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Language and Education, 2013Vol. 00, No. 00, 1–20, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2013.800549

Negotiating funds of knowledge and symbolic competencein the complementary school classrooms

Li Wei∗

Department of Applied Linguistics, Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

(Received 17 November 2012; final version received 24 April 2013)5

Global migration has had significant impact on the traditional configuration of theclassroom role set. The language teacher may be teaching a group of learners withhighly mixed interests, abilities, learning histories and exposures to the target language,while the language learner may be confronted with so many different models of the targetlanguage that notions of native, first, second and foreign languages become blurred. This15article deals with a specific language classroom context, where the traditional role setof the teacher and the learner, and the power relations implied in such a role set, isbeing challenged by the socio-cultural changes that are going on simultaneously in thecommunity and society at large. Using the theoretical concepts of funds of knowledge,symbolic competence and translanguaging, this article investigates how teachers and20pupils in the complementary schools for Chinese children in Britain utilise and negotiatethe discrepancies in their linguistic knowledge and socio-cultural experience in thelearning and construction of language, cultural values and practices, and identity throughco-learning.

Keywords: funds of knowledge; symbolic competence; translanguaging; complemen-25tary schools; Chinese

Introduction

Global-scale transnational migration in the last two decades has presented new challengesto language education. What do we do with the languages in the pupils’ linguistic repertoirethat are not the school’s language of instruction? Can the ‘non-school languages’ be utilised30in any way to facilitate the pupils’ learning? How can classroom teachers manage languagesthat they don’t themselves know, and can they benefit in any way, either professionallyor personally, from multilingual practices? What effect do multilingual practices in theclassroom have on the development of the pupils’ as well as the teachers’ identity? Bilingualand multilingual education comes in different shapes and forms. It is fair to say that the35‘strong’, perhaps ideal, form of bilingual education that Baker (2011) describes where’language minority children use their native, ethnic, home or heritage language in theschool as a medium of instruction with the goal of full bilingualism’ (p. 232) is still rare.More common forms of bilingual education are often less structured, with less focus onbalanced distribution of languages across the curriculum.40

This article looks at a particular type of bilingual education programme for bilingual andmultilingual children in Britain, especially for those of immigrant and/or minority ethnicbackgrounds, which we call complementary schools. Whilst the complementary schoolsare not set up with an explicit goal of full bilingualism, nor do they actively encouragethe use of the full linguistic repertoire of the pupils, in practice, both the teachers and the45

∗Email: li.wei@bbk.ac.uk

C© 2013 Taylor & Francis

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pupils use a wide range of linguistic resources and behave in a highly multilingual manner.Indeed, evidence shows that such schools are a ’safe space’ for the pupils to practice theirmultilingual identities and contest the monolingual and monocultural ideologies, whichinclude the language-of-instruction policies of these schools (Martin et al. 2006; Blackledgeand Creese 2010a, 2010b).50

Complementary, heritage or community language schools are a global phenomenon.Yet systematic studies of them have a relatively short history. There is, however, a growingbody of literature on the policies and practices of these schools in different national andlinguistic contexts (Hornberger 2005; Nicholls 2005; Brinton, Kagan, and Bauckus 2007;He and Xiao 2008; Duff and Li 2009; Li and Wu 2009; Blackledge and Creese 2010a,552010b). This article focuses on what is going on in the British complementary schoolclassrooms for ethnic Chinese children, with particular regard to the teaching and learningpractices through multiple languages. Whilst the findings of the research reported in thisarticle have important implications for educational policies and classroom practices, myprimary interest here is the ways in which teachers and pupils utilise shared, as well as60distinctive, ‘funds of knowledge’ to construct linguistic and cultural identities throughmultilingual practices that we call translagnauging.

In the next section, I discuss the theoretical underpinnings of the study, focusing onthe concepts of funds of knowledge, symbolic competence and translanguaging. I thenoutline the complementary schools in the UK that provide the context for the present study.65The Chinese complementary schools and the research methods used for the present studyare then described. The main body of the article is devoted to an analysis of negotiation oflinguistic knowledge, of cultural knowledge and of cultural identity, through translanguag-ing practices, with a series of examples of classroom interactions between the teacher andthe pupils. The article concludes with a summary of the findings and a discussion of the70implications.

Funds of knowledge, symbolic competence and translanguaging

Due in part to the ever-increasing international migration and intercultural encounters, itis now commonplace for language classes to have learners with very different linguistic,75cultural and educational backgrounds, some having very complex migration and languagelearning experiences. They bring with them ‘funds of knowledge – the historically accumu-lated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for households andindividual functioning and well-being” (Moll et al. 1992: p. 133. See also Moll and Gonza-lez 1994). Such funds of knowledge contain rich cultural and cognitive resources that can80be used in the classroom in order to provide culturally responsive, meaningful and effectiveteaching. Teachers, as well as the learners, have much to gain from using these ‘funds ofknowledge’ in the classroom, not only to make the classrooms more inclusive but also toengage in real-world meaning-making and identity exploration, which are crucial yet oftenneglected aspects of learning. Studies by Moll and his colleagues show that when teachers85shed their role of the teacher and expert and, instead, take on a new role as a co-learner, theycan come to know their pupils and the families of their pupils in new and distinct ways.Drawing from Vygotskian and neo-socio-cultural perspectives on learning, they advocatea pedagogical approach that makes use of the funds of knowledge of minority children, intheir case, Latino children in the US, to develop, transform and enrich the skills, abilities,90ideas and practices that are being taught. Such an approach also facilitates a systematic andpowerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how toharness them for classroom teaching.

