An Exploratory Study of Chinese College EFL Teachers’ Multilingual Awareness

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teacher Multilingual Awareness (MLA) is attracting growing scholarly attention due to the vigorous development of multilingual education worldwide. However, this concept is largely unexplored in the Chinese context. Adopting a mixed-methods design, the present study investigated Chinese college EFL teachers’ MLA based on a six-dimensional conceptual construct. The questionnaire survey supplemented by interview data revealed a general pro-multilingual orientation of EFL teachers as well as their medium to high levels of MLA. Moreover, Multivariate Analyses of Variance (MANOVAs) were conducted to assess the roles of degree of multilingualism and teaching experience in teacher MLA along six dimensions: (a) crosslinguistic and metalinguistic awareness; (b) awareness of multilingual students’ advantages; (c) endorsement for multilingual education; (d) national identity; (e) awareness of NNESTs’ strength; and (f) multilingual pedagogy awareness. The results showed, rather unexpectedly, that the degree of multilingualism only had a significant impact on the crosslinguistic and metalinguistic dimensions of MLA, and that teaching experience had no differentiating effect on any of the dimensions. These findings underscore the necessity of formulating and implementing teacher training programs that explicitly target the cultivation of each MLA dimension in societies with English-dominated foreign language education systems.