Three constructs of institutional identity among international doctoral students in Australia

Postmodern institutional interactions in Australian universities, among students and staff, entail negotiation of identity, legitimacy, and ‘social capital’. For many international students, this happens in an additional language and culture, in English. The case study presented here profiles four international non-English speaking background Ph.D. students in an Australian university, observes their out-of classroom departmental interactions, and uses a sociocultural perspective of second language in use to map their approaches to the negotiation of institutional identity. Two focus group interviews with the participants illustrated how, despite similarities among the participants in the beginning as newcomers to a Western university, students chose different pathways for integration, engagement in institutional interactions, and identity construction. The discussions highlight the role of agency and intentionality in participation and learning through interaction which leads to a critique of the ‘international student' as a label that underplays student agency.     

Teacher agency,positioning, and English language learners: Voices of pre-service classroom teachers

This study explores the identity (re)negotiations and agency of three pre-service classroom teachers who received their ESL (English as a Second Language) endorsement at a research university in the United States. An analysis of interview data and teachers' journal entries, from a narrative positioning perspective, indicates that the teachers took on various, and sometimes conflicting, positional identities in relation to their social context (e.g., mentor teachers, ELLs, etc.). The findings further indicate that those positional identities have shaped teachers' agency and self-reported classroom practices. The analysis presented provides implications for teachers of ELLs and teacher educators.     

Reflective learning and identity construction in practice,discourse and activity: Experiences of pre-service language teachers in Hong Kong

This paper reports on an investigation into two pre-service teachers' reflective learning through a series of integrated and interactive tasks (i.e., collaborative lesson planning, group consultation, microteaching and videoed reflections) in a teacher education course in Hong Kong. Relying on data gathered from interviews and reflection videos and informed by a tripartite model on teacher identity in practice, discourse and activity, the study revealed how the pre-service teachers engaged in reflective practice and identity construction in the course. The paper concludes with practical implications on how to design and implement effective reflective tasks in preparing and developing competent language teachers.     

Distinction,integration and identity: Motivations for local language literacy in Senegalese communities

Successful adult literacy and basic education programs are notoriously difficult to achieve. One reason for this has to do with how the question, “literacy for what?” is answered for a given program. All too frequently, the answer to that question is shaped more by the goals of the literacy provider than it is by learners’ own goals and desires.     

The Intersection of Language,Education, and Content: Science Instruction for ESL Students

In this study, the author investigated the relationships among Turkish students' perceived computer skills, computer attitudes, quantitative skills, qualitative skills, and gender. The author collected data from a total of 362 undergraduate students. He found that gender was a significant variable to predict computer attitudes but not perceived skills. The author found no significant correlations between perceived computer skills and attitudes. Although computer attitudes and qualitative skills were significantly and negatively correlated, the author found no significant associations between computer skills and quantitative skills and between computer attitudes and quantitative skills. At least one variable explained variances in each of the subscales of the computer-attitude scale.     

中国留澳学生语言实践与身份认同的关系研究

本文将Norton关于"身份认同"的定义及"二语投资理论"作为理论基础,以Miller的"语言使用-社会成员关系-社会环境"图表为分析工具,来阐述在动态多元的社会情境下,悉尼大学中国留学生中的CETers和non-CETers的语言实践与他们的身份认同之间的关系。通过分析比较这两类学生的语言实践情况的相似性和差异性,来研究社会背景是如何影响他们语言实践以及身份认同的。     

Language (in)competency,communication strategies,and the development of an international academic teacher identity: becoming an audible minority

Despite universities’ enthusiasm for internationalization, international academic mobility requires considerable institutional and cultural adjustment in terms of teaching and supervision styles, research expectations, and departmental relationships. Although language competency underpins these practices, research on international academics has neglected the impact of language proficiency on professional identity. This article uses autoethnography to document conversations about language ability during my first two years as an academic in a French-language university. My responses to language-related comments evolved over time, reflecting how I positioned myself as a linguistic – or audible – minority, vis-à-vis the linguistic majority. Using cultural phenomenology, the findings highlight the interactional, unstable nature of international academic identities and the importance of positive collective support for international academics who shift from majority to minority linguistic status.     

The Power of Language,Learning and Socialization: Romani and Ebonics

This article draws attention to the role one’s language plays in socialization and explains the misunderstandings and conflicts over integration of the Roma in the Czech Republic. Recognizing the role of home language leads to successful socialization. By not demanding that schools account for home language in the process of teaching, the Roma have implicitly agreed that Czech is the natural way through which children of diverse cultural backgrounds access education and adapt. Children of minorities and namely, the Roma, have been disadvantaged by cultural assumptions enabling teachers, curricula, and textbooks to construct the profile of a Czech student in a way that precludes his or her multicultural origin. To compare, the study provides insight into the conflict between Standard American English and Afro-American English and highlights its factors, legal resolutions, and contemporary situation. The article also reviews research on bilingual classrooms and learning in the United States and suggests that it is relevant to the contentious interrelationship of standard Czech and Romani at schools.     

