The making of Taiwanese Mandarin in online language teaching

Abstract

This dissertation is about processes of language un/making and their effects on the lived experiences of Mandarin teachers from Taiwan who work in the gig economy for language teaching. Language un/making is the ideological creation, maintenance and dissolution of linguistic varieties. As data, I draw on interviews with, teacher profiles of and YouTube videos by Taiwanese teachers as well as supplemental data from various institutional and pedagogical contexts. By adopting an inductive, discourse-analytical approach that foregrounds the spatiotemporal imaginations, or chronotopes (Agha, 2007b; Bakhtin, 1981; Blommaert, 2015; Perrino, 2021), that shape people’s discourses and practices, I bring together various strands of research that focus on different elements of language un/making. These theorizations include processes that concern (1) the creation, maintenance, and circulation of value attributions to linguistic entities (e.g. Johnstone et al., 2006; Labov, 1972; Peirce, 1955; Silverstein, 2003), and (2) the ways in which speakers draw on these indexical meanings to construct identities in interaction (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005; Du Bois, 2007; Spitzmüller, 2015). With these analytical-theoretical tools, together with a spatiotemporally grounded understanding of context, I investigate the details of how Taiwanese Mandarin is imagined and challenged as a linguistic entity. This means I pay attention to not only the particular discursive imaginations of Taiwanese Mandarin (as a linguistic entity, standard, or commodity) but also the spatiotemporal contexts, in which these imaginations occur (e.g. the traditional/modern classroom chronotope, or the niche/mass market chronotope). This holistic view of language un/making, in turn, allows me to focus on the real-life consequences that these imaginations have on people (such as feeling confident, fearing financial instability or questioning one’s teacher identity). I explore these processes in the three analysis chapters, with each paying attention to various language ideological issues and distinct timespaces across different scales.

Chapter 4 lays the groundwork for understanding how Taiwanese Mandarin is made into a distinct linguistic entity. With attention to differently scaled contexts such as academia and social life, I investigate the un/making of Taiwanese Mandarin within and across spatiotemporal contexts that are relevant to online Mandarin teaching. In these contexts, particular focus is put on the underlying presumption of language as system, indexical and enregisterment processes, as well as metapragmatic stance-taking for identity work. Further ideological projects investigated in the subsequent analytical chapters presuppose the making of Taiwanese Mandarin into a distinct linguistic entity discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 5 is dedicated to the making of Taiwanese Mandarin into a standard. In this chapter, I decenter standard language from codification (e.g. Milroy & Milroy, 2012) and draw our attention to the traditional and modern classroom timespaces that influence and shape expectations about what constitutes standardness. More specifically, I employ the notion of axes of differentiation (Gal & Irvine, 2019) to identify the oppositions that construct standardness along imaginaries of formality and normalcy. Of particular interest is the limited communicability (Blommaert, 2015) of Taiwanese Mandarin as a formal standard in line with pluricentric research (Bradley, 1992; Clyne, 2004) in contrast to the more spatiotemporally attuned imagination of Taiwanese Mandarin as normal.

Lastly, Chapter 6 focuses on imaginations of Taiwanese Mandarin as a commodity. I engage with the literature on language commodification and argue that it is a language ideological process (Irvine & Gal, 2000) that is spatiotemporally structured by two predominant market imaginations, namely the niche market and mass market timespaces. Intersecting language ideologies—i.e. native speakerism (Curran, 2021; Holliday, 2006) and linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa et al., 2016; Park & Wee, 2021)—emerge as central to the interviewed teachers’ imaginations of the teaching market that further delimit the ways in which they can make Taiwanese Mandarin into “something that is or can be for sale on the market” (Hall, 2023, p. 553).

Across my analyses of different timespaces, I show how language is both made (up) and real—made (up) due to the ideological processes that are needed for language to come into existence and real through the real-life affective, identity-related and material consequences of this imaginative construct. This insight is of theoretical significance in that my approach illustrates a way to better understand the interdependent relationship between people’s linguistic practices, their beliefs about language and the effects thereof. In addition, this dissertation also contributes to applied issues relating to the learning of languages other than English (LOTE), the homogenized group of native language teachers in language teaching and learning research and language variation in the research field of Mandarin as a foreign language (MFL).

Date of Award	2 Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Yuet Hung Cecilia CHAN (Supervisor), Lydia Hwa-Che Medill CATEDRAL (External Co-Supervisor) & Farzad Karimzad (External Co-Supervisor)