Recently, the essay It’s difficult but important: toward a model of African students’ Chinese language identity development in higher education has been published on the high-level Linguistics International Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. This masterpiece is written by Associate Professor Mao Yanfeng (School of Foreign Languages, Jiangsu University), Professor Wendi Adair (Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo), and Professor Su Jianhong (Vice Dean of Overseas Education College, Jiangsu University).

This longitudinal inductive research unpacks the process of African post-secondary students’ Chinese language identity (CLI) with the purpose of exploring a model of CLI development. The authors traced how 12 multilingual African students developed their CLI during the first year in Jiangsu University. Data coded from three rounds of interviews conducted at different times reveal that over time, there are fewer distractors and more contributors to the development of CLI. It is also found that three bidirectional factors that both facilitate and impede CLI construction. In terms of dimensions of language identity, Chinese language expertise and positive affiliation with the new language increased over time without change in students’ original language inheritance.

This study helps to discover patterns of change in language identity from a micro perspective and informs models of language identity development among multilingual adult learners. Moreover, it has guiding significance about international students’ cross-cultural adaption and their Chinese proficiency improvement.

(OEC)