Facing Rootlessness: Language and Identity Construction in Teaching and Research Practices Among Bilingual Returnee Scholars in China

ABSTRACT

This qualitative study examines Chinese returnee scholars’ language practices in teaching and research and their identity construction during their early career years. Using interviews and drawing upon poststructuralist identity theory, it examines the adaptations of twelve Chinese bilingual returnee scholars to new academic communities in English language departments, their teaching and publishing language choices, and their identity construction throughout this process. The findings showed these scholars constructed their professional identities through negotiating English as a teaching language in ways interwoven with students’ needs, institutional policies, and their past experiences. The Chinese returnee scholars were found to be “rootless” in terms of possessing inadequate social and cultural capital locally, resulting in limited collaboration and difficulties developing sufficiently robust language competency to publish bilingually. Some scholars, however, employed accumulated capital to exercise agency in bringing about changes in their new academic environments. Implications for bilingual returnee scholars and university policymakers are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic writing and publication
• bilingual scholars
• identity construction
• language of instruction
• returnees

Internationalization and the liberalization of the flow of labor between nations have extensively influenced the way academics initiate their careers (Cappellen & Janssens, 2005). The internationalization of Chinese higher education has created a demand for skilled talent from foreign countries, which has resulted in the extension of support, in forms such as financial aid and the Thousand Youth Talents Scheme, to encourage overseas Chinese academics to return and work in universities in China (Hao & Welch, 2012). The recent years, therefore, have witnessed a burgeoning returning flow of academics to Chinese universities (Li, Yang, & Wu, 2018). English language education, as a field substantially influenced by this internationalization, has attracted a large number of these returnees (Li & Edwards, 2014), who have contributed considerably to the competitiveness of Chinese universities due to their excellent research output, academic English ability, and capacity for scientific research (Yu & Fan, 2017). Yet, the returnee scholars tend to face various challenges working in Chinese universities, such as the classroom language choice for English courses and publishing academically in Chinese (Cui & Yuan, 2008; Flowerdew & Li, 2009). These issues have raised questions about the need to examine how these returnee scholars navigate their career paths to adapt to the Chinese academic communities and the impact that such experiences may have on their professional development.

Prior studies on language teacher identity have highlighted the impact of social factors (e.g., critical incidents, ideological constraints, and institutional structures) on multilingual teachers’ identity construction (e.g., Kılıç & Cinkara, 2020; Mora, Trejo, & Roux, 2016; Wang, 2020), especially concerning how teachers negotiate the power dynamics of languages and cultures and (re)construct professional identities during teaching practice (e.g., Mora, Trejo, & Roux, 2016). However, little research attention (e.g., Ai, 2019) has been paid to bi/multilingual returnee scholars in higher education institutions whose identity construction processes are complex and intertwined with their transnational life trajectories and language choices for teaching and research communication.

In this article, the term “bilingual returnee scholars” refers to Chinese scholars who trained and worked professionally in overseas higher education systems and returned to work in Chinese universities and use English and/or Chinese for teaching and academic publishing. These returnee scholars need to negotiate the local requirements, and they often face linguistic challenges in English-medium teaching with Chinese learners of English and in publishing concurrently in both languages (Chen, 2008; Flowerdew & Li, 2009). In light of this, this article aims to enrich the understanding of the complexities of the processes of becoming a language education scholar in China, focusing on a group of bilingual returnee scholars in the English language education domain. To do so, we draw upon a post-structuralist perspective (Norton, 2013) to explore the relationship between individual agency, capital, and influences from the wider socio-cultural contexts in bilingual returnee scholars’ identity construction. Specifically, the present study is guided by the following questions:

1. How do bilingual returnee scholars adapt to English language teaching and research in Chinese universities?

2. How do they construct professional identities in this process?

Language and teacher identity construction

To understand bilingual returnee scholars’ identity construction, we relied on the poststructuralist perspective of identity and its interaction with the theoretical concepts of capital and agency. Poststructuralism posits identity as a socially inherent and discursive concept, signifying “how people understand their relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people understand their possibilities for the future” (Norton, 2013, p. 45). Identity is not static and fixed, but an ongoing, dynamic and discursively-constructed process, one in which identity shifts as discourse and experiences change, continuously offering new configurations (Zembylas, 2003). Teacher identity should thus be understood in relation to a teacher’s language practice—the social meaning made by the language practice—as well as the larger networks of social relationships one engages with. This approach highlights examining the social and cultural context in which teaching and research activities take place, and how teachers negotiate and sometimes resist the positions that their working contexts impose on them (Norton, 2013).

