Negotiating Bilingual and Bicultural Identities

Japanese Returnees Betwixt Two Worlds

Yasuko Kanno

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135637224
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book examines the changing linguistic and cultural identities of bilingual students through the narratives of four Japanese returnees (kikokushijo) as they spent their adolescent years in North America and then returned to Japan to attend university.

As adolescents, these students were polarized toward one language and culture over the other, but through a period of difficult readjustment in Japan they became increasingly more sophisticated in negotiating their identities and more appreciative of their hybrid selves. Kanno analyzes how educational institutions both in their host and home countries, societal recognition or devaluation of bilingualism, and the students' own maturation contributed to shaping and transforming their identities over time. Using narrative inquiry and communities of practice as a theoretical framework, she argues that it is possible for bilingual individuals to learn to strike a balance between two languages and cultures.

Negotiating Bilingual and Bicultural Identities: Japanese Returnees Betwixt Two Worlds:

*is a longitudinal study of bilingual and bicultural identities--unlike most studies of bilingual learners, this book follows the same bilingual youths from adolescence to young adulthood;

*documents student perspectives--redressing the neglect of student voice in much educational research, and offering educators an understanding of what the experience of learning English and becoming bilingual and bicultural looks like from the students' point of view; and

*contributes to the study of language, culture, and identity by demonstrating that for bilingual individuals, identity is not a simple choice of one language and culture but an ongoing balancing act of multiple languages and cultures.

This book will interest researchers, educators, and graduate students who are concerned with the education and personal growth of bilingual learners, and will be useful as text for courses in ESL/bilingual education, TESOL, applied linguistics, and multicultural education.

CHAPTER
1

From My Story to the Stories of Other Bilinguals

“ALAN HALL”

This story goes back to when I was 16. I had just made my first trip abroad, from my native country, Japan, to Wales, having been awarded a scholarship to study at an international school for 2 years. I had applied for the scholarship mainly to keep company with a friend who wanted to apply, but when some miracle sent the scholarship my way, I jumped at the opportunity out of a teenager’s curiosity and recklessness. By then I had had 4 years of English, but as a product of the grammar-translation method, I had never used English to communicate with anyone.

One late afternoon, not long after I arrived in my new school, I found myself in a group of students engrossed in conversation, a conversation in which I was not participating because of my limited English. At one point, though, I caught the words “Alan Hall.” In my school, which was located in a 15th-century castle, there were many halls with different names. Eager to join the conversation and happy to have picked up words among what were mostly nonsensical noises, I quickly seized the opportunity and spoke up: “Where is Alan Hall?” I thought to myself that I had said something vaguely relevant and I felt good about having uttered a perfectly respectable English sentence. But everyone burst into laughter. What was so funny? I felt my cheeks going red, knowing that I had just made a fool of myself without knowing how. Then someone said to me, “Alan Hall isn’t a hall. He is a biology teacher.”

Now, almost 20 years later, the name of Mr. Alan Hall, who was not even my teacher, is etched in my memory while the names of more important teachers are long forgotten. My story of English began like this—for me, the learning of English was one humiliating experience after another, interspersed with an occasional sense of accomplishment and satisfaction of making real progress. Yet, as I write this book now, the fact that I am writing it in English makes me realize how far I have traveled. English is now definitely my language—in a different way, yes, but no less than Japanese is my language. In my professional life, English is the principal language in which I communicate with my colleagues and my students, express my ideas, and create my own identity. I am often told how well I speak and write in English. But the fact that I still receive compliments about my English—I never get similar compliments about my Japanese—reminds me that I still come across as something of a nonnative speaker. To borrow the words of Xiaoming Li (1999), a fellow nonnative English educator, people expect my English “to be a little ‘off’” (p. 50). Nonetheless, without English I would not be who I am: a bilingual and bicultural person at home in both English and Japanese.