Learner contribution to English language learning: Chinese research students' agency and their transitional experiences in Australia

This article examines the role of agency for the English language development of three Chinese research students with high English proficiency sojourning in Australia. The focus is on the various approaches the learners employed to strengthen their sense of confidence in their language use in Australia. The data were obtained through in-depth interviews and organized into case-study reports. The findings demonstrate that in transitioning into the Australian linguistic and cultural community, all the learners actively sought different English-mediated activities and experiences in order to build the confidence necessary for a successful transition. The differences in their choices of activities were intimately linked with what they historically saw and established as significant achievement goals in and through English. In maintaining that the students' agency was an extension of their fundamental desires and goals for learning, this article provides insights into how second-language (L2) learners gain participation in the target community and the salience of their historical learning goals for L2 use and overall L2 development.     

English-medium instruction in law and the humanities in higher education: the role of teacher identity

ABSTRACT

Recent research on English-medium instruction (EMI) has examined university instructors’ professional identities in science and social science rather than in the humanities. To fill the gap, this qualitative case study explores the ways in which 13 university instructors in law and the humanities in Taiwan perceived their identity and exercised their agency as teachers. The findings indicated that these instructors had three ideal teacher identities, including educators in global and local contexts, subject matter instructors, and EMI instructors. Each determined teachers’ choice, design, and enactment of EMI practices, as well as their notions of language use and objectives. This study highlights the primacy of preferred teacher identities in the manifestation of teacher agency, identifies enabling and constraining effects of teacher agency, and emphasizes the significant roles of discipline-specific communities and ethnicity and nationality in EMI practices. As such, teacher identities should be taken into consideration in professional development to empower instructors to take actions that maintain their commitments to EMI.     

A critical turn in higher education research: turning the critical lens on the Academic Language and Learning educator

This paper suggests that historical ontology, as one form of reflexive critique, is an instructive research design for making sense of the political and historical constitution of the Academic Language and Learning (ALL) educator in Australian higher education. The ALL educator in this paper refers to those practitioners in the field of ALL, whose ethical agency has largely been taken for granted since their slow and uneven emergence in the latter half of the twentieth century. Using the lens of governmentality, genealogical design and archaeological method, the historical ontology proposed in this paper demonstrates how the ethical remit of the ALL educator to ‘make a difference’ to student learning is not necessarily a unifying construct providing a foundational moral basis for the work, but a contingent historical and political effect of the government of conduct in liberal society. The findings of this approach are not intended to undermine the agency of the ALL educator, but to assist in making sense of the historical conditions that frame and complicate their institutional intelligibility as ethical agents in the academy.     

Language Ideology,Christianity, and Identity: Critical Empirical Examinations of Christian Institutions as Alternative Spaces

ABSTRACT

The teaching and learning of languages has been mainly investigated within educational institutions, especially by applied linguists. However, religious spaces such as churches and church related programs have historically and contemporarily served as important alternative spaces for such teaching and learning to take place. At the same time, such institutions and the way that language teaching and learning unfold in these spaces necessitates both a critical and empirical examination which makes salient the role and consequences of power. The focus of this special issue is to provide examples of studies which seek to fill this gap. This introduction serves as a way to set up this special issue and the articles within it by making salient the themes of language socialization, language ideology, identity, Christianity, ethnography and systems of power, as well as showing how the four studies in this special issue speak to the aforementioned gap and these themes.     

The Unfamiliar and the Indeterminate: Language,Identity and Social Integration in the School Experience of Newly-Arrived Migrant Children in England

Research into the language socialisation of migrant-background children in new educational contexts has pointed to a complex relationship between language, identity, and social integration. This article helps us to further define this relationship in two main ways. Firstly, through focusing on the specific (and largely neglected) context of the experiences of newly-arrived migrant school children from disadvantaged backgrounds and with little initial command of English, in the East of England, which has in recent years seen a steep rise in the population of children from Eastern Europe in particular. Secondly, through inductive analysis of the pupils’ accounts of their experience in the new environment, the article identifies four key themes which shed light on the overlap between language, identity, and social integration in this context: perceptions of exclusion in the new language environment, the social boundaries of language use, L1 exchange as communicative capital, and languages and identity simulation.     

