Investigating the impact of foreign language teaching on educating for cosmopolitan citizenship : teacher cognition and practices in China

Abstract

As globalisation advances, the issue of cosmopolitan citizenship, which places primary importance on respect for differences and shaping common ground, has become an increasingly necessary component within education across disciplines including foreign language (FL) classes. However, the topic of cosmopolitan citizenship lacks classroom-based research, and it remains to be answered how Chinese FL teachers perceive and teach cosmopolitan citizenship. To address this gap, this thesis aims to explore FL teachers’ perceptions and classroom practices for fostering cosmopolitan citizenship through the analytic lens of teacher cognition.

Through the analysis of qualitative data, this study draws upon six Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) teachers as cases in one university in South-Eastern China. Interviews with teachers were carried out to examine their cognition of cosmopolitan citizenship and its relationship with FL teaching. Classroom observations with follow-up interviews were conducted to explore how teachers teach cosmopolitan citizenship in their FL classes.

The findings revealed that teachers’ conceptualisations of cosmopolitan citizenship were vague, but when they existed, they tended to be morality-focused in multiple spheres, with some attention to human rights and civic participation. The six teachers recognised the contribution FL teaching makes to promote moral belonging-oriented citizens, as opposed to teaching by indoctrination, but they paid little attention to critical thinking about multiple moral values. In their classroom practices, they selected topics related to morals more than that of human rights, which was taught for shaping students’ emotional attitudes towards the moral values and meanwhile for actualising these values in social practice. But most of them neither specified how moral values could be transferable in the global sphere nor delivered intercultural teaching of moral values.

The findings regarding the teachers’ cognition and practice suggest they had civic content knowledge for promoting moral-centred cosmopolitan citizenship but may have lacked self-efficacy and knowledge to develop active intercultural citizenship as evidenced by their modest emphasis on social actions and critical reflection. They tended to lack the ability to facilitate students’ learning via deductive reasoning rather than indoctrinating and had little pedagogical content knowledge for integrating language knowledge, civic content and intercultural teaching into their teaching.

The main significance of this study lies in its theoretical contribution for using FL classes for teaching cosmopolitan citizenship; the study also extends its focus on human rights as universal values to basic morality as globally shared values. This study also contributes to the understanding of citizenship in China, which provides insights for research on citizenship in other Confucian contexts. The findings provide insights about critical reflection and social participation within the realm of intercultural teaching. Implications for teacher education include improving teachers’ self-efficacy and knowledge of teaching participation-oriented intercultural citizenship and increasing teachers’ content knowledge of liberal citizenship. The findings also provide pedagogical insights for FL teachers and policy-makers. Limitations and avenues for further research are discussed, followed by the concluding recommendation that moral education can be an alternative approach to teaching cosmopolitan citizenship through FL but cultivating active and critical moral cosmopolitan citizens will take time.