Imagined identities: Preimmigrants' narratives on language and identity

Abstract

This article reports on a study which investigated the language- and identity-related, predeparture concerns and expectations of prospective immigrants. Narrative interviews were conducted with 15 Afrikaans-speaking South Africans who planned to emigrate to New Zealand within months of their participation in the study. The participants' stories were told and interpreted within the exploratory space created by the intersection of three narrative dimensions (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000); that is, the personal and social experiences of participants moving backwards and forwards in time and physical space. From our socially-situated content analysis of the experiences articulated in their narratives we identified a number of thematic threads which we found to be salient. We chose five of these through which to channel our presentation of the findings: linguistic, cultural and national roots; the process of change; imagined identity changes; imagined losses and longing; emotional responses to anticipated changes. Further interpretative analysis of the findings produced five interrelated axes on which the participants, through their stories, position themselves. By examining participants' imagined experiences, our aim is to broaden the scope of research on language, identity and immigration. It allows us to make connections between life before and after migration, and thus to focus on the “journey” (Brah, 1996).

Language choice and identity construction in peer interactions: insights from a multilingual university in Hong Kong

“…Therefore, there is a need to deepen the understanding of the language choice in interactions between students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds in a multilingual school context. Given that language use is intrinsically related to identity (Barkhuizen and de Klerk 2006), this study also aims to examine identity construction in crosscultural interactions.…”

Afrikaans language maintenance in Australia

“…The published work has considered Afrikaans-speaking communities in New Zealand and to a limited extent, in Western Australia. In a series of recent articles, Barkhuizen and associates (Barkhuizen, 2005(Barkhuizen, , 2006Barkhuizen & de Klerk, 2006;Barkhuizen & Knoch, 2006) have reported the linguistic and cultural experiences of families who have moved from South Africa to New Zealand. The narratives reveal cultural changes and point towards numerous linguistic changes that have occurred in these families.…”

Cross‐border pre‐service teachers in Hong Kong: ‘to be or not to be integrated, that is the problem’

“…Rather than being broad-sweeping life stories, the interviews focused on a limited range of topics and thus provide referential accounts of specific English learning and teaching training experiences at Hong KongIEd and elsewhere (Barkhuizen and de Klerk 2006;Wengraf 2001). There were three rounds of individual interviews at intervals of three months, each one of which lasted about one hour.…”