Room G/552 and online (please email olivia.knapton@kcl.ac.uk to receive Teams link)

Speaker 1: Yangyi Zou

An in-depth exploration of incorporating a multilingual perspective on English into teaching practices in a Chinese university context.

Nowadays, English has become the most widely used language for global communication as a lingua franca (ELF). This sociolinguistic reality has led to the emergence of ELF research, which reconceptualises English as a pluralised and dynamic resource shaped by speakers from diverse linguacultural backgrounds. Rather than privileging native-speaker norms as the sole legitimate model of English, ELF scholarship emphasises communicative intelligibility, linguistic flexibility, decolonized language ownership and the right to express non-native speakers’ own sociocultural identities. Despite these theoretical developments, English language teaching (ELT) in China, continues to be dominated by monolingual and native-speaker oriented pedagogies. At the same time, the rise of authoritarian nationalism, has increasingly framed English as a vehicle of Western cultural influence.

Against this backdrop, this study investigates the pedagogical implications of implementing an ELF-oriented approach within a Chinese university ELT classroom. The four-month fieldwork as a teacher-researcher combined classroom observation, interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires with both students and teachers, alongside an action research (AR). The AR intervention introduced ELF-oriented teaching through the design of original teaching materials that foregrounded linguistic diversity, communicative strategies and the expression of students’ sociocultural identities.

The findings suggest that while the intervention produced limited structural change within the classroom, it nevertheless created a space in which alternative perspectives on English could be explored. Exposure to ELF-oriented ideas appeared to reduce students’ speaking anxiety, which was largely shaped by native-speakerism in conventional ELT practices. Moreover, the intervention encouraged students to engage more critically with language ideologies and to reflect on the sociopolitical positioning and discourses surrounding English in contemporary China. At the same time, the study reveals the significant institutional, ideological, and pedagogical constraints that shape teachers’ and students’ responses to pedagogical innovation.

Speaker 2: Xinyi Zhai

Affordances of Museum-Based Foreign Language Learning: Engagement, Scaffolding, and Intercultural Development in Informal Lifelong Learning

Abstract forthcoming