Negotiating participation and identity in a second language: Mainland Chinese students? English learning experiences in a multilingual university in Hong Kong

Negotiating participation and identity in a second language: Mainland Chinese students? English learning experiences in a multilingual university in Hong Kong

• Sung, Chit Cheung Matthew City University of Hong Kong

Research Papers in Education, (0), - , 2019

Routledge

2019

• N Students & Student Services
  • NO Minorities & Immigrant Students
• F Learning & Teaching
  • FE Medium of Instruction, Language of Teaching, Bi-& Multilingual Education, Problems of Bilingualism, Code-mixing & Code-switching

Language Learning Second Language Identity Participation Mainland Chinese Students

• Hong Kong

• 1997.7 onwards

• Post-Secondary Education

This paper investigates mainland Chinese students? experiences of learning English as a second language (L2) in a multilingual university in Hong Kong, with particular attention to their negotiation of participation and identity. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with a group of mainland Chinese students, the study revealed that their participation in L2 practices appeared to be shaped by the contextual conditions in different communities within the university and mediated by their agentic responses to the contextual realities of these communities. While they gained fuller participation in L2-mediated activities in the local student community and the classroom community as a result of their appropriation of the associated language practices and their display of knowledge and competence in the related social practices, they struggled to gain access to L2 interactional opportunities in the community of exchange students, where their negotiation of positionalities was subject to the perceived unequal power relations between native and non-native speakers of the English. It is argued that their participation in L2-mediated activities in the university could be understood as a complex, dynamic, situated and co-constructed process of negotiating access, competence, membership, positionality, identities and discursive practices associated with different communities.
[Copyright of Research Papers in Education is the property of Routledge.]

• English

Journal Articles

• 02671522

• 10.1080/02671522.2019.1677760

https://bibliography.lib.eduhk.hk/bibs/54339e09

2020-08-26