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It should be recognised that the teachers also bring with themselves funds of knowledgeand have their own symbolic competence that may be different from those of the pupils.95The language teacher community has also gone through enormous diversification. Nativespeaker teachers are no longer regarded as standard bearers (e.g. Llurda 2005; Braine 2010).Multilingual and multicultural teachers from migrant and ethnic minority backgrounds aremuch more commonly found. In complementary schools, most teachers speak the languagesthat the schools are teaching as their primary language. But they may have very different100socio-cultural experiences compared to the pupils. Their proficiency in other languages,especially the dominant national languages, may not be as high as that of the pupilswhom they are teaching. For example, Turkish, Gujarati, Bengali and Cantonese teachersin the complementary schools that we studied speak these languages as their primarylanguages of communication. But their abilities to speak English vary from individual to105individual and in most cases are not as strong as those of the pupils in the complementaryschools as most of the pupils are British-born and often speak English as their primarylanguage of communication (Creese et al. 2008). One of the questions that I am particularlyinterested in exploring is how the teachers and the pupils deal with the discrepancies inthe funds of knowledge and symbolic competence between them in the complementary110school classroom, and what, if any, can they learn from each other beyond certain linguisticstructures?

Multilingualism is now widely recognised to be a major source of ‘funds of knowledge’,not only because of the knowledge of different and multiple linguistic systems, but alsobecause of the socio-cultural knowledge that is inherent in the languages and the social-115cultural histories and experiences, including migration histories and experiences, of theusers of the languages (Gee 1996; Perry and Delpit 1998; Smitherman 1999; Saxenaand Martin-Jones 2003; Boyd, Brock, and Rozendal 2004). The ability to use home orcommunity languages and to draw on ‘funds of knowledge’ associated with worlds beyondthe classroom and the school is part of what Kramsch calls symbolic competence – ‘the120ability not only to approximate or appropriate for oneself someone else’s language, but toshape the very context in which the language is learned and used’ (Kramsch and Whiteside2008: 664. See also Kramsch 2006). As Kramsch and Whiteside point out, ‘Social actors inmultilingual settings seem to activate more than a communicative competence that wouldenable them to communicate accurately, effectively, and appropriately with one another.125They seem to display a particularly acute ability to play with various linguistic codes andwith the various spatial and temporal resonances of these codes’ (2008: 664). ExtendingBourdieu’s notion of sens pratique, which is exercised by a habitus that structures thevery field, it is structured by in a quest for symbolic survival (Bourdieu 1997/2000: 150),Kramsch and Whiteside argue that a multilingual sens pratique multiplies the possibilities130of meaning offered by the various codes in presence. As they suggest,

In today’s global and migratory world, distinction might not come so much from the ownershipof one social or linguistic patrimony (e.g. Mexican or Chinese culture, English language) asmuch as it comes from the ability to play a game of distinction on the margins of establishedpatrimonies (Kramsch and Whiteside 2008: 664).135

Researchers in bilingual education have used the term translanguaging to try to capturethe dynamic nature of multilingual practices of various kinds, such as code-switching,code-mixing and language crossing, as well as the symbolic competence of the de-/re-territorialized speaker to mobilize their linguistic resources to create new social spaces forthemselves (Williams 1994, 1996; Garcia 2009; Creese and Blackledge 2010; Baker 2011; Q1

Q2

Q3

140Canagarajah 2011. See Lewis et al. 2012a, 2012b for a review of the origin and development

Q4

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4 L. Wei

of the term.). The emphasis on the ‘trans’ aspects of languaging and schooling enables usto transgress the categorical distinctions of the past. In particular, a ‘trans’ approach tolanguage education liberates our traditional understandings and points to three innovativeaspects in considering language education (see further Li 2011a; Garcia and Li, in press):145

� Referring to trans-systems and trans-spaces; that is, to fluid practices that go betweenand beyond language and educational systems, structures and practices to engagediverse students’ meaning-making systems and subjectivities.

� Referring to its transformative nature; that is, as new configurations of languageand education are generated, old understandings and structures are released, thus150transforming not only subjectivities, but also cognitive and social structures. In sodoing, orders of discourses shift and the voices of others come to the forefront.

� Referring to the transdisciplinary consequences of the languaging and educationanalysis, providing a tool for understanding, not only language and education, but alsohuman sociality, human cognition and learning, social relations and social structures.155

Complementary schools in Britain

In Britain, complementary schools have been a major socio-political and educational move-ment since the 1950s. Initially they were formed by the Black community as a means oftackling racism towards and under-achievement amongst Black children. In the 1960sand 1970s, British Muslim communities set up a number of faith schools, especially for160girls. Some of these schools later received governmental recognition along with otherfaith schools. But the vast majority of complementary schools in today’s Britain are cul-tural and language schools, usually run outside the hours of mainstream schools, i.e.at weekends (see Li 2006 for a review of the historical developments of complemen-tary schools in Britain). According to the national resource centre ContinYou’s register165(http://www.continyou.org.uk/), there are currently over 2000 such schools. However, suchfigures are likely to be an underestimate, as these schools are voluntary organisations andmany are very small and informal, and thus may not wish to appear on official registers fora variety of reasons.

Complementary schools have attracted a certain amount of public debate in Britain170vis-a-vis the definition of schooling, government’s involvement in educational manage-ment, and alternative pedagogical practices (e.g. Chevannes and Reeves 1987; Halstead1995; McLaughlin 1995; Hewer 2001). But on the whole there is a lack of awareness ofcomplementary schools in both mainstream schoolteachers and the general public. Manymainstream teachers are not aware that a significant number of their pupils also attend175complementary schools at the weekend, nor do they know what is being taught and howin these schools. For their part, complementary schools do not usually attempt to interactwith other educational institutions (see Kenner 2007; Creese et al. 2008). This includescomplementary schools of other minority ethnic communities. So a teacher at a Turkishcomplementary school in the north east of London may not have spoken to a Gujarati180schoolteacher or a Chinese schoolteacher in the same area. They tend to operate entirelywithin their own communities.