Moreover, individuals’ relative positions in any field are maintained and developed by the capital they possess (Bourdieu, 1986). Capital “allows … possessors to wield a power, an influence, and thus to exist in the field under consideration” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 98). Bourdieu (1986) differentiates three forms of capital for material exchange: cultural capital, acquired knowledge and educational credentials; social capital, associations to networks of power; and economic capital, which is “immediately and directly convertible into money” (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 242). Symbolic capital is an additional, disguised form of power that requires recognition, deference, and obedience with legitimacy (Bourdieu, 1990). In different fields and social spheres, the value of these forms of capital is continuously being negotiated by individuals who perceive “the rules of the game” and struggle in competition with each other (Darvin & Norton, 2015). In relation to identity construction, then, Norton (2000) argues that a wider range of acquired symbolic and material resources will enhance an individuals’ identity construction, and Darvin and Norton (2015) claim that the evaluation of a person’s gained capital is an affirmation of that individual’s identity, and a legitimation of their rightful place in a given context. Thus, an analysis of the capital an individual possesses offers researchers a new access point for investigating the process of change in people’s lives.

However, we must also take into consideration agency before individuals can use or adapt the capital they possess, and they need to recognize their agency to assert their own identities (Darvin & Norton, 2015). Individuals are not simply passive or complicit banks of capital or participants in language use; they make informed choices, have influence, resist, or comply, even if their social circumstances may constrain their choices (Duff, 2012). From a poststructuralist perspective, language and agency are mutually constitutive, with capital being the mediating factor. As Buchanan (2015) argued, “the resources teachers use are born out of their identity and give rise to their particular formations of agency” (p. 705). It is through language practices that a teacher negotiates or reconstructs a sense of self and gains capitals in their working environments; and it is through the achieved powerful social networks that one is granted the opportunity to speak and make impacts.

The poststructuralist theory of identity and its relation to capital and agency inform our data analysis in that we draw on the role of language in bilingual returnee scholars’ teaching practices and their research and academic writing. Specifically, how participants construct their identities in teaching practices was elicited through an analysis of the way they perceive themselves as teachers and the way they interact with students, language policy, and their institutional environment concerning the use of English and Chinese as medium of instruction. In addition, in terms of academic research, the poststructuralist theory informs our data analysis by eliciting how participants perceive themselves and their relationships within the Chinese research environment, particularly when considering what forms of capital they gain or lose locally and what kind of agency they exercise with the available resources in order to construct their identities.

Teaching and research in Chinese higher education

The “Double First-Class Initiative” project¹ in China, implemented in 2017, aims to increase the global recognition of China’s university system. Consequently, the Chinese universities on the Double First-Class Initiative list have been particularly proactive in recruiting Chinese scholars who received academic training and work experience abroad; simultaneously, Chinese universities have tried to enhance the status of teaching in these universities by rewarding teaching excellence and enacting policies that place the intersection of teaching and research as a mission goal for Chinese universities (Li et al., 2018). Therefore, bilingual returnee scholars are required to focus their early-career efforts on teaching effectively, since poor student evaluations of one’s teaching performance can carry the salary deduction consequences or promotion restrictions. Teachers’ teaching and academic research performance are also evaluated in terms of the total number of students the faculty member has taught, teaching hours, student satisfaction scores, students’ overall learning experiences, research publications, citations, research funding, and so forth (Huang & Guo, 2019), and recently returned bilingual scholars are not exempt from these expectations.

In the context of Chinese universities, using English as the medium of instruction is required in the field of English language education, which aims to improve teaching quality and nurture the talents for Chinese society (Borg & Liu, 2013). In implementing English-medium instruction at Chinese universities, however, individual course lecturers were found to have different interpretations of the university language policy, as well as having diverse classroom language practices (e.g., English only, and bilingually in English and Chinese) depending on the lecturer’s academic English proficiency and/or the students’ learning needs (e.g., Cui & Yuan, 2008; Hu & Lei, 2014). Influenced by top-down department management styles in Chinese universities which are characterized as governance driven by efficiency, external accountability, and monitoring (Li et al., 2018), English language teachers are also forced to take on the other role of a productive researcher (Huang & Guo, 2019). They can choose either English or Chinese for research writing and publication. Chinese holds a dominant position as the primary language of research for humanities and social science (HSS) scholars in China, but the frequency of international publication in English has also been increasing (Flowerdew & Li, 2009). Although publication in English helps enhance scholars’ international reputation, publication in Chinese can enable researchers to cultivate a local reputation, build up academic networks, and inform local policymaking (Li & Flowerdew, 2009). The Decision² issued in 2011 advocated promoting Chinese language, culture and indigenous research, which encouraged some Chinese scholars to publish in local Chinese journals (Feng et al., 2013). However, bilingual returnee scholars uniquely lack systematic training on the scholarly style of Chinese academic writing and publishing, and they do not develop their academic Chinese in the teaching task since they use English alone as the medium of instruction only. Although previous studies have investigated domestic bilingual scholars’ heavy workload (Wang, 2020), the lower status of teaching as a subject (Tao & Gao, 2018), their burden of publication (Huang & Guo, 2019), and even novice language teachers’ identity crisis (Xu, 2013), there is a paucity of research exploring how returnees struggle to adapt to the local teaching and research environment in terms of the use of Chinese and English and their professional identity construction in this process.

