A tale of two Mainland Chinese English Learners

Abstract

This paper reports a biographic enquiry of two tertiary English learners from mainland China and attempts to capture the developmental processes of their language learning approaches. Through sharing their past language learning experiences, two Chinese learners verbalized their struggles in language learning and revealed the deep impact that their learning settings had on their perceptions of self and language learning. Their adopted learning approaches, as revealed in their biographical accounts, seem to be extremely exam-oriented and are dependent on the learners’ self-will and effort as well as teachers’ support and attention. Both learners’ accounts suggest that their language learning approaches are influenced by the contextual discourses about learning English, stressful social processes and a sense of threatened self-identity as English major graduates in a highly competitive educational context.