Whilst the establishment of the complementary schools is sometimes seen as a challengeto the dominant ideology of monoculturalism in Britain, the ideology of the complementaryschools themselves is rarely questioned. For instance, most complementary schools have185an implicit policy of one language only (OLON), usually the minority ethnic languageof course, or one language at a time (OLAT). It discourages the use of English and the

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mixing of languages, and treats the pupils as if they were the same as those from theirancestral countries, be it China, Turkey, India or some other, even though they are Britishby any definition. I have raised the question elsewhere (Li and Wu 2008, 2009) about the190implications of such policies. To me, OLON and OLAT policies are another form of themonolingual ideology particularly in light of the complexities of multilingual repertoiresof the pupils, the teachers and the parents. Although it is understandable that the comple-mentary schools want to insist on using specific community languages in this particulardomain, the long-term consequence of the compartmentalisation of community languages195and cultural affiliations is an issue of concern (see Martin et al. 2004; Creese et al. 2006;Blackledge and Creese 2010a, 2010b).

The present study

The present study draws data from a number of complementary schools for ethnic Chinesechildren in three English cities: London, Manchester and Newcastle. The current Chinese200community is one of the largest immigrant communities in Britain, developed primarilyfrom post-war migrants who began to arrive in the 1950s. The vast majority of the post-warChinese immigrants were from Hong Kong. They were Cantonese and/or Hakka speakers.Many of them were peasants and labourers, who left an urbanising Hong Kong to seek abetter living in Britain. They tend to be engaged in largely family-based catering business205and other service industries. Over a quarter of the Chinese community in Britain now areBritish-born. A more detailed account of the current socio-linguistic situation of the BritishChinese community can be found in Li (2007).

There were informal reports of ‘home schooling’, i.e. children being taught by theirparents and others at home, amongst these Chinese migrant families in the 1950s and2101960s in cities such as London, Liverpool and Manchester, where there were significantnumbers of Chinese residents (You 2006). The very first ‘Chinese schools’, complementary Q6schools, in effect, emerged on the basis of such collectives of families, providing privateeducation to their children. The reasons for the emergence of such schools were complex.There is no doubt that racial discrimination played a role. But the fact that the vast ma-215jority of the Chinese were, and still are, engaged in service industries has led to scatteredsettlements right across Britain. It is often said that any town or village in Britain witharound 2000 residents will have at least one family-run Chinese takeaway. While this maybe stereotypical, the implication is that the Chinese children of these families would havelittle or no contact with other Chinese children if there were no Chinese complementary220school. The establishment of the Chinese schools must thus be seen as a major achieve-ment of the community in their determination to support themselves. According to theUK Federation of Chinese Schools and the UK Association for the Promotion of ChineseEducation, the two largest national-level organisations for Chinese complementary schools,there are over 200 Chinese complementary schools in the UK (http://www.ukfcs.info/ and225http://www.ukapce.org.uk/). They are located in major urban centres. Many families haveto travel for hours to send their children to the schools. They receive little support fromthe local education authorities. They are almost entirely self-financed. Parents pay fees tosend the children, and local Chinese businesses offer sponsorships and other support (e.g.paying for the hire of premises and facilities). Many of the schools use teaching materials230provided free of charge by voluntary organisations and other agencies in mainland China,Hong Kong and Taiwan. The teachers are mainly enthusiastic, middle-class Chinese parentsand university students.

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In the last decade or so, a pattern has emerged. There are now four types of Chineseschools: (1) for Cantonese-speaking children from Hong Kong immigrant families; (2) for235Cantonese-speaking children of Hong Kong immigrant families with particular religiousaffiliations, i.e. run by the church; (3) for Mandarin-speaking children from mainland China;and (4) for Mandarin-speaking children of Buddhist families, mainly from Taiwan. Mostof the schools run classes over the weekend for up to three hours. Parents play a crucialrole in the schools – parents pay, parents govern and parents teach. A typical Chinese240complementary school in Britain looks like this: It rents its premises from a local school oreducation centre. There is a temporary reception desk at the entrance for parents to speak tothe teachers about any issues of interest. A shop is available for the children to buy snacksand drinks. Space is provided for the staff to have tea and coffee during break time and tohave meetings. The children are grouped according to proficiency in Chinese. There are245traditional Chinese dance, arts and sports sessions before or after the language and literacysessions. Many schools also provide English language lessons for parents.

With regard to language, four issues are noteworthy: (1) There is a clear policy thatonly Chinese, whatever variety it may be, should be used by the teachers and pupils, eventhough in practice both teachers and pupils alternate between Chinese and English regularly250(see further Li and Wu 2008). Li (2011b) discusses how switching by the children betweenQ7Chinese and English, as well as between speech and writing, in the complementary schoolclassroom is used creatively not only in the process of learning but also as an act of identityand rebellion against the OLON or OLAT policies. (2) Like most complementary schoolsin Britain, the Chinese schools have literacy teaching as their key objective, as there is a255widespread perception amongst the parents that the British-born generations of minorityethnic children have lost the ability to read and write in the ethnic languages. (3) Thereare significant differences between the teachers’ and the pupils’ linguistic proficiency andpreference: the teachers tend to be native speakers of Chinese, have had a substantialmonolingual experience as Chinese speakers and prefer to use Chinese most of, if not all,260the time; whereas the pupils have had limited and context-specific input in Chinese, havehigh proficiency in English and use English as the lingua franca with their peers includingother children of Chinese ethnic origin. The children’s English language proficiency, in mostcases, is much more sophisticated than that of the teachers. Li and Wu (2009) examinedexamples of how children manipulate the discrepancies in the language proficiencies and265preferences in Chinese and English between themselves and their teachers to their ownadvantages in the classroom, e.g. through correcting the teacher’s pronunciation of certainEnglish words, and the use of idioms that are unknown to the teacher. Moreover, the teachersand the pupils also have rather different socio-cultural experiences, with the teachers mainlyfrom Hong Kong and mainland China and having had a relatively short period of time270living and working in Britain whilst most of the pupils being British-born, growing upin contemporary British society, and only having occasional visits to Hong Kong andChina. (4) All the Cantonese schools also teach Mandarin and the simplified charactersthat are associated with it. However, none of the Mandarin schools teaches Cantonese orthe traditional complex characters. This may be seen as a sign of the changing hierarchies275amongst varieties of the Chinese language as a result of the rising politico-economic powerof mainland China. Mandarin, the variety that is most popularly used in mainland China, isfast gaining currency in the Chinese overseas diasporas which are traditionally Cantoneseor Hokkien-speaking (see further Li and Zhu 2010a, 2010b; Li 2011a, 2011b). It also raisesissues of the complexities of different modalities in learning Chinese (see e.g. Li 2011b).280