Bilingual returnee scholars’ professional identity construction

Returnee scholars’ identity work has been increasingly examined in many international contexts. In Mexico, for example, Mora et al. (2016) found that the returnee language teachers’ identities have been marked as fragmentation because of the lack of stability in their work and painful transitions in their lives, thus impacting their investment in work-related opportunities. In the Turkish context, Karakaş (2020) revealed that while acknowledging the beneficial overseas experience on identity construction, returnee scholars’ expectations about home working conditions in academia were not met, but this study focused on overall returnee scholars, not specialized in the field of language studies.

In China, a body of scholarship has explored English teachers’ identity construction in tertiary education contexts. For example, Wang (2020) demonstrated how first-year teachers’ perceptions of themselves and their work impacted their identity construction; the mismatch between institutional norms and the classroom language teaching methods constrained them. Tao and Gao (2018) showcased that the uncertain status of English as Specific Purpose (ESP) as a discipline constrained the ESP teachers from asserting their professional identities at institutions as compared to teachers in traditional language-related courses. Additionally, the inclusion of research as a significant component of language teachers’ work has caused them to increasingly bear the “publish or perish” pressure (Tao et al., 2019). Scholars must strive with performance indicators that include publications, funding, and research impact. Huang and Guo (2019) revealed that Chinese English teachers’ identity construction was a complex process in which they had to reconcile the reality of institutional expectations and requirements on teaching and research with the finding that passive conformity did not improve research and teaching quality. Additionally, previous literature has uncovered the struggles, constraints, and complexities of identity construction brought about by institutional requirements, personal experiences, and so on. However, to date, insufficient attention has been paid to bilingual returnee scholars (e.g., Ai, 2019; Mora et al., 2016), whose identity construction concerning language use in both teaching and academic research could be mediated by their transnational education experiences and the dynamics in the new working environments. To address the research gap, this study sets out to explore the professional identity construction of a group of returnee English language scholars who are in the early years of careers at Chinese universities. Using scheduled introspective interviews, the study particularly examines the relationship between the returnee scholars’ professional identity construction and their language use in the new working space, focusing on both their teaching and research experiences.

Methodology

Research context and participants

The universities where the selected participants were working were all on the list of the Double First-Class Initiative project in China. A purposive sampling approach was used to identify prospective participants because it allowed researchers to access the Chinese bilingual returnee scholars in universities quickly and conveniently (Ivankova et al., 2006). The potential participants were selected based on their prior study and work experiences. Individuals of Chinese nationality who had studied or worked abroad for at least 3-years and had completed at least 1-year of subsequent work experience in China were recruited through personal and professional networks. Eventually, the present study recruited 12 scholars (3 male, 9 female) who represented study and work experience backgrounds in a variety of countries. All the participants completed their undergraduate study on English language and literature in Chinese mainland, received doctoral degrees overseas, and were teaching English to university students in China at the time of the study. All the participants obtained doctoral degrees in English-dominated education systems and societies except for Sally, who received doctoral education in a graduate school in Japan that follows the US education system and was under the supervision of a scholar from the United States. Although there was variety in their precise areas of study, all had taught and researched topics related to foreign language during their time abroad. The participants’ ages ranged from 30 to 46 (M = 36.3), the total length of their stay abroad ranged from 3 to 11 years (M = 5.8), and each had worked for at least two years in China when the study was conducted. All were required by their institutions to use English as the language of instruction in their courses. Participants’ demographic information is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Demographics of the participants

Pseudonym	Gender	Age	Country/Region of study	Length abroad	Year of return	Research interest	Current course title	Linguistic repertoires*
Cindy	Female	35	USA	5 years	2015	Language assessment	Public speech in English	Chinese (L1), English
Claire	Female	37	USA	5 years	2017	Cross-cultural communication	Cross-cultural communication	Chinese (L1), English
Helen	Female	45	UK	6 years	2012	Cross-cultural communication	General English writing	Chinese (L1), English
Jack	Male	33	New Zealand	5 years	2018	Language assessment	Intensive English reading	Chinese (L1), English
Lily	Female	30	Hong Kong	3 years	2019	Second language writing	English academic writing	Chinese (L1), English
Lucy	Female	46	USA	10 years	2017	American immigrant literature	General English writing	Chinese (L1), English
Mark	Male	34	Ireland	4 years	2016	Western drama theory	English Stylistics	Chinese (L1), English
Paula	Female	34	UK	5 years	2016	Foreign language learning	Intensive English reading	Chinese (L1), English
Rebecca	Female	31	USA	5 years	2017	Psycholinguistics	Intensive English reading	Chinese (L1), English
Rose	Female	34	UK	5 years	2016	British literature	Literary translation	Chinese (L1), English
Sally	Female	38	Japan	11 years	2018	Foreign language teaching	Intensive English reading	Mongolian (L1), Chinese, English
Tom	Male	38	UK	5 years	2018	English for academic purposes	Intensive English reading	Chinese (L1), English

*Linguistic repertoires were self-reported.