When I reflect on how my identity as an English speaker/writer has changed over the years and keeps on evolving, I am struck by the paucity of research on the long-term development of second language (L2) learners and their transformation into competent bilinguals. Many studies of ESL education document the process of students learning English, but they rarely follow these students longitudinally to learn how they become bilingual and bicultural (or multilingual and multicultural) and what they do with their bilingualism and biculturalism. I see this as a serious gap in knowledge that needs to be filled because I know firsthand that many ESL students, however timid and silent they may appear to be when they start learning English, go on to own English as one of their languages. Through their second language, they also learn to claim their existence and negotiate their identity in their adopted culture. In other words, ESL students do not forever remain ESL students but—when their education works—turn into bilingual and bicultural (or multilingual and multicultural) adults. It is important to document that process.

The purpose of this book, then, is to examine the longitudinal development of bilingual and bicultural identities: how young ESL learners first encounter another language and culture, and go on to mature into bilingual and bicultural young adults. I analyze the experiences of four Japanese “returnee” (kikokushijo) students who lived in English-speaking countries during their adolescence and returned to Japan to attend university. Through an analysis of their identity narratives, I argue that it is possible for bilingual individuals to strike a balance between two languages and cultures. As adolescents, the four participants in this study tended to be polarized toward one language and culture over the other, as if believing that fundamentally a person can keep only a single linguistic and cultural allegiance. However, through a period of difficult readjustment in Japan, they gradually came to appreciate their hybrid identities. In negotiating identities and reestablishing themselves in their home country, they had to think hard about what was important to them and who they wanted to associate with, and this reflection led them to the realization that they are, after all, bilingual and bicultural.

In the remainder of this chapter I develop a theoretical and methodological framework for this study. First, I discuss recent studies of identity in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and bilingualism that have informed this study. I then describe two perspectives that I use to conceptualize identity: narrative inquiry and communities of practice. Finally, I describe the process of working together with four Japanese returnee students whose experiences constitute the core of this study.

EXPLORING IDENTITY

In this study I use the term identity to refer to our sense of who we are and our relationship to the world. Many aspects of our “selves” contribute to our understanding of who we are: race, gender, class, occupation, sexual orientation, age, among others. Which part becomes a salient feature of our identity depends on the context (McNamara, 1997). In this study, I am concerned with parts of our identities that are related to language and culture. Thus, by bilingual and bicultural identity I mean where bilingual individuals position themselves between two languages and two (or more) cultures, and how they incorporate these languages and cultures into their sense of who they are. In addition, because I believe that identity is multiple and changing, I use the plural form of the term, bilingual and bicultural identities, to reflect my belief. In this section, I discuss recent studies of identity in the fields of SLA and bilingualism that have informed this study.

The last several years have seen a surge of interest in issues of identity in the field of SLA and bilingualism, and with it a shift toward viewing language learners as complex and multidimensional beings. Norton (2000; Norton Peirce, 1995), in her influential work on the language-learning experiences of immigrant women in Canada, questioned the traditional view of social identity as the fixed property of the individual. Drawing on poststructuralist theories especially Weedon (1987), Norton Peirce (1995) conceptualized the individual as “diverse, contradictory, and dynamic; multiple rather than unitary, decentered rather than centered” (p. 15). For Norton, social identity is not something that belongs to the individual but emerges out of the learner’s interaction with the learning context. She proposed the notion of investment to replace the traditional concept of motivation in order to better capture the complex negotiation between the language learner and the learning context:

[In the traditional view] motivation is a property of the language learner—a fixed personality trait. The notion of investment, on the other hand, attempts to capture the relationship of the language learner to the changing social world. It conceives of the language learner as having a complex social identity and multiple desires. (Norton Peirce, 1995, pp. 17–18)

Rather than having a fixed amount of motivation to learn a particular language regardless of the situation, the learner assesses opportunities to practice the language in a given context and the potential symbolic (e.g., recognition, friendship, voice) and material (e.g., jobs, money) returns for his or her investment of time and effort.