The data for the present article come out of a series of research projects investigatingmultilingual practices in complementary schools and families in London, Manchester and

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Newcastle (see Acknowledgements). In each of the cities, we chose one Cantonese schooland one Mandarin school. And in all the schools, extensive ethnographic observationswere made. After initial meetings with the administrators in each school, explaining the285purpose of the research project, information sheets were distributed to teachers, parentsand pupils, and permissions sought for further data collection. We were allowed access toobserve classroom interaction and to collect data in a range of settings including breaktime and formal school events such as prize-giving ceremonies. A selection of teachers,administrators, parents and pupils were interviewed, and recordings, both audio and video,290were made in the classroom as well as during break time. We chose to focus on the 10–12year-old groups in all the schools we studied, although some of the classes also includedchildren as young as 8, or as old as 14, years. All the examples discussed below are takenfrom the transcripts of audio-recorded interactions. They are given in standard Chineseand English orthography. Mandarin is represented in simplified Chinese characters and295Cantonese in traditional, full characters. The pronunciation of the Chinese words is onlygiven where it is relevant to the discussion, in Pinyin for Mandarin and in Jyutping forCantonese, in brackets immediately after the Chinese characters. The English translation isgiven underneath the Chinese transcript in italics.

Linguistic knowledge: Cantonese, Mandarin, English and beyond300

We begin with a series of examples from classroom interaction where the discrepancies inlinguistic knowledge between the teachers and the pupils can be clearly seen. Our analyticinterest here is on whether and how the teachers and the pupils resolve the discrepancies.

Example 1 is taken from a Mandarin class in the Cantonese school in London. Theteacher has written the Chinese characters for a particular type of cookie, ��, on the305white board because she thought it was an unfamiliar word for the pupils.

Example 1. (T: A female teacher in her late twenties; G1 and G2 are two 11-year-old female pupils.)

T: ��(quqi). — ��� , ��� ?Quqi. A kind of cookie, you know?

G1: What?T: ��(quqi).

5 G2: kuk-kei. kuk-kei.T: Yes.G1: So why did you say qiu. . .something qiu. . .

T: ��(quqi).G2: No. kuk-kei.

10 G1: ���� kuk-kei�In Cantonese it is kuk-kei.

G2: It’s Cantonese. kuk-kei is Cantonese.T: �� ?

Is it?15 G2: �� !

Yes.

As it happens, the word��(cookie) is a Cantonese transliteration of English and someof the pupils recognise the characters, as they have seen them in local shops. The Cantonesepronunciation of the characters is kuk-kei, as G2, one of the pupils, says in line 5. But theteacher, not knowing Cantonese herself, pronounces the word in Mandarin, quqi, which310sounds very different from the English source, cookie. The two pupils explain to the teacher

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8 L. Wei

that the Cantonese pronunciation of characters is in fact very similar to the English word.What is particularly remarkable is that when the teacher seeks confirmation (Is it?), G2replies in Cantonese, haila, meaning ‘yes’ and reinforcing the fact they are Cantonesespeakers. So whilst the pupils are learning Mandarin, their knowledge of Cantonese helps315with the proceeding of the class, and the teacher gains knowledge about the origin of theChinese word by learning from the pupils.

We have observed many comparable instances where the pupils’ knowledge of Can-tonese has proved to be particularly useful in the teaching and learning of specific wordsand phrases, many of which are transliterations of English. Examples include �� salad,320in Cantonese saaleot and in Mandarin�� sela; ��cheese, in Cantonese zisi and Man-darin zhi-shi. The Mandarin teachers, while assuming an influential status in the class andteaching what is assumed to be a high-status variety of Chinese, gains specific linguisticknowledge by learning from the pupils.

Example 2 is taken from a class of 8-year-olds in the Cantonese school in Newcastle.325The teacher is going through a series of pictures of fruit and vegetables and asks the pupilsto name them in Mandarin.

Example 2. (T: Female teacher in her early thirties. B1 and B2 are boys and G1 and G2 are girls.They are all about 8-year old.)

T: �� ◦ � — � , ��� ?Good. Next, what is it?

B1: Sweet potato.T: ����� ?

5 What is it in Chinese?G1: �� (faan syu) ◦

Sweet potato.T: �� ?

What?10 B2: �� (faan syu) ◦

Sweet potato.T: OK. ����� ?

What can it also be called?B1: Sweet potato� ◦

15 PAT: �� !

Chinese!B1: �� (tang shu), �� (tian shu)◦

candy potato, sweet potato20 G2: �� (tang shu)!

candy potato(Giggles)

T: �� (hong shu) , ������� (baishu)◦Hong shu (red potato); some places call it bai shu (white potato).

25 B2: Red and white.T: �������� (digua)◦

In my hometown we call it digua (earth melon).G2: ��(digua)◦T: �� (digua) �� potato.

30 Digua is potato.G1: So it’s ��� (tian digua)◦

So it’s sweet digua.T: No, ��(digua)�� sweet potato.