Data collection and analysis

In-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted to achieve a nuanced and comprehensive picture of the participants’ personal experiences and underlying feelings (Patton, 2015). During the interviews, participants were asked to retrospectively reflect on their adaptation period over the past few years since returning to China and share their experiences and perceptions of teaching and academic research in Chinese universities, focusing on the patterns of language use and socialization within their local academic communities. All the interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese via Skype. Each interview lasted around 50 minutes and was audio-recorded and then transcribed for analysis. Field notes were taken during the interviews to capture the participant’s feelings, experiences, and reflections on those experiences, and these were later reviewed when triangulating the interview results. Participants’ informed consent was collected, and all interview data were treated confidentially. The two authors of this study, who likewise obtained their PhD degrees outside of Chinese mainland, easily built rapport and gained resonance with the participants. The interview included questions such as “how do you describe and perceive your language use in teaching and research?” The first author collected the data, while both authors analyzed the data and wrote the article.

The analysis of interview data was essentially inductive and recursive; codes, categories, and themes were successively generated (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). First, the Chinese transcripts and field notes were read and re-read to identify recurring words, phrases, and clauses in relation to the research questions. Second, open coding was performed to create a cluster of codes that were then converted into relevant categories. Third, axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) was performed to compare and integrate the codes and categories at hand to analyze how participants constructed their teaching and research identities relating to language use. The axial coding was done in two phases: within-case analysis and cross-case analysis. Within-case analysis conducted on each participant yielded themes and then cross-case analysis was performed to compare participants in terms of these emerging themes. For example, we identified the categories of “English is a must as the medium of instruction,” “insufficient Chinese to satisfy students’ needs,” “use of English after class,” “the use of translanguaging to enrich students’ understandings,” etc., and then we concluded with the theme “English as a working language plays an essential role in teaching practices.” We then identified the shared meaning of the participants’ perceptions of or experiences with classroom teaching and research activities and how they navigated constructions of identity. The analysis of interview data was then verified, and discussions were held to resolve disagreement. Subsequently, the researchers translated the Chinese interview quotes into English. Efforts were made to ensure the trustworthiness of the findings. Member checking (Birt et al., 2016) was also performed to increase validity.

Researcher reflectivity

While conducting qualitative research, researchers’ prior experiences, beliefs, and assumptions may influence the research process, which calls for the attention of researcher reflectivity (Watt, 2007). In this study, the influence of researcher’s positionality was acknowledged and was addressed by including the perspectives of two researchers who provided emic and etic views on the Chinese returnee scholars’ experiences, respectively. Specifically, Author 1, who is also a bilingual returnee scholar working at a Chinese university, enhanced the depth of data analysis with his insider’s view: he understands the research contexts more thoroughly and shares much common ground (e.g., working experiences, language and identity struggles, and feelings) with the participants. Meanwhile, Author 2, who is a multilingual Chinese scholar working outside the Chinese context, provided a different perspective that is more objective, comparative, and unbiased. Continuous communications between the two authors throughout the data collection and data analysis process laid the foundation for more reliable and robust research result.

Findings

Instructor as monolingual or multilingual? Negotiating English as a teaching language

Our analysis first indicates that the Chinese bilingual returnee scholars navigate their multilingual repertoires in teaching and negotiate the medium of instruction as required by their university institutions. The findings show that the participants enacted English as the medium of instruction in different ways.

Some participants (e.g., Lucy, Rose, and Claire) reported to adhere to an English-only understanding of the institutional policy of English as medium of instruction. In doing so, they drew upon their prior learning and teaching experiences abroad in English-dominated countries and regarded their first language—Mandarin Chinese—as an unavailable resource in the workplace:

Lucy: My language system in teaching was constructed during my past ten years abroad, and my insufficient Chinese logic and proficiency level hindered my teaching effectiveness and smoothness. I felt I was working when using English.

The above extract shows that Chinese returnee scholars’ language competence for academic communication (such as teaching) has been confined to English, and they tend to lack sufficient ability and confidence in their scholarly use of Chinese, which for them is very different from daily use of Chinese. Lucy further explained that “the difference between scholarly and daily use of Chinese included vocabulary use, logic, and discourse features.” Therefore, the experience of professional training in English-speaking countries positioned these scholars as monolingual English instructors in Chinese universities. Additionally, some participants adopted English as the only language for communicating with students in response to students’ requests. For example, Cindy reported:

I was unwilling and felt weird speaking Chinese with my students even during class intervals because students also hoped for me to keep speaking English after class. Students came to ask me questions after class in Chinese, and to show respect I used Chinese to answer, but students replied, “You could use English” so that they could practice their English listening.

This interaction pattern showcases that the teacher’s English is regarded by the students as an additional learning resource and using English to communicate with students also caters to the students’ learning needs, revealing the cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) of the returnee’s English. The cultural capital gained through English teaching experiences overseas enhances the identity construction of being an English-monolingual instructor.

