Chapter 6. Language and literacy teaching, learning and socialization in the Chinese complementary school classroom

The Chinese complementary schools for overseas-born ethnic Chinese children provide an interesting, complex and forever changing context where the teaching and learning of the Chinese language, especially literacy, is intertwined with the teaching and learning of Chinese cultural values and ideologies. These values and ideologies, however, are not static but changing across the generations and with the on-going process of transnational movement and globalization. This article focuses on classroom interactions in Chinese complementary schools in Britain and aims to show how the teachers use the opportunity of language and literacy teaching to pass on cultural values and ideologies to the pupils, how the pupils react to this kind of socializational teaching and how the teachers and the pupils negotiate identities through the process of language and literacy learning. The findings of the study have implications for both policy and practice regarding the education and development of multilingual children.