No, digua is sweet potato.35 B2: ���(faan syu la)◦

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When the teacher points to the picture of sweet potatoes, B1 answers in English. Theteacher asks for the Chinese name, and G1 answers in Cantonese. The teacher does notknow the Cantonese word for potato. So she asks for clarification. B2 repeats what G1330said. The teacher realises that they are speaking Cantonese. She seems to accept it with her‘OK’ and then asks for an alternative. B1 answers in English, again, but this time with aCantonese utterance final particle. The teacher takes the opportunity to stress that this isa Chinese class and asks for the Chinese name. B1 attempts at a literal translation. tangmeans ‘sweet’ but it is a noun, as in confectionery, and shu means ‘potato’. Tian also means335‘sweet’ and it is an adjective. One can see that he is trying to work out what is the correctform of the word. G2 repeats B1’s first attempt, tang shu (confectionery potato) in a mildlymocking way and some of the pupils in the class giggle. The teacher then offers the correctterm, explaining that in some parts of China it is known as hong shu (literally: red + potato)and in some other places, bai shu (white potato). G2 understands it and says in English ‘Red340and white’. The teacher then offers another term, digua (literally: earth melon) adding thatthis is how it is known in her hometown dialect. But she then says that digua is potato. G1reckons that sweet potato would need to have an adjective before it. So she says tian digua.But in fact, digua means ‘sweet potato’, and the teacher has made a slip in the previousturn. When she corrects G1 and herself, by saying digua is sweet potato, B2 repeats the345Cantonese term which he and G1 offered in the first place, faansyu, as if in protest.

Example 3 was recorded in one of the Mandarin schools in London. The teacher is tryingto explain the meaning of the phrase ��� (bai wulong), or in traditional characters ���, and in Cantonese baai wulung.

Example 3. (T: Male Mandarin teacher in his late twenties. B1 and B2 about 13-year-old boys; G1:a 12-year-old girl.)

T: (Speaking slowly as he writes on the whiteboard) � - � - �(bai wulong).Mess up. �� (wulong), black dragon. ��� ��� ?Wulong Tea, do you know?Black Dragon tea. �� (wulong)◦ means /mI

∫eIp/.

5 (Silence)T: �� (wulong)/mI

∫eIp/. ��� (bai wulong). Mess up.

B1: What?T: Made a mistake. Accident. /mI

∫eIp/.

G1: /mIshæp/, you mean?B1: Oh I see.

10 T: What?B2: /mIshæp/. It’s /mIshæp/.B1: Not /mI

∫eIp/.

T: /mIshæp/.B1: Yes.

As in Examples 1 and 2, the Chinese phrase that the teacher is trying to explain comes350from a Cantonese transliteration of the English phrase own goal, and the verb baai/baicould mean play, place or display. Nowadays, the phrase is widely used amongst speakersof different varieties of Chinese to mean ‘made a mess of things’. Like the teacher inExample 1, the teacher in this example does not seem to know the origin of the phrasethat he is teaching. He makes a connection between the word wulong (transliteration of355own goal) with the name of a type of Chinese tea which has the same written characters.Unlike Example 1 though, the pupils in the present example do not seem to know the originof the phrase either, as they are not Cantonese speakers. So they have not challenged the

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teacher on the meaning of the phrase. What they do challenge is the mispronunciation of theEnglish translation of the phrase that the teacher makes. He pronounces the word mishap as360/mI

∫ eIp/. B1 is clearly puzzled. After the teacher explains it with other translations, but stillincluding the mispronunciation in English, G1 realises what is meant and offers the ‘correct’pronunciation. When the teacher shows his lack of knowledge of the correct pronunciation,the pupils start to teach him. And the teacher learns. The class then proceeds smoothly.One cannot help wondering though that, if there was a Cantonese speaker present, bringing365further funds of knowledge to the discussion, the teacher and the pupils would have learnedmuch more beyond the correct pronunciation of an English word. Nevertheless, the teacherhas gained some knowledge of English pronunciation.

Elsewhere, I have discussed other examples of the pupils teaching the teachers thestandard ways of saying certain phrases or pronouncing certain words in English (Li and370Wu 2009). The teachers in the Chinese complementary schools generally readily acceptthat the pupils’ English is much better than theirs and many actively seek to learn fromthe pupils, just as many Chinese parents routinely ask their British-born children for the‘correct’ way of saying things in English.

Example 4 comes from a Cantonese class in the Manchester Cantonese school that we375studied. The teacher is trying to teach numerals in the traditional Chinese written charactersrather than the Arabic numbers.

Example 4. (T: Female teacher in her forties. G, P and Y are girls and H, boy, all about 11-year old.)

T: � , ����� ����� , ����� ◦Nah, those who finished the corrections, take out your exercise

book and copy the characters on the blackboard.G (moaning): Oooh. . . What for?

5 T: ������ , ������ , � ������ ◦The first character is word ‘One’, the second is word ‘Two’.

These are Chinese number words.P (confirming

understanding):� ◦

Oh.10 T: ����� , ����� , ����� , ����� ◦

‘One’ represents ‘one’, ‘Two’ represents ‘two’, ‘Three’represents ‘three’, ‘Four’ represents ‘four’.

H: ����?In the exercise book.

15 T: �� , ���� ◦Yes, in the exercise book.

G (sigh): � ◦Ai.

T: ��� ◦ ������ ◦ ������ ’ � ’ � ◦ ����20 �� ◦ ���������� . . .

‘One’ to ‘Ten’, not one to ten times. ‘One’ represents ‘one’.These are Chinese characters. Chinese number words arewritten like these. . .

T: � �������� ◦25 This is the word ‘One’ which used to be used in China.

Y: ������� ◦But we don’t use them now.

T: ���� , �������� , ����������� ◦30 ������ , ���������������

������� ◦ �������� ◦ ������ , �������� � ◦

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Not being used now, but just to let you know these. Sometimesyou’ll see them in newspaper or magazine articles. So, (I’m)letting you know these. This is ‘One’, ‘Two’, ‘Three’, ‘Four’,

35 ‘Five’, ‘Six’, ‘Seven’, ‘Eight’, ‘Nine’, ‘Ten’. Copy into yourexercise book quickly. Because you’ll sometimes see thesewords in newspapers.

As we can see, the pupils, who are used to the Arabic numerals, cannot see the pointof learning the Chinese characters and contest the way they are being taught. One pupil,Y, explicitly says in line 25 ‘But we don’t use them now’. A few minutes after the teacher380got the pupils to copy the Chinese characters, he asked the class what other systems ofnumerals they knew.

