Multiple Discourses, Multiple Identities: Investment and Agency in Second-Language Learning among Chinese Adolescent Immigrant Students

Abstract

In this article, Sandra McKay and Sau-Ling Wong argue for a revision of code-based and individual learner-based views of second-language learning. Their position is based on a two-year qualitative study of adolescent Chinese-immigrant students conducted in California in the early 1990s, in which the authors and their research associates followed four Mandarin-speaking students through seventh and eighth grades, periodically interviewing them and assessing their English-language development. In discussing their findings, McKay and Wong establish a contextualist perspective that foregrounds interrelations of discourse and power in the learner's social environment. The authors identify mutually interacting multiple discourses to which the students were subjected, but of which they were also subjects, and trace the students' negotiations of dynamic, sometimes contradictory, multiple identities. Adopting B. N. Peirce's concept of investment, McKay and Wong relate these discourses and identities to the students' exercise of agency in terms of their positioning in relations of power in both the school and U.S. society.

Becoming “Local” in ESL: Racism as Resource in a Hawai‘i Public High School

“…As a result of the "disciplinary social conditions" of this racialized discursive space, these youths "express[ed] their moments of identification in relation to African Americans and African American cultures and languages," with rap, hip-hop, basketball, and "Black stylized English" serving as resources for them to "become Black" (p. 353). In their study of a California junior high school, McKay and Wong (1996) explicate how four Chinese L2-English learners were subject to and subjects of "mutually interacting multiple discourses" at the school. Included among these discourses was a "colonialist/racializing discourse" about immigrants, which "reflect[ed] a Euro-and Amerocentric attitude of superiority toward those parts of the world with which Western powers have held colonial .…”

Being and Becoming American: Triangulating Habitus, Field, and Literacy Instruction in a Multilingual Classroom

“…The data presented here suggest that Joyce's habitus included the socially sanctioned (mis)recognition not of her parents' vernacular literacies and biliteracy, but of individualist "model minority" (McKay & Wong, 1996) achievements as the kind of cultural capital to be brought to bear on childrearing and school achievement.…”

“…However, as McKay & Wong (1996) found in their research on Chinese immigrant students, factors affecting students' investment in learning a second language Volume 8 Number 3 Fall 2006 Page 3 extend beyond the curriculum and include powerful discourses of language and literacy that guide individuals' choices of language and literate practice, and similar forces are at play in teachers' pedagogical decision-making (New London Group, 1996). Accordingly, pedagogical change requires a consideration of how power is forged and negotiated through language use in multilingual settings (Luke, 2003;Pennycook, 2001).…”

Investimento e comunidades imaginadas: uma análise narrativa da construção da identidade de alunos-professores de inglês

“…When speaking about recent research on the process of identity construction of language learners, we often draw on those studies developed by scholars such as Norton (2013Norton ( [2000), Kanno and Norton (2003), McKay and Wong (1996), which were conducted in second language contexts in which the participants were immigrants. It means that, in these contexts, the level of exposure by the learners is usually -but not necessarily as suggested by Norton (2013Norton ( [2000) -higher than in those contexts which the language is learnt and taught as an additional language.…”