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.