T: �������� ?Do you know any other numerals?

B1: Roman, I know Roman numbers.T: Show me.

5 B1: I have to write it.T: Go on.

(B1 goes to white board and writes Roman numerals.)(There are discussions amongst the pupils whether B1 has got

everything right.)10 (The teacher calls another boy to the white board to write his

version.)(More discussions as to how the system works, e.g. how to write

2012.)T: Oh I learned a lot today!

What happens in this class, as shown in the example above, is by no means rare. In fact,during our interviews with the teachers, many of them claim that learning from the pupilsis one of the most enjoyable aspects of working in the complementary schools.385

One further example I want to discuss in this section was recorded in the Mandarinschool in London. In this example, the teacher is explaining the text ����� meaning‘taking granddad home’. For reasons only known to herself, she gives an English translationimmediately after she says the Chinese phrase.

Example 5. (T: Female teacher in her mid-twenties. B: Boy, 12-year old.)

T. (Reading the textbook) ����� , took grandfather to the home.send granddad home

B: Aren’t the Chinese suppose to be nice to their grandparents?T: Yes, of course.

5 B: Why is she sending him to a home then?T: What?B: You said she sent the granddad to a home.T: � , � home◦ �� going home◦B: Not an old people’s home then.

10 T: What?B: Doesn’t matter.

Unfortunately, the teacher’s English translation ‘took grandfather to the home’ does390not only sound bookish, but is also pragmatically misleading. Chinese speakers of English

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12 L. Wei

often have problems with the use of articles in English. The teacher confuses the adverbhome and the noun phrase the home. This causes one of the pupils to remark on the Chinesetradition of looking after the elderly within their own families rather than sending them tocare centres. What is interesting here is that, while B realises that he misunderstood the395teacher because of the way she phrased it, the teacher does not seem to realise that the wordhome can also refer to care centres for the elderly.

This example illustrates the discrepancies in the cultural knowledge that exist betweenthe teachers and the pupils. Many of the teachers have only been in Britain for a shortperiod of time. The pupils, on the other hand, are mostly British-born. They have relatively400little in common in terms of their cultural background and life experience. This lack ofcommonality between the teachers and the pupils can potentially cause difficulties in theclassroom and beyond, unless they engage in co-learning actively and positively.

Let us now turn to other examples that illustrate more specifically the issue of culturalknowledge that faces the teachers and the pupils in classroom interaction.405

Cultural knowledge: Values and practices

Example 6 is taken from a recording of an exchange between two boys and a teacher ina Mandarin complementary school in London. The teacher is illustrating the use of theword�� (unite) with the phrase ���� (to unite the motherland). This apparentlytriggered the question from B1 in the opening line of Example 6.

Example 6. (T: Male teacher in his early thirties. B1 and B2 are boys about 13 years’ age.)

B1: Are the Chinese still fighting?T: No, why?B1: So why are you always talking about �� ?

unite5 B2: It’s about Taiwan and China. They are two countries, and they want to be

united.T: No. ������ ◦ ��������� ◦

Not two countries. Taiwan is part of China.B2: No, they are not.

10 T: They are.B2: They are not. In the Olympics, there were separate teams. I saw it.T: It’s like Scotland or Northern Ireland. ���� , ����� football �

� rugby����� ◦All part of the UK. But for the World Cup football and rugby, they can be

15 separately represented.B1: Scotland is a different country.T: No it is not.B2: It is. XXX (a girl in the class) is from Scotland. She was born in. . .where

were you born again?20 B1: Dundee.

T: ������� ◦ ������. The UNITED Kingdom ���� ? !But it is united. Not two separate countries. The UNITED Kingdom, don’t

you understand?!

410The teacher seems somewhat puzzled by B1’s question. So B2 offers an explanation,

which is correct, except that he talks about Taiwan and China as two separate countries. Thisis a highly contentious political issue and the mainland Chinese government and a significantnumber of the politicians in Taiwan use a discourse that treats Taiwan as an integral part

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of China, even though, as B2 points out, the mainland and Taiwan are often separately415represented at international events. The teacher clearly follows the official line and statesthat the mainland and Taiwan are not two countries and that Taiwan is part of China. Heexplains B2’s observation by referring to the UK situation and how the different nations inthe United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) are represented insports. He further rejects B1’s assertion that Scotland is a different country and reinforces420his position by stressing the word UNITED in the United Kingdom.

As has been discussed in Li and Wu (2010), the process of teaching and learning canbe seen as a process of socialisation through which certain values and ideologies, as wellas facts and practices, are transmitted and exchanged amongst the co-participants. Out ofthis process, new values, ideologies, knowledge and identities may emerge. The mainland425and Taiwan relationship issue is a politically sensitive one amongst the Chinese worldwide,but it is rarely directly discussed in everyday social interaction. It is interesting to observesuch a direct engagement with the issue in a British complementary school classroom. Theteacher is taking a very clear and strong stance in the present example. The pupils seem tohave a somewhat different understanding of the situation. Whether or not the pupils’ views430would be changed by the teacher’s stance is impossible to tell. But one thing is certain, byengaging in the discussion, both the teacher and the pupils have been made aware of thedifferent positions on the issue.

In Example 7, the teacher moves from various Chinese folk festivals to the key phrase��(panwang), meaning longing for. But the examples she gives in collocation with it435all concern certain socio-cultural ideals, such as having a ‘united homeland’ and ‘unitedfamily’. In contrast, the pupils are all longing for the ‘less serious’ things such as holidays,sporting events, and in an apparent act of rebellion, the end of the Chinese complementaryschool year.

Example 7. (T: Female teacher in her forties. Q and B are girls, and the others boys, all between 10and 11 years’ age.)

T: ������� ◦ ���� ? �� ◦ ����� ? ��� , ������� ? �� , expect, look forward to. Write down the explanationbeside the words, in case you forget it later. �� , the 4th one, meanslook forward to. ��� , ������� ?

