Identity of university Chinese heritage language learners in Hong Kong

Abstract

In the literature, heritage language (HL) learners typically appeared as second-generation immigrants who were exposed to a minority language at home and to a dominant language in school and society. While this conceptualization of HL learners may make it easy to study HL learners in a confined immigration context, it may also make it less likely to fully describe long-term HL learners’ developmental and transnational experiences across a wider social context. The aim of this study is to explore how identity was constructed in Chinese heritage language (CHL) learners’ narratives about their long-term experiences of language learning, language use, and social practices across time and space. The term learner identity in this study is drawn from a poststructuralist view that affirms the multiplicity and fluidity of identity construction, and the inseparability of learning experience from social and linguistic practices. I examine CHL learner identity from a perspective of narrative discourses, grounded in the understanding that all learning, linguistic and social aspects of learner identity are interconnected in narratives. The participants were 16 university-level CHL learners in Hong Kong, who had lived in non-Chinese-dominant places for a significant number of years before they attended university in Hong Kong. The research method was based on in-depth interviews concerning the participants’ linguistic and social experiences that were deeply intersected with transnational and transcultural processes. Bamberg’s (1997) 3-level positioning framework was adopted to analyse identity in both the micro and macro contexts of the narrative discourses. The results showed that the participants’ identity construction was characterised by constant negotiation between self and other and transformational practices over time. This study also offers a perspective from which CHL learners classified as overseas CHL speakers, domestic-born CHL speakers, and “third culture” CHL speakers can be understood to have a shared self-positioning that framed their linguistic practices as flexible, hybrid, and transformative. This study illustrates how positioning is implicated in HL learner identity construction and identity change over time. This study showed the importance in understanding CHL learner identity as a dynamic and evolving construct from a broader perspective of transnational movement. The implications of this study were presented to challenge the stigmatized conceptualization of HL learner identity in diasporic contexts and to call for a more critical approach to examining identity construction in shifting contexts that were characterised by superdiversity. Suggestions for future research were offered. (390 words)