Identity construction and scale making of migrant university students in multilingual settings: a scalar analysis

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study investigates how migrant students from mainland China attending Hong Kong universities, as scale makers, negotiate and construct new scales and identities by utilizing their sociolinguistic resources, and how their scale making is related to such social categories as history and politics. The findings suggest that (re)scaling practices are beyond hierarchically-ordered indexical regularities, but develop and change as a shifting category, and can be considered a construct that allows for negotiation and creation of meanings. The participants show their agentiveness in defining a translocal space that advocates hybridity to their advantage. It is also found that the participants established new tacit norms and organized their identities with reference to experiences and attitudes local students lacked. Under the force or influence of political, social, economic, and interpersonal factors, rescaling practices were continuously in play, and norms were re-constructed by language users.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• scale
• multilingual university setting
• migrant students

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Michelle Gu’s research interests include: language and identity, linguistic ideology, multilingualism and mobility, and teacher professional development. She has published widely in the above fields, with articles appearing in journals such as Applied Linguistics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, System, Journal of Pragmatics, Multilingua, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Language and Education, Language Teaching Research, and Computer Assisted Language Learning. She received Research Excellence Award in 2017 and Young Researcher Award in 2015 at Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the editor of book review section at Journal of Asia TEFL and on the editorial board of Multilingual Education book series, Springer.

Additional information

Funding

This study is supported by a General Research Fund of Hong Kong government with the reference number of 14620117.