Exploring Chinese instructors’ perceptions and practices of integrating culture into tertiary-level English education: A case study

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dc.contributor.advisorBockarie, Abu
dc.contributor.advisorBlachford, Dongyan
dc.contributor.authorLiu, Yueming
dc.contributor.committeememberBrown, Douglas
dc.contributor.committeememberSterzuk, Andrea
dc.contributor.committeememberCharrier, Philip
dc.contributor.externalexaminerZaidi, Rahat
dc.date.accessioned2022-11-30T19:23:36Z
dc.date.available2022-11-30T19:23:36Z
dc.date.issued2022-07
dc.descriptionA Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education, University of Regina. xi, 275 p.en_US
dc.description.abstractPedagogical conceptualization of culture influences, in significant ways, how language instructors identify cultural points, contextualize culture for pedagogical purposes, and scaffold student meaning-making. Although this issue is at the core of intercultural pedagogy, literature suggests it remains insufficiently investigated. As a meaning-based and process-oriented study, this research aimed to develop an in-depth understanding of participants’ collective ways of conceptualizing culture within English language teaching (ELT), delineate the most salient features of their classroom meaning-making, and reveal the contextual factors that shaped the local perceptions and practices. This case study employed a qualitative research approach and explored twelve participants’ perceptions and practices of integrating culture into ELT in a higher educational institution in China. Data were collected through one-on-one semi-structured interviews, non-participant classroom observations, and documentation. The findings of the study revealed that the participants conceived culture more as a noun with its referential meaning ready to be transmitted to the learner in form of objective knowledge than as a verb (Street, 1991) with its meaning to be explored and interpreted in dynamic social interactions. Further, they perceived culture more as social constraints in form of cultural norms that demanded conformity than as public resources that could be drawn on strategically and creatively to serve purposes. In addition, they viewed culture more as value-free that could be grasped at the denotative level than as value-laden with its barely known face hidden under the veil of cultural myth (Barthes, 1957). In terms of participants’ general approach to culture in-ELT, they tended to contextualize culture in self-sanctioned “purified” ways. There was a general resistance towards problematizing cultural meaning and engaging learners in “struggles over meaning” (Kubota, 1999, p. 30). The participants were usually at the center of classroom meaning-making and monologic meaning-making featured most classrooms observed. Overall, Classroom discourses did not enact a dialogic stance nor were they oriented towards engendering productive meaning-making and developing agentive cultural competence. The contextual conditions that influenced participants’ perceptions and practices included participants’ low theoretical literacy level, insufficient in-service education opportunities, sanitized culture-related textbook contents, and the burning issues resulted from the changing ideological landscape in China. The study concluded that the meaning-making potentials of the current culture instruction could be expanded through exploring poststructuralist perspectives on culture and reorienting culture pedagogies towards individual-level culture, problematized cultural meanings, and more agentive cultural competence. The implications of the study for policy, practice, theory development and further research, as well as the recommendations arising from it, were discussed.en_US
dc.description.authorstatusStudenten
dc.description.peerreviewyesen
dc.identifier.tcnumberTC-SRU-15503
dc.identifier.thesisurlhttps://ourspace.uregina.ca/bitstream/handle/10294/15503/Liu_Yueming_PhD_EDUC_Thesis_Fall2022.pdf
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10294/15503
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.publisherFaculty of Graduate Studies and Research, University of Reginaen_US
dc.titleExploring Chinese instructors’ perceptions and practices of integrating culture into tertiary-level English education: A case studyen_US
dc.typeThesisen_US
thesis.degree.departmentFaculty of Educationen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineEducationen_US
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Reginaen
thesis.degree.levelDoctoralen
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)en_US
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