Social rationale for this study

Since the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was held in Beijing in 1978, of which the motto was ‘Practice is the only real criterion to test the truth’（实践是检验真理的唯一标准，in Chinese), China has undergone rapid economic development and dramatic social reform, achieving significant growth both economically and socially, due to the decision for economic development as well as reform and an opening up to the rest of the world.

Simultaneously, increasing socioeconomic disparity has become a problem that could potentially destabilize economic reform, and the existing rigid social-status hierarchy that grew out of a state socialist economy is no longer suited to represent the increasing social and economic fragmentation of Chinese society (Bian, 2002). Even at present, China still is a rural-urban dual-structured society marked by a strict division between rural and urban areas.

By 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, rural–urban income differences had reached their historic peak and were greater than when reforms began with real rural income per capita being only 39 percent of real urban income per capital. (…) In addition to contributing to overall inequality, rural–

urban inequality creates incentives for rural–urban migration and urbanization

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while at the same time being symptomatic of persistent barriers to population mobility. (Park, 2008, p. 41)

Despite the difficulty in obtaining data, several researchers argue that China’s rural–

urban gaps are much larger than those found in most other developing countries (Knight, Li & Song, 2006; Eastwood & Lipton, 2004). Sicular, Yue, Gustafsson and Li (2006) have found that rural–urban differences make up at least 25 percent of overall inequality in 2002 for several provinces in China.

In terms of social class, at the beginning of establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the threefold socialist-era categories of workers, peasants, and cadres were used to classify the Chinese people under Mao’s leadership (Liang, 1997). This kind of division is largely based on an individual’s officially registered residential status. If a person is registered officially as a rural resident, he or she is considered a farmer, no matter where he or she is or what he or she is doing. Furthermore, China is experiencing an increasingly large gap between the education levels of people holding urban and rural permanent residency permits (houkou, or ‘户口’ in Chinese). The research-setting school is located in a rural region and most of students in this school hold rural houkou and suffer from the huge urban-rural gap.

Better education and English competence seem to be widely conceived by Chinese middle-class families in urban areas as essential to securing a better future for their children. Due to their easy access to material and social resources, these so-called

‘elite’ families, are committed to giving their offspring an earlier start in the race for English learning. As a result, the promotion of English and enthusiastic investment in the learning of English by the middle class have exacerbated the gap in learning English between ‘those who have’ and ‘those who have not’ (Nunan 2003, p.605; also see Gao, 2008). Due to their and their parents’ social status, the English learners in rural China have limited access to profitable resources. The severe gap between urban

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and rural areas in China has caused the unfair distribution of resources in English education; these resources are key for the resultant transaction between knowing English and having valuable cultural capital. This implies an urgent need for research into the current situation of rural Chinese English education.

Of course it must be noted that the issues of language education and social equality are hardly new. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the sociologist Basil Bernstein, drawing on work from Halliday (1969), began exploring the connections between

‘code’ and ‘context’. Bernstein argued that “codes are not directly observable, only speech variants” (1971/2003, p. 12), going on in further research to explore

[T]wo inter-related strands: the various factors which affect children’s experience of formal education, and a more general problem of the structure of cultural transmission and change, with special reference to speech. (Berstein, 2003, p. 13).

Drawing on work from linguists of the caliber of Cassirer (1944, 1953), Whorf (1956) and Sapir (1949), along with (educational development) work by Bruner and colleagues (1956), Bernstein argued that through direct lexical experience of the individual in their familial context, the child becomes ‘sensitized’ to certain language features. Features that are ‘differentiated’ (or, on the other hand, ‘undifferentiated’) by the individual may be preferred in formal education settings, thus having an indirect but important effect on how the students are perceived in the classroom. In other words, through exposure to specific language features, the individual is better able to differentiate these features and respond to them. In the case where these variants of language use are similar to the formal education setting of the individual, a clear advantage is in play.

For Bernstein, the term ‘code’ refers to the ways in which language is organized according to a set of principles, but in relation to the perceptions of that language in

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particular social groups. Thus knowledge of, and use of a ‘restricted’ code will require belonging to the social group that this particular code is associated with. Citing work by Bernstein (1971) and Labov (1972), Lynch and Baker (2016) explain that in educational settings codes that are more commonly used by the upper classes become prioritized over those employed by working class or ethnic minority students.

In terms of educational equality and sociolinguistic and sociocultural backgrounds, numerous studies have shown the impact that linguistic and cultural life experiences can have on students’ access to educational opportunities. Seminal work in this field was carried out in the 1980’s and 1990’s (Brice Heath, 1983; Maybin, 1992; Young, 1992; Barton & Hamilton, 1998; Pollard, 1999). Further along these lines are the studies and publications stemming the Critical Pedagogy (cf. Giroux, 1981, 1988, 1997; McLaren, 1995; Kincheloe & Steinburg, 1997), all of have made a mark on research concerning the way in which language users are perceived within the educational context and their education opportunities and eventual attainment (Dooly

& Vallejo, 2009; Ross, Dooly & Hartsmar, 2012).

In particular, Critical Pedagogy has enjoyed resurgence in the area of language learning, as exemplified by the special issue in the journal TESOL Quarterly (2006) and other work; it has continued to expand into studies of plurilingual education (cf.

Lüdi & Py, 1986/2013), with the rapidly growing acceptance of concepts such as

‘translanguaging’, which calls into question long-standing notions of ‘codes’ and

‘code-switching’ when dealing with bi/multi-lingual speakers. Coming full circle, this implies that, beginning with the previously mentioned seminal works into understanding language use and language learning (Bernstein, 1971; Labov, 1972), sociolinguistics is at a juncture that requires a re-thinking of the very idea of ‘code’

and ‘language’ as anything but social constructs; placing even further emphasis on the way in which languages may be perceived as valuable (or not) by both individuals and society as a whole. Or, as Otheguy (2016) puts it, translanguaging is “a conception