Between Shame and Pride: A Critical Ethnography of Chinese University Students Learning Lao Language

In applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, emotions constitute an emerging space for capturing the complexity of foreign language learners’ experiences. However, our knowledge of emotion-based foreign language studies has long been dominated by English discussion, leaving a significant gap of understanding emotions of learning languages other than English (LOTE). The incommensurability in the existing literature forms a stark contrast to China’s nation-wide valorization of learning LOTE. Previous studies (Li, 2021; Li & De Costa, 2023; Li & He, 2023) show that learning LOTE is largely mediated by social, political, cultural and economic discourses across spatial-temporal contexts. Seeing emotions from a critical sociopolitical perspective (Benesch, 2017; Song, 2023), this study unpacks the emotional experiences of a cohort of Chinese students learning Lao language at a Chinese university. A longitudinal ethnography was conducted between August 2023 and May 2024 and the data included field notes, participant observation in and out of class, semi-structured interviews and written documents. Findings indicate that Chinese students learning Lao language experience both positive and negative emotions driven by sociopolitical and cultural factors circulating at macro-, meso- and micro-levels. It is argued that foreign language learners’ emotions are not fixed but dynamic and mediated in a broader process of socioeconomic transformations within and across national boundaries across time and space. The study is closed by offering some insights on conducting emotion-based foreign language studies.