ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a longitudinal inquiry into the engagement dynamics of six multilingual learners of Mandarin Chinese over the first academic year of their BA Chinese programmes at a British university. Mandarin is often perceived by English first language speakers as a novel yet challenging language to learn due to the linguistic and cultural distance from their existing repertoire. While much valuable knowledge of motivation for learning Chinese has been generated, it is important to understand the nature of students’ engagement with learning Mandarin. This study will present narrative data about engagement trajectories at different stages in the learning process, which were generated through in-depth interviews and an engagement tracker where students documented their weekly engagement and significant learning incidents over the year. The analysis reveals the potential role of vision: A specific type of vision was found to contribute to sustained learning engagement, particularly in its affective and behavioural dimensions. Implications are discussed for theory and pedagogy.
