Racialization and English learning: the experiences of Nepali secondary school students in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on an inquiry that explored how a group of Nepali secondary school students discursively reconstructed and interpreted their English learning in Hong Kong. In the study we collected data from 30 participants through participatory observation, in-depth unstructured interview and taking field notes in two secondary schools. The analysis of the data revealed that the participants generally interpreted learning English as an essential means to construct the racial images they identified with, and otherwise resist being racialized in and outside school. The findings suggest that the participants tended to construct English as their mother tongue with an anti-racist stance. These findings offer insights into the role of racialization in language learners’ learning of English and their pursuit of desirable identities in postcolonial contexts like Hong Kong. They also imply the need to design and adopt an appropriate pedagogy to redress the inequitable distribution of educational resources for minority language learners.

KEYWORDS:

• Racialization
• minority language learners
• English learning
• identity
• postcolonial context

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yang (Frank) Gong

Yang (Frank) Gong, PhD, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Macau, Macau SAR, China. His research interests include Chinese education, language teacher education, intercultural education, and technology and language education. His publications have appeared in Language Teaching, Teaching and Teacher Education, Computers and Education, System, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and so on.

Chura Bahadur Thapa

Chura Bahadur Thapa received his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. His research interests include language policy, ethnicity, identity, and language education.

Xuesong (Andy) Gao

Xuesong (Andy) Gao is Professor in TESOL at the School of Education, University of New South Wales. He has published extensively on topics including language learning strategy, language teacher education and language education policy. He edits International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching for De Gruyter.