Internationalizing teaching, localizing English: Language teaching reforms through a south Chinese university

Based on ethnographic data collected over a three-year span at a university in the Peoples Republic of China, named here China Southern University (CSU), the study adds a practicing EFL teacher and Chinese university perspective to theoretical discussions of communicative competence and globalization. Specifically, the dissertation presents local forms of globalization in university ELT classrooms in China through two organizing themes: (1) Teacher appropriation of west-based teaching roles and methods; and (2) English language learner responses to internationalization reforms and new learning goals.;CSU is located in southern China and closely tied to national attempts to increase the number and spoken fluency of English speakers in an effort to "internationalize" Chinese education and meet the growing need for bilingual Mandarin-English and trilingual Mandarin-Cantonese-English managers. In recent years, the university mandated that all students take English through a newly created English Language Department (ELD), and it has recruited many "foreign experts" to teach new courses specifically using communicative language teaching (CLT) methods.;The data in the dissertation come from discourse analysis of university language policies and web documents coupled with qualitative data from: (1) classroom observations of participating local and foreign teacher English classrooms; (2) interviews with all foreign and local English teachers at CSU; (3) case studies and interviews of students in ELD courses; (4) student journals from my own classrooms; (5) my own teacher and researcher notes over the course of three teaching semesters at CSU.;The study presents several tensions in the reform and internationalization policies at CSU and found that students and teachers at CSU are maintaining traditional views of Chinese culture and education while fashioning creative and international identities through English language learning and teaching. In the drive to reform universities and replicate international teaching methods, Chinese university English programs need to more thoroughly incorporate these diverse voices and language practices and not simply strive to replicate dominant discourses and methods in the ELT field. In this way, English language programs at CSU and in the larger Chinese context can become truly transnational and more relevant to Chinese students and teachers of English.