Horizontal and Vertical Discourse: Making Chinese Learnable for Australian Students From Low Socio-Economic Backgrounds

Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) education is a fragile undertaking across all stages of Australian schooling, and the crux of limited sustained success rests on, amongst all other factors, the textbook-based, teacher-directed classroom discourse. Highly abstract educational policies pose challenges for teachers to translate into practice, and the developed learning activities neither meet students’ demands for future careers and social lives, nor guarantee classroom cooperation or compliance. This paper takes up these concerns and attempts to articulate the possibilities of shifting pedagogic discourses to make Chinese learnable for students from low socio-economic status (SES) backgrounds. By applying Bernstein’s conceptualization of vertical and horizontal discourses (1999), I present two vignettes from a research project designed to induct underprivileged students into CFL learning in an Australian primary classroom. The potentially useful knowledge of Chinese language and culture was reorganized to constitute worthwhile pedagogical tools, interweaving both formal and informal discourses for students, recognizing relevance in personal and school lives. By offering a convincing explanation of effective CFL and its affordances for social equity and just education, this paper makes an original contribution to scholarly debate around structuring the CFL curriculum in the global context.