Our analysis also suggests that bilingual returnee scholars (5 out of 12) experienced a transformation of teaching language choice from monolingual use of English to translanguaging practices (mixing English and Chinese) as their local knowledge of students’ learning needs grew.

In Lily’s English academic writing class, where English was officially stipulated by her institution as the medium of instruction, conflicts arose between the requirement to teach in English and the students’ request that the teacher use Chinese due to their insufficient English proficiency for effective learning. She thus determined to allow Chinese use conditionally in certain class activities such as presentations and discussions. Lily commented:

There was no fixed and standardized classroom language policy despite the stipulated language policy and my preference for teaching only in English, and what I needed to do was to satisfy students’ needs.

This suggests the participant’s language teacher identity is a site of struggle (Norton, 2013), where Lily negotiated the institution-level language policy and exerted her teacher agency to create a “translanguaging space” (Li, 2011) in the English classroom to allow for flexible language practices to accommodate the students’ learning needs. By doing so, Lily demonstrated a returnee scholar identity that differed from the university’s expectation, i.e., a competent English speaker and monolingual English teacher; and she redefined a good returnee scholar in the Chinese university context as a flexible bilingual speaker who can configure different linguistic resources from her repertoire in teaching to cater to students’ learning needs.

Rootlessness of research networks and academic publishing in Chinese

Our analysis further reveals that the unsettled state of the returnee scholars at the beginning of their careers and their adaptation process contributes to a professional identity characterized by a lack of useful local research networks, support, and collaboration in the Chinese higher education context. This has resulted in difficulties in academic publishing. In the interview, most participants suggested that research networks were crucial for academics in China, but as returnee scholars who were new to the local academic communities, they were on one hand short of local contacts and on the other lacked support in the new space from distant former supervisors and research communities they had once maintained abroad:

Helen: I was not yet acclimated to the Chinese research atmosphere because I did not have my supervisors or mentors here and did not even know how to publish papers in China.

Rebecca: I felt that I had been isolated by the Chinese research community.

Cindy: I had few research networks in the Chinese research community, and I was just observing what was happening there.

The extracts show that these interviewees lacked social capital, in this case an academic network (Bourdieu, 1986), and have not yet managed to fully integrate into the local research community. Helen had intended to join the local community, but Cindy perceived herself as an outsider. Turner and McAlpine (2011) once stated that time is needed for the expansion of research networks, and the status of early career academics, especially the reality of being a returnee, makes this adaptation process more complex and difficult. This is in sharp contrast with the PhD graduates whose research networks are fully grounded in China:

Helen: local PhD graduates naturally had supervisors, senior fellows, and classmates as their existing research networks.

Admittedly, bilingual returnee scholars, young newcomers to the Chinese research community and academic system, rarely have this social capital (e.g., research network or community) in place, and it takes time to develop and expand such networks on their own (e.g., Tom, Mark, Jack, Paula, Rebecca). Such “rootlessness” indeed created barriers to their career development in China, as was exemplified by Tom:

I could hardly find any collaborators; I often communicated with other returnees, but unfortunately, we had different research interests.

This lack of research collaboration may not only slow down the returnee scholars’ publication speed and increase their publication pressure, but this seems to be uneasily overcome in a short term. Given the shortage of social capital in the Chinese academic community, most returnee scholars found it difficult to publish in Chinese journals, which would have been a good strategy for expanding their local visibility and facilitating their integration into the mainstream Chinese research community. In this case, some chose to remain connected primarily with their research networks established abroad, publishing in English only. For example:

Cindy: Until now I have still been publishing English journal articles and have continued my prior research and publication tradition because I did not do research as an undergraduate student in China, and also I obtained my master and doctoral degrees abroad.

For Cindy, publishing in English is a practical solution, but this does not enable young scholars to gain credibility in the Chinese research context where publishing in Chinese is encouraged and at times even required (Mallapaty, 2020). In contrast, some returnee scholars were actively engaged with publishing in Chinese but encountered external difficulties, as expressed by Rose:

There were only four Chinese social science citation indexed journals suitable for me to submit to, and the slow review process can last around a year and a half sometimes.

This demonstrates how returnees’ attempts to publish in Chinese—a research ability classified as local cultural capital—can be constrained by uncontrollable external factors, such as the number of available journals and the review process, which can send returnee scholars into an endlessly downward spiral of publication and prevent them from structuring identities as competent scholars publishing in Chinese. Like Cindy and Rose, other returnee scholars also struggled to construct their professional identities as bilingual researchers who could publish in both languages. Moreover, the returnee scholars’ rootlessness in academic publishing is manifested by their lack of sufficient Chinese proficiency for academic purposes. 5 out of 12 participants confessed that despite speaking Chinese as their first language, they were not familiar with the academic Chinese genre (e.g., discourse features) required for writing research proposals to secure research funding, which is a major measurement parameter in universities’ evaluation of young scholars’ research outcomes and potentials for promotion. Below is a representative response:

Lily: When I was writing a research proposal in Chinese, I found my sentences did not read smoothly. Influenced by my doctoral supervisor, I mostly read English academic literature and seldom checked Chinese literature. I still have not gotten the hang of this, which was something like a fixed or inherent logic in writing, because I did not know what the logic of Chinese academic writing should be like.