5 That’s the fifth word. The fourth word? ‘Panwang’ (long for). How do youuse ‘Panwang’? For example, what do we long for? ‘Panwang’ expect,look forward to. Write down the explanation beside the words, in caseyou forget it later. ‘Panwang’, the fourth one, means look forward to. Forexample, what do we ‘panwang’?

10 P1: ��.Having festivals.

P2: ��� ◦Christmas.

T: ��� ?15 World cup?

P3: No.P4: ��� ◦

Eating mooncakes.T: �������� ? Sounds a little strange.

20 We all long for eating mooncakes?B: Birthday! My birthday!

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T: ���������� ◦ B������ ◦ �� can be a little big forall these occasions. ��� , ���������� , �� ? ��������get reunited.

25 We all long for Christmas. B longs for her birthday. ‘Panwang’ can be alittle big for all these occasions. For example, we all long for our mothercountry to get reunited, right? We all long for our mother country to getreunited.

L: �������� ◦30 Long for Chinese school to run out.

(All laugh.)T: L, be serious, OK?L: I am serious, I’m looking forward to it.T: ��� , ��������� ◦

35 For example, we long for family reunion.T: For example, if you are here in Manchester, your parents are back in

China, and you have been separated for years, you are looking forward tothe reunion of the family.

Very similarly, the teacher in Example 8 makes sentences with the verb ��tuanjie440(unity/unite) by citing examples of propaganda slogans from mainland China, while thepupils use the word in association with football.

Example 8. (T: Female teacher in her early thirties. B1 and B2: 11-year-old boys.)

T: �� (tuanjie)◦ ������ , ��������� ◦ ��(tuanjie),united.

Unity/Unite. Unity is strength. Unite to strive for greater success.B1: Manchester United.B2: Yeah, United will win.

These examples show the discrepancy between the socio-cultural values the teacherwants to pass onto the pupils and what the pupils are interested in as part of their everydaysocio-cultural experience.445

This kind of discrepancy in socio-cultural values and practices is further illustrated inExample 9, where the teacher is making sentences with the phrase �qidai, also meaninglonging for, in collocation with a ‘united motherland’, family reunion, peace and friendship.The pupils, in sharp contrast, are making fun of each other, as well as making light of thelearning task.

Example 9. (From a Mandarin class of 13 year-olds in Newcastle. T: Female teacher in her forties.B, a boy.)

T: “�”���� ? ����� , ����� , ����� ◦What can you say with qidai (longing for)? Longing for a united

motherland; longing for family reunion; longing for peace andfriendship.

B: xxx (name of another boy in the class) ��������� ◦xxx is longing for Jennifer to moon bathing with him.(All laugh.)

450In this exchange, B deliberately transliterates his classmate’s girlfriend’s name, Jennifer,

in a funny Chinese phrase literally meaning real clay Buddha, and the phrase moon bathing

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is clearly a parody of sun bathing. Elsewhere I have discussed more examples of thecreative use of translanguaging by the British Chinese youth (Li 2011a). The fun aspects ofthe multilingual creativity, as shown through such examples, not only affect the classroom455proceedings and the relationship between the teacher and the pupils but also reflect thesocio-cultural identity that the pupils are developing. Let us now look at the issue ofidentity in more detail.

Co-construction of identity

For most of the pupils in the Chinese complementary schools, they think of themselves460primarily as British youths of Chinese heritage. They associate China with food, music andeveryday culture. While most of them are aware of certain aspects of Chinese history, someof the old folk tales and archaeological artefacts that are included in the Chinese textbooks,their primary interests in things Chinese are pop songs, comics and youth magazines, andvarious card and computer games. Yet, little of what the young British Chinese seem to465be interested in is reflected in the teaching in the Chinese complementary schools. Theiractual, complex, lived experiences as British Chinese youth are not at all reflected in theteaching and learning in this particular context. For the schools and the teachers, and manyof the parents for that matter, the emphasis of what they want to transmit to the childrenseems to be on a set of traditional values and practices, many of which are imagined rather470than real. They also tend to think of the children as primarily Chinese and they want them tobe very much similar to those in China and Hong Kong. Such discrepancies in expectationsare already shown through the above examples where the teachers try to socialise thepupils into the traditional Chinese cultural values and practices through specific classroomactivities as well as specific examples they use in teaching. We have also seen how the pupils475in the Chinese complementary schools often resist the teachers’ socialisational teachingby posing challenging questions and making fun of the classroom activities (see furtherexamples in Li and Wu 2009). All of these examples are ultimately about identity. Butexplicit discussions of the issue of identity in the complementary classroom are relativelyrare. When they do happen, however, they are highly interesting and revealing, as the final480example illustrates.

Example 10. (From the Mandarin school in London. T: Female teacher in her early thirties. G1 andG2 are girls and B1 and B2 boys, all between 11 and 12 years’ age.)

T: ����� ◦We are Chinese.

B1: ������� ◦We are not Chinese.

T: ���������� ?You are not Chinese?

B2: ��� ◦British.

G1: ��� ◦British Chinese.

T: OK.G2: ��� ◦

Overseas Chinese.G1: ����� ◦

Should it be huaren (ethnic Chinese) or huaqiao (Chinese citizens residing outsideChina).

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16 L. Wei

T: ���� , ���� ◦Strictly speaking, it should be huaren (ethnic Chinese).

B1: � ◦Huaren (ethnic Chinese).

T: � ◦ ������ ◦Correct. You are overseas Chinese.

G1: ��� ◦British Chinese.

T: � ◦Also correct.

B1: ��� ?Then what are you?

T: � ? ����� ◦Me? I am Chinese.

B1: So you don’t have a British passport.T: No.B2: Isn’t your husband British?T: Yes, I have permanent residence.B1: So you are not British.T: ����� ◦

I can say that I am huaqiao (Chinese citizen residing outside China).B2: British Chinese.T: No. I am a Chinese living in Britain. You are British Chinese.B1: Or Chinese British.B2: Like they call it Chinese American or American Chinese.B1: ABC (American-born Chinese).T: You are BBC (British-born Chinese).

