ABSTRACT
This paper explores the ways that embodied and conceptual resources within languages play out in multicultural and multilingual activities. Drawing on Chen's theoretical reconstitution of ‘Asia as method’, this paper deploys a multilingual lens to explore how the complex resources available to the multilingual person can provide additional foci through which we can challenge the monolingual subjectivity and parochial worldview of Asian and Western conceptions.
The paper draws from a larger study that investigated Chinese students' English learning experiences in tertiary-level Sino–Australian programs in China. Using an analysis that conceptualises the discussion through both Chinese and English language thinking, the author traces how students in the program engage words, meanings and tropes complexly to describe how their learning experiences both affirmed and differentiated two cohorts of teachers (Western and Chinese). Utilising a lens drawn from socio–culturalism and recent theories of multilingualism, the author explores questions about how Chinese and Western teachers and their pedagogies and practice can be approached without assuming endlessly fluid identity formation or an essentialisation of the different and the Other.
