Negotiating participation and identity in a second language: Mainland Chinese students’ English learning experiences in a multilingual university in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates mainland Chinese students’ experiences of learning English as a second language (L2) in a multilingual university in Hong Kong, with particular attention to their negotiation of participation and identity. Drawing on a series of in-depth interviews with a group of mainland Chinese students, the study revealed that their participation in L2 practices appeared to be shaped by the contextual conditions in different communities within the university and mediated by their agentic responses to the contextual realities of these communities. While they gained fuller participation in L2-mediated activities in the local student community and the classroom community as a result of their appropriation of the associated language practices and their display of knowledge and competence in the related social practices, they struggled to gain access to L2 interactional opportunities in the community of exchange students, where their negotiation of positionalities was subject to the perceived unequal power relations between native and non-native speakers of the English. It is argued that their participation in L2-mediated activities in the university could be understood as a complex, dynamic, situated and co-constructed process of negotiating access, competence, membership, positionality, identities and discursive practices associated with different communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Language learning
• second language
• identity
• participation
• mainland Chinese students
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. While Putonghua, the standard dialect of Chinese, is widely used in mainland China, Cantonese, a regional dialect of Chinese, is the dominant spoken medium in everyday communication in Hong Kong. English, as a co-official language, is one of the main languages in the professional world in Hong Kong, including the government, higher education, law, and business (Evans 2011).

2. The data elicited from the interviews should not be seen as direct representations of the reality, but rather as partial versions of the reality co-constructed by the interviewer and the participants.

3. Selected quotes from the participants are included to illustrate emergent themes identified in the analysis, and the quotes included are translations from Chinese into English by the author.

4. Lan Kwai Fong is a popular expatriate area for clubbing, drinking and dining in Hong Kong.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee [project number 23600416].

Notes on contributors

Chit Cheung Matthew Sung

Chit Cheung Matthew Sung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. He holds a PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK, and previously taught at the University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research interests include sociolinguistics, global Englishes, multilingualism, language ideology and identity, and second language learning. His work has appeared in English Today, ELT Journal, Compare, Applied Linguistics Review, System, Linguistics and Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Language, Culture and Curriculum.