Date of Award:

5-2013

Document Type:

Dissertation

Degree Name:

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department:

School of Teacher Education and Leadership

Committee Chair(s)

Steven P. Camicaia

Committee

Steven P. Camicaia

Committee

J. Spencer Clark

Committee

Barry Franklin

Committee

Sylvia Read

Committee

Ko-Yin Sung

Abstract

Under conditions of globalization and massive social, economic and political changes, the world in the last two decades has witnessed a wave of revived interest in
citizenship and citizenship education as well as the emergence of foreign language education as an important but under-researched site for the education of citizens. In this study, I critically examined the concept of good citizenship embedded in current foreign language curricula in China and the U.S. to see what it means in the two different contexts. I conducted a comparative critical discourse analysis of four data sets: (a) foreign language policies and/or curriculum standards implemented in Shanghai in China and Utah in the U.S.; (b) EFL (English as a foreign language) and CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) instructional materials developed for the first through third and tenth through twelfth graders in Shanghai and Utah respectively; (c) media accounts relating foreign language education with citizenship education in the two countries; and (d) relevant academic publications. The following questions were used to guide this study: How is the concept of good citizenship portrayed in China’s EFL curriculum? How is the concept of good citizenship portrayed in America’s CFL curriculum? Where and why do the two cases converge and diverge significantly?

Three sets of findings were yielded in response to the three research questions. First, in the case of China, the most popular good citizen image refers to an individual
whose allegiance is to the nation and the market, whereas the second popular perception is someone who observes Confucian moral principles and adopts a global perspective. Second, in the case of the U.S., the dominant good citizenship notion refers to someone who is market oriented, whether the allegiance is to the nation or the entire human family. Given the particularities of the historical and contemporary social contexts that China and the U.S. are situated in, it makes sense that different citizenship notions are valued in the two countries. Even when the same notion appears to be prioritized in both cases, that notion indeed embodies context-specific connotations. That said, there are still some common features that the good citizenship notions embedded in China’s EFL curriculum and America’s CFL curriculum share. For one thing, a patriotic entrepreneur is considered a good citizenship norm in both cases, which testifies to the tenacity of nationalism and the popularity of a promarket mentality in the present-day world. For another, however different the social contexts are, the preferred good citizenship notion embedded in official documents works in the best interest of the power elite in each society and takes maintaining this group’s social control as its hidden agenda.

I expect that findings from this study could stimulate more theoretical research and practical debate at various venues such as language classrooms, mass media, and academic publications on the roles foreign language education should play in the education of good citizens, with the topic of good citizenship itself meriting critical discussion.

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