Norton’s work was with adult L2 learners, but McKay and Wong (1996) used Norton’s notion of investment to analyze the English learning of adolescent Chinese immigrant students in California, who are closer in age to my participants. They illustrated various discourses (i.e., colonial/racial, model-minority, Chinese cultural nationalist, school, and gender) in which the students were simultaneously involved within the school context. Some of these discourses helped students construct a social identity that was conducive to acquiring English; other discourses removed them from resources they needed in order to learn the language. Their work demonstrated that, even within the school setting, which is only one part of the immigrant students’ lives, they possessed multiple identities. The authors found that, for school-age language learners, maximizing returns on their investment was not always their primary concern, as it was for Norton’s adult learners. In fact, in order to preserve positive self-images, the students sometimes stopped their investment in English. McKay and Wong observed that “since the identity made possible by proficiency in their target language is not the only one available, other identities may already provide sufficient satisfaction to the learner at a given stage” (p. 604).

Other researchers focused on examining hybrid identities that bilingual speakers express. In 1985, Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985) argued that “the equation ‘a race = a culture = a language’” (p. 234) is simply not accurate. More recent studies effectively demonstrated their point. Rampton (1995) provided a detailed ethnographic analysis of language crossing by working-class youths in England, the appropriation of languages that are not normally associated with one’s own ethnicity: In his study, Punjabi was used by both African-Caribbean and white, English-speaking adolescents, for instance. Pavlenko’s (2001) analysis of the published autobiographies of L2 users showed the bilingual (or multilingual) writers struggling to claim identities that do not fit with the dominant ideologies of monolingualism and monoculturalism in the United States. She argued that by writing about their experiences of learning and using multiple languages, these authors are staking out a claim that “being a contemporary American is about multiplicity and invention as much as it is about ‘fitting in’ in some preconceived identity options” (p. 340). These authors’ efforts to win recognition for their hybrid identities and their voices in their L2 (English) echo in the writings of nonnative English educators who work in a field that has traditionally privileged native proficiency in English (Braine, 1999). Kramsch and Lam (1999), in an article entitled The Importance of Being Non-Native, claimed and that nonnative speakers, because of their detachment from taken-for-granted assumptions of native speakers, can “stretch the limits of the sayable” (p. 61) in English and achieve the kind of creativity that is impossible for native speakers.

As Kramsch and Lam’s (1999) emphasis on the importance of being non-native demonstrates, underlying the enactment and experiences of multiple, hybrid identities are issues of power and language ideology. Society grants differential power and values to various languages: As Bourdieu (1977) pointed out, “Linguists are right in saying that all languages are linguistically equal; they are wrong in thinking they are socially equal” (p. 652). The market value of a particular language—or bilingual proficiency— depends on the language ideologies of the society. In a country such as the United States, where English monolingualism is strongly associated with nationalism (as evidenced by the passing of Proposition 227, which banned bilingual education in California), individual language minority families, even if they want to maintain their ethnic language and pass it on to their children, may not receive much material reward for their investment. Worse, their efforts may be circumscribed by negative images abundantly projected by the dominant group of the society toward immigrants and minorities. For example, an immigrant couple of Mexican origin in Schecter and Bayley’s (1997) study, who wanted their children to learn Spanish, were disturbed by what they called “un español muy pobre [an impoverished Spanish]” in the United States (p. 519): Spanish spoken on the local television and radio programs were full of errors; working-class Mexican values and images associated with the Spanish language in the United States were foreign to this couple, who originally came from well-educated, professional families. In contrast, in societies where bilingualism or multilingualism is valued such as Canada and Europe, individual efforts to develop multilingual proficiency are more likely to be facilitated, with more resources (e.g., immersion programs) and rewards (e.g., jobs that require bilingual proficiency) being available. However, even in such countries not all languages are treated equally (Dagenais, in press; Phillipson & Skutnabb-Kangas, 1996).

