“Insufficiently Korean” to strategic meaning-maker: textual transpositioning and multilingual identity work

The lack of systemic means in the U.S. to identify multilingual college students engenders questions of whether these students receive equitable educational experiences. In response, we sought to understand multilingual identity among multilingual college students through an intersectional, agency-focused lens. The present empirical paper draws on the accounts of 23 multilingual undergraduate students whom we interviewed regarding their experience of being multilingual at a diverse urban university in the Midwest U.S. We used an iterative qualitative analytic approach to examine the students’ identity work in their recollection of experiences inside and outside of college. Students’ accounts demonstrated the intersectional construction of their multilingual identity; the impact of English language dominance; and the pride, joy, and desire derived from their heritage language use and identity work. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings in research, practice, and policy.

Earlier research has established that language teachers’ identity work is intertwined with emotions and called for incorporating emotions in language teacher education. Yet, there is limited research investigating how teacher education programmes pedagogize identity, emotions and agency to help pre-service teachers gain critical emotional reflexivity. To respond to this gap in the literature, we pedagogized Kayi-Aydar’s emotion–identity–agency triangle via three teacher learning activities in a critical practicum course in a pre-service English language teaching programme in Turkey: reflective emotion diary; auto-ethnography; and critical issues analysis and advocacy project. In this study, we explore a Korean pre-service language teacher's (Iris's) case to demonstrate how she navigated her emotions, identity and agency throughout the practicum course with the help of these teacher learning activities and critical, dialogical supervision in our course. At the beginning of the term, Iris expressed anxiety due to her novice non-native pre-service teacher identity. Yet, as she gained critical emotional reflexivity, Iris could reflect on her emotions critically, transform her internalized deficit view of her identity as a novice non-native pre-service teacher and perform her multicultural and multilingual identity in her emerging pedagogy. We argue that findings from this study offer evidence that when intentionally and systematically supported by second language (L2) teacher educators through the design of teacher learning activities, pre-service L2 teachers can develop critical reflexivity of their emotions and emotion labour and recruit this awareness for teacher agency even over a short period of time and in contexts of power imbalance such as pre-service practicum experience. We offer recommendations for L2 teacher educators.

This study examines how cultural learning episodes shape multilingual identity construction for non-native teachers of Chinese working in Irish post-primary schools and enrolled in an online continuing professional development (CPD) programme. Using classroom discourse analysis, we analysed around 60 h of Zoom sessions from two parallel evening groups, plus chat logs and cultural task artefacts. Cultural episodes were systematically identified and coded for translanguaging practices and identity-relevant talk. Two recurring interactional patterns emerged. First, translanguaging-rich teacher–learner exchanges created a third space in which participants could reposition themselves as emerging multilingual teachers rather than deficient beginners. Second, cultural workshops and multimodal tasks supported professional investment by legitimising partial character literacy and enabling cross-linguistic meaning-making. Across these episodes, discourse moves such as multilingual glossing, cross-linguistic comparisons, identity-oriented prompts and the public legitimisation of partial repertoires expanded opportunities for participation and made moment-by-moment identity work visible. This article offers a fine-grained account of multilingual identity pedagogy in low-proficiency Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) teacher education and identifies design principles for online CPD. The study is limited by its focus on a single CPD programme in Ireland and the absence of follow-up data from participants’ own classrooms.

This article is based on interviews with two teachers who work in a Vietnamese community language (CL) school in Australia. It explores the teachers’ descriptions of how they came to teach at the school and what they consider to be the purpose of teaching Vietnamese. The analysis sheds light on CL teacher identity, including how teachers position themselves in relation to others in and beyond the CL school context. Excerpts are represented using poetic representation, to bring out existential and emotional experiences in the teacher narratives. The result reveals how the teachers’ expressed experiences of isolation and disconnection in a broader, monolingual context, contrast with their descriptions of involvement and connection with the local community after joining the Vietnamese community language school. Social and ideological factors emerge as salient factors shaping the subject positions the teachers perform. The article thus sheds light on the complex identity work performed by CL teachers, revealing their on-going commitment to developing communication, knowledge of culture and multilingual identity within families and communities living in diasporic contexts.

The EFL classroom can be a place in which students develop target language skills and overarching plurilingual competencies, but also their multilingual identities. Digital games – including interactive fiction (IF) – may play a role in this context, as participation in digital games and gaming practices has been claimed to afford identity work. This paper is based on a follow-up study for the “FanTALES” Erasmus+ project. Drawing on IF stories created in a pedagogic intervention and on follow-up focus group interviews, it finds that multilingual storytelling in an interactive fiction context was challenging for students, even though they self-assessed their productive plurilingual competencies as fairly high, and that the writing task itself was only partially successful in creating a ‘translanguaging space’ in which all linguistic resources could be used and valued.

The past decades have witnessed an increasing number of studies documenting native English teachers’ (NETs’) challenges in professional development and collaboration with nonnative English teachers’ (NNETs’) across multiple educational contexts. There are also debates in TESOL regarding the essentialized dichotomy of NETs and NNETs with insufficient recognition of the educational and cultural experiences of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) / English as a second language (ESL). Little research has been conducted on the lived experiences of transnational multilingual NETs who work in heritage contexts; and how they position themselves when they conduct their teacher identity work and negotiate between heritage identity and NET identity. This study, drawing on the notion of ethical self-formation and its application in teacher identity research as a theoretical lens, addresses the gap by investigating the identity construction of two transnational NETs of Chinese ethnicity returning to their home context in Hong Kong to teach. The findings indicate that (1) the participants negotiated their multilingual identity and the monolingual NET identity ascribed in the workplace, (2) they developed counter-strategies to turn the knowledge of the local language and culture into resources in teaching, and (3) they agentively expanded the definition of NET and situated them in the full institutional and social context to consider their identity conflict and self-empowerment. The findings have implications for education policy to accommodate and value the plural-competences of NETs and NNETs.

Aneta Pavlenko(2013), defines identity as the manner in which a person perceives his or her relationship to the world, how the relationship is constituted by time and space, and how the person perceives possibilities of what can be done in the future (Pavlenko, 2013, p. 4), and views identity as dynamic and negotiated by multilingual users, who negotiate and construct or build identities through language choices and multimodal practices in the digital chat. Multilingualism, code-switching, translanguaging, and digital communication, the study of the matter sheds light on the fact that the digital environments of chats offer new spaces in which identity work takes place. Applying a qualitative research design, the research examines chat logs and reflection journals of multilingual users and applies thematic and discourse analysis to them based on the models such as the investment theory by Bonny Norton and the self-presentation theory by Erving Goffman. The discussion shows that the participants are strategic in the use of language choice, transliteration, code-switching and multimodal cues (emojis, tone, script) to show belonging, professionalism, intimacy and cultural hybridity. Findings shows that multilingual web-based communication cultivates hybrid and fluid identities and are influenced by emotion, audience, platform and context affordances. This study concludes with the statements; that digital multilingual chat spaces are socio-psychological ecosystems based on the language acting as an identity-building resource; and proposing future studies; a longitudinal design or analysis, different platforms and heterogeneous populations of users; the practical conclusions; designing digital-literacy interventions that acknowledge multilingual identity and multimodal expression.