The Unfamiliar and the Indeterminate: Language, Identity and Social Integration in the School Experience of Newly-Arrived Migrant Children in England

ABSTRACT

Research into the language socialisation of migrant-background children in new educational contexts has pointed to a complex relationship between language, identity, and social integration. This article helps us to further define this relationship in two main ways. Firstly, through focusing on the specific (and largely neglected) context of the experiences of newly-arrived migrant school children from disadvantaged backgrounds and with little initial command of English, in the East of England, which has in recent years seen a steep rise in the population of children from Eastern Europe in particular. Secondly, through inductive analysis of the pupils’ accounts of their experience in the new environment, the article identifies four key themes which shed light on the overlap between language, identity, and social integration in this context: perceptions of exclusion in the new language environment, the social boundaries of language use, L1 exchange as communicative capital, and languages and identity simulation.

KEYWORDS:

• Language and identity
• language socialisation
• migration
• newcomer EAL students

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Bell Foundation and Diana Sutton for supporting the research on which this article was based and to the research team, which included Madeleine Arnot, Deb Davies-Tutt, Linda Fisher, Karen Forbes, Mei Hu, Claudia Schneider, and Oakleigh Welply. We are grateful to the participants in the schools and community who gave their time to help this project. The views expressed here are solely those of the named authors of this article. We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers of this article for their useful comments and suggestions.

Notes

^1. For a discussion of the relevance of Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other to the context of language and identity in schools, see Evans (2012). Derrida used the distinction to focus his autobiographical account (or anamnesis) around the ambiguity of his own hyphenated identity as a Franco-Maghrebian. Phantasmatic here can be read as a reference to the effect of memory, on the one hand, and illusion, on the other, in the renewal of identity.

^2. King and Rambow (2012) summarise these concepts from the literature as follows: “simultaneity is the experience and construction of a life that incorporates institutions, routines and activities across national borders” (p. 402); “polycentricity […] refers to the simultaneous orientations to different “centres” of authority and “normativity” (p.402); and “hybridity” focuses on constructions of “a third space” rather than “established dichotomies” (i.e., home vs. host country; academic vs. everyday activities) (p. 403).

^3. Alba and Holdaway (2013) point out that in social science research “children who arrive at a young age and thus receive part or all of their schooling in the new society are called the ‘1.5’ generation” (p. 3). For a critique of this label on the grounds that its use has been driven by the discourses of demographic, linguistic and academic partiality, see Benesch (2008).

^4. All statistical references are to maintained schools and are taken from DfE official sources.

^5. Selection of pupil participants was made in consultation with the schools prior to the start of fieldwork. While constraints on the choice of pupils varied from school to school, the following criteria were used in the selections: admission to the school as close as possible to the start of the academic school year in which the project began, range of levels of competence in English and academic subjects, mix of gender, and diversity of L1 backgrounds.

^6. In England, the school year groups in secondary schools correspond to pupil age groups as follows: Y7 = age 11–12; Y8 = age 12–13; Y9 = age 13–14; Y10 = 14–15; Y11 = age 15–16.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Bell Foundation.