoked in Fleming and Harrison’s study of millennial forms of consumer culture in China and their impact on Chinese subjectivities, societies, and cities (Fleming and Harrison, 2020). Chinese Urban Shi-nema aims to frame the broader horizon of a modernising Chinese city and its inhabitants’ micro-interactions in one dynamic picture, which includes the city’s Sino-foreign venture and EMI teaching policies.…”

“…This kind of language policy negotiation can offer valuable insights to English-Medium Instruction (EMI). In a review of research on transnational higher education universities, De Costa et al (2020) point to such interactions as valuable to understanding “the pedagogical practices that are enacted in the EMI classroom” (p.6), and, more generally, to shedding light on the impact of language ideologies and forces of marketisation on the ecologies of EMI universities (Fleming and Harrison, 2020; Han et al, 2019; Pennycook, 2018). These real-time policy negotiations are also a type of “language-related episode” – that is, “part of a dialogue where the students talk about the language they are producing, question their language use, or correct themselves or others” (Swain and Lapkin, 1998: 326).…”

“…As we know from two decades of Second Language Acquisition research, language-related episodes open up critical moments for negotiating linguistic knowledge and meaning in classroom discourse (Edstrom, 2015; Leeser, 2004; Ohta, 2001; Williams, 1999). From our psychogeographic and ecological-enactive perspectives (Fleming and Harrison, 2020; Harrison, 2020), we see student group interactions as meshworks or knottings of “entangled lines of life, growth and movement” (Ingold, 2011: 63). In the EMI classroom, language policy negotiation is interlaced through such knottings and may tighten or loosen depending on the situation.…”