Here, the Chinese phrase ��� (zhongguo ren) is linguistically ambiguous as itcan refer to the general ethnic category or Chinese citizens or nationals. What the pupilsobject to is being described as Chinese citizens or nationals. But the two terms often usedto describe Chinese people living outside China are also confusing. � (huaren) means485persons of Chinese ethnic origin, and � (huaqiao) means Chinese citizens who are livingoutside China. However, when the English term Overseas Chinese is used, it often includesboth groups of people. Many of the governmental and non-governmental organizations foroverseas Chinese affairs do not make a clear distinction between the two groups and theyare both invited to events in the British Chinese embassy, for instance, Chinese National490Day celebrations and Chinese New Year receptions. Remarkably, the pupils in the presentexample seem to be interested in the fine technical details and one of them asks the teacherdirectly what she is. The teacher first gives a cliched reply that she is Chinese. After thepupils’ challenges, however, she has to reflect on it and gives a more precise answer. Thepupils also begin to reflect on who they are. What starts as a technical discussion of some495terminological issues has thus led to a meaningful discussion and enhanced awareness oftheir identities.

Summary and conclusion

I began this article by suggesting that complementary schools for multilingual, ethnic mi-nority children in Britain are an important site to explore three related theoretical concepts –500funds of knowledge symbolic competence and translanguaging. The funds of knowledge,the teachers and pupils in this particular context bring into the classroom include language,culture and life experiences. What is especially interesting, as the examples discussed in

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this article show, is the differences in the teachers’ and the pupils’ linguistic proficienciesin Mandarin, Cantonese and English, their attitudes and attachments to the different lan-505guages and language varieties, the cultural values that are inherent in the languages as wellas those that they gain from their different life experiences, their migration histories anddevelopmental trajectories, their social positions in the community and the wider society.The vast majority of the teachers have a relatively short experience living in Britain, andmany also have little contact with the Chinese communities apart from service encounters.510Some of them are educational transients who are in Britain for their studies and who haveevery intention to return to China in due course. They of course bring with them knowledgeof contemporary China, which they do use in their teaching. But the vast majority of pupilsin the Chinese complementary schools are British-born and have no intimate knowledge ofChina. Very few of them have ever lived in China for any significant period of time. They515are British youth of ethnic Chinese background. These differences may cause tensions andconflicts, as studies in Li and Martin’s (2009) collection demonstrate. But they also provideexciting learning opportunities and resources. What seems to be at issue is how to utilisethe different funds of knowledge so that both the teachers and the pupils can gain somethingpositive and beneficial. In some cases, specific new knowledge is gained, for instance, in520Example 3 where the teacher learned the correct English pronunciation, and Example 4where the teacher learns the Roman numerals from the pupils. But even when there is noexplicit evidence of learning, in the sense of gaining new information and being able to usethat information, the awareness of the differences or a realization of something amiss canbe very useful.525

One particular aspect of the discrepancies in the funds of knowledge between theteachers and the pupils concerns the pupils’ knowledge of Cantonese and the lack of iton behalf of many of the teachers in Mandarin classes. Although the social hierarchybetween Mandarin and Cantonese is changing fast amongst the Chinese diasporas, due toglobalisation and the increased politico-economic power of mainland China, Cantonese530speakers brings with them specific cultural knowledge that is immediately relevant to theevery life of the community in which these Chinese complementary schools are located.So whilst at the global level Mandarin clearly has higher status, at the local level Cantoneseplays a specific role that brings with it specific power and influence. For instance, theprovision of services such as restaurants, travel agencies, accountancies and health clinics535in the Chinese communities in Britain is still dominated by Cantonese. And there aremany times more Cantonese schools than Mandarin ones. When the Cantonese pupils usetheir knowledge of the language skilfully in the classroom, they can obtain a symbolicallypowerful position, and when the non-Cantonese speaking teachers are prepared to learnfrom the pupils, they can gain knowledge, power and respect.540

The discrepancies in funds of knowledge and symbolic competence between the teachersand the pupils are also shown in the competing cultural interests, expectations and values.The teachers seem to want to transmit certain cultural values and practices to the pupilsthrough specific ways of using the language. The cultural values and practices come inpart from the teachers’ own cultural knowledge and experience and in part from what they545believe all Chinese children should do and be. But the pupils, coming from a differentsocio-cultural perspective, with a different set of knowledge and experience, contest thevalues and practices that are being transmitted to them. We see examples of the kind ofresistance they put up, as well as the creative translanguaging acts, which are used veryeffectively to negotiate new power relationships in the classroom.550

The utilisation and negotiation of the different funds of knowledge will undoubtedlyimpact on the development of the socio-cultural identities of both the teachers and the

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18 L. Wei

pupils. Although many teachers may come into the complementary schools context with aset of ideas of who the pupils are and what they can do, their ideas do change in the courseof teaching. At the minimum, they come to realise that these pupils are not the same as555those in China and Hong Kong. The pupils’ socio-cultural experiences as British Chineseare a valuable resource for the society at large and for themselves as individuals to bedeveloped into effective citizens of the world. Although it is rarely explicitly articulated,the teachers’ experiences of teaching in complementary schools for Chinese children inBritain must surely impact on own identity development. It should enable them to realise560the important intercultural differences amongst different ethnic Chinese communities. Itshould also provide them with an opportunity to reflect on who they are, what they knowand what they can learn from others.

AcknowledgementsSome of the examples were collected as part of an ESRC-funded project Investigating Multilin-565gualism in Complementary Schools in Four Communities, RES-000-23-1180 and AHRC projectSGDMI/PID134128. The research team of the ESRC project consisted of A. Creese, T. Barac, A.Bhatt, A. Blackledge, S. Hamid, Li Wei, V. Lytra, P. Martin, C.-j. Wu and D. Yagcıoglu-Ali. TheAHRC project was led by Zhu Hua.

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