Lily attributed her dissatisfactory academic Chinese competence to her past academic training experience abroad, during which she had little exposure to Chinese academic literature. Furthermore, some participants reported an L2-induced “L1 attrition” (Pavlenko, 2004) that prevented them from producing high-quality Chinese academic writings:

Sally: If you asked me to write something in Chinese, it was so hard for me. Last time, I wrote a research proposal and my friends picked up a lot of language errors. I was so disappointed with my Chinese writing. It was very similar to my Japanese writing due to the similarities between the two languages in terms of word order.

Claire: I was uncertain of whether my Chinese expressions originated from English. Sometimes, I asked myself whether I was correct if I expressed something by using Chinese in this way, because I had forgotten what I had learned in my elementary and secondary schools.

Both Sally (11 years in Japan) and Claire (5 years in the USA) encountered language difficulties in Chinese writing in terms of grammatical mistakes and confusions. They found that their degradation in Chinese writing proficiency resulted from limited use of Chinese in the recent years and was impacted by their L2 knowledge.

Therefore, when returnees first encountered the “publish and perish” academic environment in China (Tian et al., 2016), they were initially rootless with limited social capital. After realizing that the publication of Chinese articles is necessary, they still endured both internal and external difficulties in publishing Chinese journal articles, which has thus hindered them from constructing identities as competent researchers in the Chinese higher education system. Specifically, the degradation of their Chinese language proficiency and inadequate knowledge of logical academic Chinese writing burdened these Chinese scholars’ academic writing during the adaptation period. In general, participants’ academic writing and scholarly publication is shaped by language (Norton, 2013). These returnee scholars would benefit from more targeted institutional support in facilitating research network building and improving academic Chinese competence.

Constructing a returnee scholar identity: Individual agency in bringing about changes and benefits

The analysis optimistically suggests that with time and the accumulation of experience working in Chinese universities, some returnees (e.g., Helen, Mark, and Rose) gradually reversed the tide and successfully overcame their initial maladjustment. In this process, they integrated the various resources gained from their past studying and working experience at home and abroad to construct an identity as Chinese returnee scholars who not only fit in the local Chinese academic community but also were able to bring about positive changes with their international perspectives.

For instance, Helen, who returned to China in 2012, served as a volunteer professor in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, a less developed and remote area in western China. Drawing on her study-abroad experiences in the UK, Helen recognized that the local scholars in western China tended to “lack teaching knowledge, expertise in research, as well as resources for professional development.” Thus, she initiated academic workshops to facilitate her Chinese colleagues’ research skills:

Inspired by my research experiences in the UK, I successfully held 12 academic workshops here for Xinjiang teachers and will continue to do so. Through these, teachers can “absorb nutrition” [acquire professional knowledge], which made me feel good.

Helen proactively applied what she had learned abroad to the less-developed local higher education context in China. Her actions contributed an international perspective to domestic Chinese scholars in Xinjiang concerning academic research and set an example of how to exchange research ideas through regular workshops. By organizing the workshops, Helen deployed the cultural capital from her academic training abroad and successfully socialized into the local community by positioning herself as an expert in international academic cultures.

Another participant, Mark, who was promoted to the rank of Associated Professor in 2018, has vigorously organized research seminars to help teachers and research-based students to improve their research quality:

In-service teachers, MPhil and doctoral students were welcomed to present their research work before it was published, and other teachers would give some advice.

However, Mark has not had a favorable wind throughout this journey, and the whole process was at times obstructed. Mark further commented:

Because they did not do research; most teachers focused on teaching; the reason was that the senior professors felt [it was] unnecessary or [were] less motivated to do research because they were tenure-tracked, and the novice researchers did not have enough time to spare.

Mark’s insistence on his own mission of promoting research sharing conflicted with his colleagues’ practical constraints and demotivation. In light of this, the research seminar in Mark’s context had to be suspended. However, Mark did not give up and tried again to mobilize his colleagues’ enthusiasm for research. Supported by his initial desire to create a research platform where teachers could communicate, share, and improve, he recently reorganized the research seminar and explained why he persisted:

I wanted to change the current [research]situation. Why not stand up, share with us and receive feedback, and we [can] work together to revise and fine-tune your work.

His returnee scholar identity has progressed from encountering hindrances while actively applying his experience abroad to the Chinese academic context to persisting in making change as enabled by the resources he gained through working in this context for several years. During this process, Mark activated agency in reshaping the working and micro-academic environment around him, employing the social and cultural capitals available (i.e., professorship, work experiences, and network).

