Multilingualism and Identity in Hong Kong Education After 1997

Abstract

Multilingual settings are regarded as ideologically, culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse social contexts where tensions exist among different groups and individuals, and in which language users’ multilingual competence can be utilized as repertoire for communicative, identification, and learning purposes. Multilingualism and identity have been widely explored from different theoretical orientations in diverse educational settings. The major research findings from the postmodernist perspective reflect that (a) identity, reflecting an individual’s relationship with the external environment, is dynamic, multiple, and fluid; (b) individuals’ identities are continuously shaped in multilingual interactions, and the multilingual settings provide affordance for the language users to identify themselves through the lens of cultural memories, embodied history, subjectivity of themselves and others, during which the new identities and relationships are established; and (c) the multilingual speakers can shape the multilingual settings through negotiating power relations between languages as well as cultures, and modifying as well as reconstructing social discourses. As such, the exploration of multilingualism and identity, and their complex interplay with educational discourse, history, and sociopolitical realities, have both theoretical significance and practical implications for transferring diversity into recourses and constructing new spaces and opportunities for identity, language, and education in an era of increasing hybridity and mobility.