‘I never knew I could have so many future possibilities’: a case study of an ethnic minority student in mainstream higher education in China

Abstract

ABSTRACT As a linguistically and ethnically diverse region in China, Xinjiang has received much scholarly attention in multilingual and multicultural education research. Given that minority Uyghur students need to learn three languages (i.e. Uyghur, Mandarin Chinese, and English), and that they generally have limited access to educational resources, some of these students often feel inferior to their majority Han counterparts when admitted to university where they are expected to compete on an equal footing. Adopting a poststructuralist conceptualisation of identity, we traced the multilingual learning experiences of one underprivileged Uyghur student in this two-year-long case study. Our semi-structured interview, reflective journal, and social media data revealed that drawing upon multiple affordances and her repertoire of communicative resources, our participant felt empowered to reshape her understandings of her future possibilities and to effect a more powerful identity in the host community. This study deepens our understanding of ethnic minority learners’ identity construction and multilingual practices in the process of internal migration. Additionally, this study attempts to advance our knowledge of ethnic multilingual learners’ identity construction by linking individual learner’s investment in multilingual learning (micro-level) to the institutional practices (meso-level) and the national language education policy (macro-level).