Urban Schools and English Language Education in Late Modern China: A Critical Sociolinguistic Ethnography

This book explores the meaning of modernization in contemporary Chinese education. It examines the implications of the implementation of reforms in English language education for experimental-urban schools in the People'¬"s Republic of China. Pérez Milans sheds light on how national, linguistic, and cultural ideologies linked to modernization are being institutionally (re)produced, legitimated, and resisted through everyday practice in the current context of Chinese educational reforms. He places special emphasis on those reforms regarding English language education, with respect to the economic processes of globalization that are shaping (and being shaped by) the contemporary Chinese nation-state. Thus, the book explores the processes of institutional categorization of the "good experimental school", the "good student", and the "appropriate knowledge" that emerge from the discourse of modernization in those schools'¬" everyday practices.