3.Method

The methodological triangulation is employed to assure the validity and reliability.The mixed method consists of①documentation search focusing on the curricula used in selected Australian universities;②qualitative investigation on the lecturers’attitude towards two cohorts of Chinese heritage background students and non-Chinese background students;and③qualitative investigation on the response to the existing practices of teaching Chinese from the two cohorts of students of Chinese.The quantitative approach seems inappropriate for this study since the number of students are not sufficient enough to demonstrate statistic features.Neither the observation of class is feasible because it was not economic to travel four states along the coast of the Eastern Australia to obtain observation notes.

The research was conducted in the four states along the eastern coastal line，including Queensland，New South Wales，Victoria and South Australia since there are considerable migrants from China and other Asian countries，and the population of Chinese heritage background students is relatively larger than West Australia，Australian Capital Teritory and the Northern Teritory.Information statements and census forms about this project were sent to all the universities in these four states，inviting Departments of Chinese Language，lecturers and students to participate.Consequently，seven universities spreaded in these four states were selected，covering two universities in“G8 Group”which are coded as U-A and U-B，four universities in“Research Innovation Group”(with the codes of U-D，U-L，U-M and U-S)plus one regional university coded as U-N where students(N=10;coded from S1 to S10)were invited to have an interview.In total，ten lecturers(coded as L1-L10，three male and seven female)agreed to make contributions to the research.Over half of them have more than ten years teaching experience in Australian universities.

Documentary analysis is a method used to identify，categorise，interpret and investigate the limitations of physical sources(Payne and Payne，2004).To start this research project，priority was given to a critical review of Australian national and states’policies on teaching and learning LOTE including Chinese.Meanwhile，the general information about the Chinese language programs in the seven participating universities were scrutinised in order to know what actions have been taken to satisfy both Chinese heritage background students(CHBS)and non-Chinese background students(NCBS).It was expected that a review of these documents would reveal a macro overview of CLT in the Australian higher education context.The source of documents was from official websites of Australian federal and state governments and Australian universities.

Apart from documentary research，in-depth interview is most frequently used in qualitative study to“get close to an individual’s perspective”(Kayrooz and Trevitt，2005).For the sake of understanding people’s experience to obtain useful explanations and interpretations(Yin，2009)，interviews were conducted with lecturers through telephone communication and two cohorts of students(CHBSand NCBS)through focused group-interview in one university for the economic purpose.These interviews aimed to explore participants’experiences，opinions and suggestions on existing Chinese language programs which they were involving at their universities.The duration of each interview varied from 30 minutes to 60 minutes depending on the individual commitment and availability.Interviews with lecturers and students were digitally recorded with the consent of the interviewees and transcribed verbatim.Interview transcripts were imported into NVivo as individual cases and organised for thematic analysis.To ensure validity and reliability，all coding was cross-checked.

In general，the analysis of collected data went through three steps in the current study.In the first step，holistic coding was applied to grasp basic themes or issues in the data，and it is a time-saving approach for preparing massive amount of data for more detailed analysis(Dey，1993).The second step employed descriptive coding which summarizes basic topics of the narratives selected in the first stage in short phrases.And then，at the third step，focused coding was applied to organize the descriptive codes into themes.All the themes were discussed in the following section one by one.