In addition to altering the academic culture in Chinese universities, some returnee scholars (e.g., Rose and Helen) have sought collaboration with publishers to transmit their knowledge throughout the society. For example, Rose, whose research interest is British literature, mentioned in the interview after working for several years:

I was collaborating with the local press to be a lead reader who read and appreciated British English literature together with the potential readers, thus bringing my academic value into play in society. It was necessary to link my research to social needs and do something I like.

Rose liked what she was doing despite the fact that this public service did not count towards her academic evaluation by her university. She maintained that:

My attempt to help people read and appreciate literature at the expense of my spare time and research time was not regarded as research output, and it was entirely due to my personal interests and commitment to knowledge transfer.

Beyond teaching and research, Rose initiated facilitating the transfer of her knowledge of British literature to the public to benefit more people. Her professional identity as a bilingual returnee scholar extends beyond the research tradition in humanities to making the knowledge “visible” to the social groups of readers in need. Generally, the participants’ reported instances of individual agency in forming identities were associated with the Chinese “publish or perish” research context and stringent research performance evaluation. In contrast to Mark, who commented: “since I had become tenure-tracked, I needed to do something for others to cope with evaluation,” Rose thought: “I had to seek the balance between my research and knowledge transfer.”

Discussion

The present qualitative study examined how a group of bilingual returnee scholars adjusted themselves to teaching and research work in Chinese universities. The analysis shows that the participants varied the classroom working language in multiple ways. Their professional identity construction is closely related to their negotiation of language resources for teaching, being either English only or translanguaging, which is in turn influenced by their own experiences overseas, students’ learning needs, and institutional requirements. Regarding academic research, their new professional community, within which they possess less social capital, yields for the returnees a sense of rootlessness characterized by a lack of local academic collaboration and a struggle to become competent scholars with the robust language ability to publish in both English and Chinese. However, as they accumulate experience and resources over time, some bilingual returnee scholars are mature, developing agency in their Chinese university contexts and becoming intentional social actors who make valuable research sharing and knowledge transfer contributions for others.

Consistent with previous studies (e.g., Ai et al., 2019; Wang, 2020), our analysis showed the complexity, struggles, and constraints of bilingual returnee scholars’ identity construction in teaching English to Chinese students and doing research. Moreover, this study reveals the special language difficulties of teaching and researching in this context, and participants’ identity struggles during the adaptation period. The findings show that not all language teachers are capable of speaking the academic register of their mother tongue well enough to cope with the students’ comprehension difficulties that are brought about while teaching in English (e.g., Lucy). Shaped by socio-cultural factors, bilingual returnee scholars (re)construct their identities to incorporate translanguaging, a new teaching belief, which is in line with previous findings (Kılıç & Cinkara, 2020; Simon-Maeda, 2004; Wang, 2020).

Theoretically, the present study contributes to the poststructuralist theory of identity by showcasing a twist-and-turn process in which returnees who initially lack social capital in local research networks develop their identities and obtain local cultural capital in academic writing. Publication is also a taxing process, but scholars can act as agentive beings, making a difference after accumulating the necessary networks, resources and experiences of social and cultural capital, which further supports the notion that individuals are intentional beings who utilize available resources to develop a sense of agency and construct identity (Ahearn, 2001). Following Block’s (2013) call for a more balanced consideration of the role of social structure and individual agency in one’s identity work, our study further demonstrates the interaction of structure (working environment) and agency in shaping returnee scholars’ language choice and professional identity construction. That is, bilingual returnee scholars are motivated to change the research environment with the overseas experiences, advanced knowledge, and new viewpoints. In addition, our study further uncovers that these agentive behaviors are still constrained by the institutional environment in areas such as teaching language policy, students’ needs, and university research evaluation principles. While returnees are gaining local cultural capital by publishing in Chinese, the acquisition process is continuously negotiated at the sites of struggle and is at times prevented by external factors, such as the quantity of available journals and Chinese writing proficiency. Last but not least, our theoretical contributions lie in the fact that the intersection of language use and identity construction among returnee bilingual scholars in both teaching and research practices is mediated by capital. For example, the lack of local social and cultural capital results in difficulties developing sufficiently robust language competency to publish bilingually, which further prevents bilingual from being a competent Chinese scholar.

The present study further indicates that the process of identity struggle in a new space is part of cultural adaptation (Makarova & Herzog, 2013). Returnees experienced a transformation of professional identity in relation to the shift in medium of instruction. Specifically, during this adaptation process, some returnee scholars expanded their linguistic teaching repertoire by changing from English only to translanguaging (e.g., Lily), which they could then draw upon to address students’ needs and build up a stronger social membership in the new cultural space. The choice itself of either English only or translanguaging as the medium of instruction contributes to bilingual returnee scholars’ identity construction and shows how the process of English language teaching helps returnees navigate the relations underlying the classroom discourses to facilitate better interactions and understandings between teachers and students. The returnees also experienced the competitive Chinese research culture, which demands frequent publications. In order to survive, a process of identity construction occurs which shifts toward that of their new Chinese research community to respond to new cultural and institutional challenges.

