“It's not like I'm gonna go to China one day”: A raciolinguistic perspective on students’ language ideologies in a U.S. Mandarin FLES program

Abstract In U.S. schools, Chinese is often offered as a world language, yet students may come to understand it through broader meanings attached to “Chinese” as a racialized, cultural, and geopolitical construct. Despite the rapid expansion of Chinese programs, little research has explored how students experience and interpret these ideological conditions that shape their learning. Drawing on data from a larger ethnographic study, this article employs a raciolinguistic lens to examine how fourth‐grade students in a U.S. Mandarin FLES program articulated and negotiated language ideologies surrounding Chinese learning. Findings reveal that students positioned Chinese learning in contrasting ways. While some valued it as a form of linguistic and cultural capital and as a site for identity reflection, others dismissed it as irrelevant within English‐dominant, monolingual frames. Across these orientations, a persistent sense of foreignness shaped how students understood Mandarin as socially distant and irrelevant, judged who could legitimately speak Chinese through racialized assumptions, and conflated Chinese with broader forms of Asian sameness. By showing how young learners negotiate these ideological tensions, this study highlights the need for pedagogies that cultivate critical language awareness, affirm multilingual legitimacy, and situate Chinese learning in locally grounded ways.