‘The culture of China is broad and profound, with all rivers flowing into the sea’: Plurilingual and pluricultural competence and identity among university students in China

Abstract

As part of its ambitious Belt and Road initiative, the Chinese government, cognizant of the fact that establishing strong people-to-people bonds locally, regionally, and internationally will be key to the initiative’s success and that languages will play a pivotal role in facilitating this, has called for the diversification of language programmes beyond English at the tertiary and pre-tertiary levels. The aim is to boost the plurilingual and pluricultural competence (PPC) of Chinese citizens, who are often already multilingual because of their knowledge of Chinese dialects and minority languages. This article reports on a study involving 248 university students from over 20 provinces in China that explored the interactions between their reported PPC, translingual dispositions, interculturalism, orientations toward cultural differences, and identity-related views. The results revealed that the participants’ translingual dispositions entailed engaging in language negotiation practices to a greater extent than in resisting linguistic norms or exploring language. Moreover, the more multilingual the participants were, the more fluidly they reported moving between languages and the greater was their PPC, which was also positively and statistically significantly predicted by their age, ethnic background, acceptance of cultural differences, and views about their personal identity.