Diversity and Uniformity in Multilingual Education in China: Balancing Tensions for Sustainability

中国多语教育之多元与统一：张弛有度、平衡利弊、持续发展

Abstract

In this overview of the scholarship and practices in multilingualism in education in Mainland China since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), we focus on policies, models, and challenges that policy makers, researchers and practitioners have had to face in the last two decades, in which multilingualism and multilingual education have been most active. Our overview suggests that while the promotion of Mandarin Chinese has remained consistently strong in the PRC era and is further intensified in the whole society in recent years, policies and practices concerning minority languages, varieties of Chinese (Fangyan), and foreign languages have fluctuated, particularly in education. In the current post-COVID-19 context, where tensions deepen between ideologies of diversity and uniformity for language education and for the society at large, we argue that a nuanced balance between the two is critical for sustainable development of multilingualism and affordance of quality multilingual education.

本文旨在全面回顾和综述中国自建国以来在多语教育方面的政策演变、教育实践与主要挑战，聚焦于近二十多年来的多语制与多语教育理论、模式与研究的发展变化。我们的综述表明，普通话的推广在中国保持了最强势的状态，并且近二十多年来在整个社会中得到了进一步的升级。然而少数民族语言、汉语方言、和外语的政策和实践却有波动，这些波动在教育领域特别明显。在目前后疫情的背景下，语言教育和整个社会的多样性和统一性之间的紧张关系进一步加深，由此我们认为这两者之间应该尽量张弛有度、平衡利弊，这对于中国多语言的可持续发展和提供优质多语言教育至关重要。