The Scale of Modernity in the Heritage Language Classroom

ABSTRACT

Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received significant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within which social identification and learning take place. This article problematizes modernity as a scale of its own and investigates it in the context of the heritage language classroom discourse at a German high-school in Berlin. Microethnographic analyses of 10th-grade classroom interactional data reveal how Turkish heritage language students appropriate Turkish modernity and debate identity models around it while at the same time bringing to the table German/Western modernity and its contents. The article sheds light on the multiplicity of heritage language identities and situates scales as an important determinant in their construction.

KEYWORDS:

• Classroom discourse
• identity
• microethnography
• scales
• Turkish as a heritage language

Acknowledgment

I am grateful to my dissertation advisor Prof. Jane Zuengler for encouraging me to undertake this project and for her unyielding support along the way.

Notes

1. All of the interviews and classroom interactions analyzed in this article are in Turkish in their original form. Their English translations are presented in this article for space concerns. Switches to German are indicated in bold in the transcriptions and explained in text.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst [A/10/72493].

Notes on contributors

Işıl Erduyan

Dr. Işıl Erduyan is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Foreign Language Education, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her research interests include heritage language discourse, multilingualism, and linguistic identity processes in the classroom. In addition to her several articles published in peer-reviewed journals, she is the author of a recent volume titled, “Multilingual Construction of Identity: German-Turkish Adolescents at School.”