The findings of this study contribute empirically by showing that returnees’ prior educational backgrounds and working experiences lead to the rootlessness they face upon coming back (Ai, 2019). Varying teaching and research languages do exist in the field of English language education, a division of humanities and social science, which concurs with Kuteeva and Airey’s (2014) findings, but our analysis extends further and implies that what the returnees lack in Chinese academia—social networks or guanxi (relationship)—is actually a symbol of social capital (Wang, 2007). Furthermore, the hierarchical bureaucratic authority in China, closely intertwined with various research networks, creates more barriers for these rootless bilingual returnee scholars. Although their publications in Chinese seem to play a mediating role in alleviating this sense of rootlessness, in practice it is not an ideal solution because of their limited Chinese academic writing proficiency. This is a language dilemma. As the returnee bilingual scholars, they are supposed to have a good command of academic Chinese but the lack of this resource may subsequently transform their professional lives to some extent.

However, the assets of international experience, including academic networks and relationships that returnees accumulated during and after their study abroad, may facilitate professional growth (Li et al., 2018), which in turn counterbalances the negative impacts resulting from the weaknesses of their Chinese research network and academic writing skills. The returnees’ social and cultural capital gained in the local workplace after returning, accompanied with individual agency, further enables research sharing (e.g., the case of Mark). In comparison to domestic bilingual scholars (Huang & Guo, 2019; Wang, 2020), bilingual returnee scholars particularly face the disadvantage of scholarly use of Chinese in teaching and research as well as Chinese academic writing. Domestic bilingual scholars’ unique identity construction is one of our future research directions. The in between research situation in which returnees can neither obtain the overseas support nor access local resources is also a result of the encounter between two different cultures. Under such circumstances, it is unnecessary to homogenize different research cultures. Respecting differences and striving to discover ways to survive and flourish within the new research culture seem to be the ideal solution.

Finally, the findings of this study have implication for worldwide higher education system that receives returnee scholars. The Chinese bilingual returnee scholars’ experiences in our study share common grounds with those in Mexican and Turkish contexts. They all lack local support (e.g., social network) to adjust into the new environment. In particular, the implications of this study can assist bilingual returnee scholars in navigating the teaching and research context. First, bilingual returnee scholars should determine the medium of instruction after considering the socio-cultural factors, such as institutional requirements, students’ expectations and their own language proficiency. Teachers should also be willing to actively update their teaching practices through interactions with students so as to shorten the duration of mismatch between the teachers’ beliefs and students’ needs. This indicates that opportune teacher training for returnee scholars to facilitate their professional development in the local space is necessary even if returnee scholars had teaching experience prior to going abroad. Furthermore, the teaching challenges returnees face may be mitigated by increased university support. For instance, creating a professional learning community can enhance teacher self-efficacy development (Zonoubi et al., 2017), benefiting the process of professional identity construction. Second, despite the unavoidable feeling of rootlessness returnees may initially undergo, they should regulate their emotions and seek opportunities to expand their research networks by attending local academic conferences and reading research papers in home language (e.g., Chinese) to accumulate resources that eventually will benefit both themselves and others. Third, policymakers and administrators of universities should be aware of the bilingual returnee scholars’ adjustment challenges and seek ways to help them to adjust to the new environment quickly and smoothly, mitigating their sense of rootlessness. For example, a reduction in their teaching load and more seed funding could be provided to young scholars, including returnees, within their first three years to maximize their research potential and enhance their teaching excellence.

Conclusion

This study explored the facets to identity construction and negotiation evidenced by bilingual scholars returning to China from work and study overseas. Various forms of language use and agency were involved in the transition process experienced by the interviewees. We should note that the present study has limitations, particularly in terms of this study’s disciplinary bias. We focused on the case of English language education only, and perspectives from other disciplines such as STEM as well as cross-disciplinary research are needed in the future. We believe that our study makes a significant contribution to the literature, as it presents the identity reconstruction process bilingual returnee scholars worked through in terms of language, an underexplored area of research, particularly in the contexts of foreign language and local home (China). Potential policy decisions and scholar strategies that could make the transition experience shorter and more productive were offered accordingly.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jian Xu

Jian Xu is an Assistant Professor at Sichuan International Studies University. He obtained his PhD degree from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His work has appeared in several journals, such as Assessing Writing, Applied Linguistics Review, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Educational Studies.

Wanyu Amy Ou is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on intercultural communication and multilingualism in education policy and practice. Her work has been published in international journals such as International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, International Journal of Multilingualism, and Linguistics and Education.

Wanyu Amy Ou

Wanyu Amy Ou is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on intercultural communication and multilingualism in education policy and practice. Her work has been published in international journals such as International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, International Journal of Multilingualism, and Linguistics and Education.

Notes

1. The Double First-Class Initiative is China’s current higher education development program which aims to enhance the global recognition of China’s university system by 2049.

2. The Chinese version of Decision can be found at http://www.gov.cn/jrzg/201110/25/content_1978202.htm, and the English version can be found at www.cctb.net.