Associate Professor and Dean of the English Department, School of Foreign Languages Mao Yanfeng published as first author a research paper entitled “It’s difficult but important: toward a model of African students’ Chinese language identity development in higher education” in Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (April, 2022), a top international journal devoted to linguistics, together with Wendi Adair, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo of Canada and Su Jianhong at the Overseas Education College of Jiangsu University.
The paper adopts the longitudinal inductive research to unpack the development of Chinese language identity of 12 African students in Jiangsu University during their first year of study in China, discovering decreasing distractors and increasing contributors, as well as three bidirectional factors that both facilitate and impede the construction of Chinese language identity. The research shows that the overseas African students in China shows positive affiliation with the new language. The overall performance of their Chinese language identity is as follows: with the increase of their Chinese language knowledge, they show stronger affiliation with the Chinese language, though their original language inheritance remains unchanged, so there has been no conspicuous inclination towards Chinese language inheritance. This paper partially reveals the rules governing the development of the Chinese language identity of African students in Chinese universities from a microscopic perspective, which will positively help overseas students with their intercultural adaptation, formulate effective language policies for overseas students, and boost the efficiency of the educational administration of overseas students.
Journal of Multilingual and Multilingual Development is an interdisciplinary bilingual/multilingual research journal. In recent years, its influence in the academic community has been on the rise, and it has become one of the top journals in the field of linguistics. The journal ranks 22nd in the list of 192 SSCI journals devoted to linguistics issued in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) in June 2021. The impact factor (IF) of the journal is averaged at 2.849 for the past five years, and its JCR ranking is Q1. Up to now, only a few Chinese linguists have published articles in this journal. The publication of Mao’s paper in this journal is not only a major breakthrough made in the research on undergraduate education, but also creates a new record in the linguistic research of the School of Foreign Languages.
During the “14th Five-year Plan” period, the School of Foreign Languages thoroughly implemented the guidelines of “Highlighting features by means of dislocation competition and creating brands through international cooperation”, took more measures to make teaching and research achievements, and formulated motivational policies that would give impetus to the professional development of faculty members in line with international standards, as well as to their publication of academic papers in international journals. All these measures contributed to the great breakthrough herein publicized.
(School of Foreign Languages)
Chinese
English