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1. Introduction
Over the past 15 years, rising interest in research exploring the practice and effects of multilingualism in applied linguistics (Lei & Liu, 2019) has triggered the development of research on multilingualism in the Chinese context. In China's foreign language education landscape, English remains dominant (Gao & Zheng, 2019) and English-related language teaching research is in the majority (Fang & Widodo, 2019). Despite this, a group of researchers in Shanghai, China have been committed to promoting research on multilingualism situated in the Chinese cultural, linguistic, and policy contexts. The core members of the research group are from four top universities in China, namely Fudan University, Tongji University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and Shanghai International Studies University. As the four universities are close to each other geographically, all located in Northeast Shanghai, we call ourselves the ‘Shanghai alliance of multilingual researchers’.
The research group echoes Chinese scholars’ enthusiasm for conducting research on multilingualism, as well as their dedication to graduate training in the field. The group consists of around ten core members, and during the last five years of its development the group has trained or is training approximately 30 postgraduate research students (including ten doctoral students and two postdoctoral researchers). This article aims to highlight some recent projects carried out by group members and students, divided into three focal areas: (1) multilingualism in language education, (2) multilingualism in Chinese society, and (3) research methods. The following sections will first delineate the published research in these areas, followed by brief introductions to ongoing research projects that the research group is engaged in.
2. Multilingualism in language education
Within the realm of multilingualism in language education, the alliance has focused on language-in-education planning at the macro and meso levels, as well as multilingual teachers’ and learners’ lived experiences at the micro level. Taking the approach of language-in-education planning, Yongyan Zheng (Fudan University) collaborated with Xuesong Gao (University of New South Wales) and guest-edited a special issue entitled ‘Multilingualism and higher education in Greater China’ in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (Gao & Zheng, 2019). They pointed out three tensions – between Global English and languages other than English (LOTEs), between individual identity and contextual variation, and between instrumentalist and transcultural values...