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ABSTRACT
This study aimed to explore how gender restructuring might interact with immigrant second language (L2) learning in the new trends of feminized marriage migration in Asia, using Mandarin-language education in Taiwan as a case study. Drawing on positioning theory to analyze classroom discourse in a Mandarin-language class for marriage-migrants, this paper shows how the societal gendered expectations of marriage-migrants are concretely manifested and discursively negotiated in the classroom. As the teacher interactively positioned students as runaways, potential transgressors of chaste womanhood, and unfit mothers, the focal student reflectively positioned herself as an autonomous woman, capable mother, avid language learner, and multilingual speaker. By focusing on the dynamic negotiations of gender positionings in the language classroom for marriage-migrants in Asia, this study extends current research on immigrant L2 education to examine the nexus of globalization, transnational marriage migration, gender, and adult immigrant education.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the teacher and students who took part in this study. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their insightful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Shumin Lin is Assistant Professor of TESOL at the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, where she teaches and does research in discourse, identity and second language acquisition in the context of globalization and transnational migration. Her publications include articles in Language in Society, and Anthropology & Education Quarterly.
Notes
1 Gendered nicknames for these classes have been documented: ‘daughter-in-law training courses’ in Taiwan (Shen Citation2003), ‘mothers class’ in Japan (Faier Citation2009), and ‘wife classes’ in Korea (Kim Citation2013).
2 SEP was established in 1976 to compensate for the shortage of the provisions of formal education. It includes elementary and junior high school levels. The elementary level was a major adult literacy education program before ABEP. ABEP was established in 1991 as an adult literacy program to speed up ‘eradicating illiteracy’ (Lin Citation2015).
3 Mandarin, a language not spoken in Taiwan before 1945, was imposed as the only legitimate language when the KMT took over Taiwan from Japan. After half a century, the Mandarin-only policy has resulted in a societal language shift to Mandarin among younger generations, with only elders and, more recently, marriage-migrants speaking only limited Mandarin in Taiwan today.
4 All participants’ names are pseudonyms.
5 Anh had to wait until her legal adult age to move to Taiwan.
6 During the interview, I asked her to read the consent form written in Mandarin out loud, and she was able to do so without much difficulty. She also understood the text without my explanation.
7 Back translation was conducted by a graduate level researcher who is proficiently bilingual in Chinese and English to ensure the accuracy of the English translation presented here.
8 In Chinese morphology, characters, known as zi, are single-syllable morphemes. Although sometimes these single-syllable morphemes or characters can stand alone as individual words, most Chinese words, known as ci, contain multiple characters or character compound.
9 In this example (Except 3) and the next example (Except 4), Chinese characters and character compounds under instruction are provided when they first appear, in addition to pinyin and English translation because the shapes and sounds of the Chinese characters are crucial for readers to understand the vocabulary instruction and because the characters, not pinyin, are what were taught and practiced in class.