The idea that identity is not fixed gives rise to the possibility that it can change over time. Another direction that recent explorations of identity have started to take, thus, is the examination of long-term changes in bilingual students’ identities. Research on the long-term changes has so far taken on two forms: the examination of bilingual learners’ retrospective accounts and the longitudinal observation of bilingual learners. Adopting the former approach, Kondo-Brown (2000) asked bilingual heritage students of Japanese in Hawaii to reflect on their experiences of Japanese language maintenance and their cultural orientations. She found that while they were growing up, they sided with the dominant culture and resisted Japanese language and culture; however, now that they were university students, they were more willing to embrace both cultures and languages. Kondo Brown (2000) observed, “These students’ acculturation strategies are not static; they seem to have changed from assimilative to additive modes over the years” (p. 15). Tse (1999) also identified a similar pattern of identity transition in published autobiographies of 39 Asian-Americans. She proposed four stages of development (p. 122). In stage 1, ethnic unawareness, which takes place usually prior to attending school, ethnic minority children have not had enough exposure to other races to be aware of their own ethnicity. Childhood and adolescence are characterized by stage 2, ethnic ambivalence/evasion, during which ethnic minority youngsters try to assimilate into the dominant group. By the time they enter adolescence or early adulthood, many of them reach stage 3, ethnic emergence. They realize that becoming a member of the dominant group is not entirely possible and start to look for alternative ways of self-definition. Finally, in stage 4, they identify with their own ethnic group (e.g., Asian-Americans), ethnic identity, and come to terms with their hybrid heritage.

Kondo-Brown (2000) and Tse (1999) relied on the actors’ retrospective accounts of their experiences to reveal long-term changes in their identities. However, some authors spend a long term (more than a year) working with the same bilingual learners. Toohey (1996, 1998, 2000b) observed a group of language minority children from kindergarten to Grade 2. Through sociocultural theories of learning, especially Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities-of-practice perspective, Toohey examined how practices in the classroom work to differentiate and rank students. We tend to believe the identities that students assume in the classroom are due to their own abilities and personality. Toohey argued that it is the community practices that shape the students’ identities as members of that community:

The specific practices of their classrooms “produced” the focal children as specific kinds of students, with the identity “ESL learners” as a more or less important marker. They held the positions, not the internal essence, of being “ESL” and “quiet” or “clever” or “not so clever” and so on; these identities made sense only within the context of these particular practices. (Toohey, 2000b, p. 125)

Norton (2000; Norton Peirce, 1995) argued that social identities are born out of the interaction between the learner and the learning context; Toohey seemed to be going a step further by claiming that sometimes—perhaps more so in the case of young children—the learning context produces certain identities for the learners that they have little power to resist.

Harklau (1994) and Miller (2000) worked longitudinally with ESL students closer in age to the students in this book. Harklau spent 3½ years following four Chinese immigrant students in California as they moved from ESL to mainstream classes. Miller tracked Chinese high school students in Australia for 18 months, from their on-arrival intensive ESL program to their eventual integration into the mainstream classroom. Both studies found that, generally, ESL students remained isolated from English-speaking students, even after they had been mainstreamed. Harklau (1994) wrote, “Perhaps the single most salient aspect of observations of ESL students in mainstream classes was their reticence and lack of interaction with native-speaking peers” (pp. 262–263). Similarly, Miller (2000) found that the ESL students who moved to a regular high school after receiving intensive ESL instruction elsewhere had less opportunity to use English in the high school. Although they were physically surrounded by native English speakers, the ESL and the native-speaking groups had so little t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 From My Story to the Stories of Other Bilinguals
• 2 Sawako’s Story
• 3 Kenji’s Story
• 4 Kikuko’s Story
• 5 Rui’s Story
• 6 The Development of Bilingual and Bicultural Identities
• 7 Theoretical Implications
• 8 Conclusions
• References
• Appendix: Cited Quotes in Original Japanese
• Author Index
• Subject Index