UNDERSTANDING CHINESE STUDY MOTHERS’ ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNING EXPERIENCES WHILE SOJOURNING IN AUSTRALIA
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Authors: Yi Hou
Keywords: Chinese study mother, English language learning, Australia, sojourner
Abstract: An increasing number of Chinese mothers are accompanying their children (<18 years) to Australia to provide care and support while the children complete primary and secondary schooling. These women are generally called Chinese ‘study mothers’ (pei du mama). This special household arrangement involves the mothers living with the children in the host country while the fathers remain in China to provide financial support for the family. Australian visa regulations restrict these mothers from undertaking paid work and limit their study of English language courses within 20 hours every week. This can pose great challenges for these mothers’ and possibly their children’s social and cultural settlement in Australian society and impact their sense of belonging. These Chinese women may return to China during any stage of their stay and thus, are acknowledged as sojourners or temporary residents who have different desires for learning the local language from other individuals such as long-term settlers. This paper outlines a proposed narrative case study that explores Chinese study mothers’ English language learning experiences, and how these experiences intersect with their mothering practices while sojourning in Australia. Using the frameworks of ‘investment’, ‘capital’, and ‘ideological becoming’, this proposed research attempts to gain a partial but in-depth understanding of the English language learning experiences of a group of Chinese study mothers based in Melbourne, Australia, trying to capture the mixture of the old and new of their being and becoming in a transnational context. Specifically, an empirical inquiry will be undertaken into their desires for English language learning, and how these desires may mediate their investments in the target language learning in both formal and informal settings in their daily lives. Simultaneously, this study seeks to understand how Chinese study mothers make sense of their English language learning experiences and negotiate their transnational identities during the second language learning process in the local community. This research plans to inform Australian federal government policies that will promote the social inclusion of migrants in Australia as an immigrant-receiving country, school policies around the inclusion of international families, and English Language Teaching (ELT) pedagogy; particularly, for female adult migrants as transient sojourners in an Australian context. It is also anticipated that this study could provide insight into autonomous English or second language learners who are living in the target language-speaking countries but who are limited from participating in formal learning.