Addressing the crisis in curriculum studies: curriculum integration that bridges issues of identity and knowledge

Many people from non-dominant backgrounds or believers from various religions want their children to acquire the best modern knowledge and to remain open to their home cultures and beliefs. However, this double aspiration poses complex challenges, and most scholars have either stressed the importance of addressing identity (and diversity) issues, or claimed that the key is to give everyone access to powerful knowledge. Beginning from curriculum studies’ alleged crisis and its relation to this dichotomy, this paper suggests that bridging concern for diverse identities and access to powerful knowledge implies devising curricula that allow for issues that are transversal to the disciplines without collapsing the boundaries between them. Since this has been generally difficult to develop, the paper reflects on the kind of curriculum integration that is needed, arriving at the idea of interstitial curriculum or connective tissue amid the disciplines. Subsequently, unique features of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program (IBDP) are presented to exemplify these curricular interstices, and how they help to deal with the epistemological challenges posed by the initially mentioned double aspiration of many families at present.     

Professional identity in early childhood care and education: perspectives of pre-school and infant teachers

This paper explores perceptions of professional identity in the early childhood care and educations sector (ECCE) in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). It is concerned with the status, salary and conditions of those working with children aged four to six in pre-school and primary school settings. Using qualitative methodology, the study garnered personal perspectives and insights into professional identity. It presents new empirical evidence on the attitudes of those working in ECCE towards their professional identity and their aspirations for the future. Findings indicate that professional identity is contentious and problematic. At pre-school level, this is predominantly associated with the lack of a mandatory training requirement. There is compelling evidence that highly trained ECCE graduates are being lost to the sector. At primary school level, while teachers per se enjoy a relatively high social status, their professional identity as infant teachers is compromised within individual school settings. Teachers believe that this is related to a perception that the infant class is akin to ‘playschool’. As a result, they do not get the same respect as teachers working in classes higher up the school. These issues gives rise to fundamental questions about the value of early childhood as well as the value placed on those working with four- to six-year-old children in pre-school and primary school.     

Tibetan students at an interior university in China: negotiating identity,language, and power

ABSTRACT

Using Norton’s conception of identity and Harré and Moghaddam’s positioning theory, the current study examines how a group of Tibetan students’ situated context affects their identity (re)construction in a traditionally non-multiethnic interior university in China. Drawing from interview, biographies, document, and artefact data, our findings suggest that the construction and negotiation of ethnic Tibetan students’ identities is a complex, power driven, and unstable process. In particular, the participants’ identity positioning at the host university is inextricably linked to stereotypical images of Tibetans, linguistic integration in the interior academic environment via English, Putonghua, and Tibetan language, and larger institutional practices. Tangible pedagogical implications are discussed, such as providing critical multicultural and multilingual education at the university are discussed.     

Ways of Talking (and Acting) About Language Reclamation: An Ethnographic Perspective on Learning Lenape in Pennsylvania

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity, and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.     

Turning heads: The impact of political reform on the professional role,identity and recruitment of head teachers in Wales

This article considers the professional work, identity and recruitment of head teachers (HTs) in Wales. Drawing on the sociology of professions, the article illustrates how intensive educational policy reform post‐2011 has restricted HTs’ professional agency and re‐orientated the head teacher role towards organisational professionalism. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews (n=30) with both head and deputy head teachers, the article argues that issues with the recruitment and retention of HTs in Wales can, in part, be explained by the promotion of managerial and technicist approaches to professional practice. This role reconfiguration is the result of myriad and, at times, overlapping accountability mechanisms. The article illustrates how these changes to HT professional roles and identity are more intense within a small education system where HTs had, traditionally, enjoyed an elite professional status. To ameliorate these issues, the article proposes policy initiatives which the Welsh Government could introduce to foster the agency of HTs within a revised professional framework for educational leadership in Wales.     

Socio-emotional connections: identity,belonging and learning in online interactions. A literature review

This review focuses on three interconnected socio-emotional aspects of online learning: interaction, sense of community and identity formation. In the intangible social space of the virtual classroom, students come together to learn through dialogic, often asynchronous, exchanges. This creates distinctive learning environments where learning goals, interpersonal relationships and emotions are no less important because of their ‘virtualness’, and for which traditional face-to-face pedagogies are not neatly transferrable. The literature reveals consistent connections between interaction and sense of community. Yet identity, which plausibly and naturally emerges from any social interaction, is much less explored in online learning. While it is widely acknowledged that interaction increases the potential for knowledge-building, the literature indicates that this will be enhanced when opportunities encouraging students’ emergent identities are embedded into the curriculum. To encourage informed teaching strategies this review seeks to raise awareness and stimulate further exploration into a currently under-researched facet of online learning.