Towards Interculturalising Chinese Language Education in Australian Higher Education: A Conceptual Framework
Abstract
In an era of intensified global interconnectedness shaped by mobility, digital technologies, and transnational flows of knowledge, intercultural encounters have become routine rather than exceptional. As a result, intercultural perspectives have increasingly been positioned as a central concern in foreign language (FL) education. Over recent decades, the goals of FL teaching and learning have expanded beyond linguistic proficiency to include learners’ capacity to engage appropriately, critically, and reflexively in complex intercultural contexts. In both policy and pedagogical discussions, notions such as intercultural (communicative) competence, critical cultural awareness, global citizenship, and multiculturalism have been widely foregrounded.
Within Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) education, interest in intercultural approaches has also grown alongside the global expansion of Chinese learning and broader social and cultural transformations. In Australia, expectations related to cultural competence and global outlook are explicitly articulated in university graduate attributes and in internationalisation agendas, positioning intercultural learning as an intended outcome of higher education. Consequently, many Chinese Studies programs and CFL units in Australian universities seek to cultivate learners’ ability to mediate across cultural perspectives, negotiate meanings among cultural identities, and reflect on their own positioning within diverse cultural discourses. Despite these developments, limited research has systematically examined how such intercultural expectations are understood, articulated, and enacted within CFL education in Australian higher education context.
Addressing the gap, this study draws on theories of interculturality and adopts a social constructivist perspective, conceptualising interculturality as a socially situated, relational, and context-dependent process rather than a fixed set of skills. Intercultural expectations are thus understood as educational orientations constructed through the interaction of institutional priorities, curriculum discourses, pedagogical traditions, and teachers’ beliefs and practices. Building on this theoretical positioning, this paper proposes a conceptual framework that maps the construction of interculturality across three interconnected levels: institutional policy narratives (macro), curriculum and syllabus discourses (meso), and teachers’ perspectives and pedagogical reasoning (micro).
By articulating this framework, the study aims to offer a theoretically grounded lens for examining intercultural dimensions in Chinese language education and to inform future empirical research. The paper will contribute to ongoing discussions on internationalisation, language education, and intercultural pedagogy by highlighting the multi-layered processes through which interculturality is shaped, negotiated, and potentially contested in Australian higher education, with implications for Chinese language programs in other global contexts.
