Identity, Motivation, and Multilingual Education in Asian Contexts

Mark Feng Teng, Wang Lixun

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350099678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

This book investigates how learners' motivations and identities are constructed in the process of learning and using multiple languages in Asian contexts. It presents examples of multilingual contexts in different parts of Asia and illustrates various achievements and challenges associated with multilingual education. Drawing on recent theoretical developments regarding learners' motivations and identities in language learning-related research, this book uncovers learners' motivations that underlie their decisions of learning multiple languages in Asian contexts. Through empirical studies, the authors offer conceptual interpretations on emerging concepts such as dual-motivation system, motivation dynamics, motivational transformation episodes, and hierarchies of identities. In addition to being highly relevant to researchers of applied linguistics, this book is a valuable reference for every university and college library that serves a faculty or school of education.

1

Imagined Communities, Motivation and Multilingual Education in Asia

Multilingualism is viewed as a valuable resource that should be invested in language education as a means of securing learners’ access to various imagined language communities (Dagenais 2003). Asia is currently one of the most exciting regions in the world and may be one of the most prominent regions in which multilingualism resides in the future. It is no wonder that Asia witnesses dynamic uses of English for various social, cultural, political and economic purposes. We traditionally limit this region to the traditional, geographical Asian countries or regions, for example, East Asia (e.g., Hong Kong, Mainland China, Korea and Japan), Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia), and South Asia (Bangladesh, India and Pakistan). However, the concept of Asia is ever-expanding. In the modern world the word ‘Asia’ invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples.

In this day and age, the effects of globalization on Asian regions cannot be ignored. This chapter examines the state of multilingualism in Asian contexts. Bilingualism and multilingualism in Asia have developed and will continue its development because of human migration and coercive political campaigns. In addition, contact between languages and linguistic interference is becoming more and more common in this region. Similar to other parts of the world, linguistic diversity is a characteristic feature of Asia, where a great number of language families exist. Related to this, language contact occurs as a recurring phenomenon. Of equal significance is the fact that the Asia region is bi- or multilingual rather than monolingual.

The shifts and fluctuations in multilingual education have become visible under the recent sociopolitical and socio-economic trends. These include the development of globalization, deepening economic trade, the post-colonial search for national identities, and the increased international migration. A change has also been witnessed in the language policy in Asian contexts. Reasons included the growing dominance of English as an international language and the use of languages for national cohesion or social control. Against this backdrop, there is a need to explore the globalization, linguistic diversity, community affiliations and learners’ motivation for language learning in Asia.

1.1 Language and multilingualism

Language is a system of vocal sounds and/or nonverbal systems by which group members communicate with one another. It is a critical dimension in constructing one’s identity and developing awareness and psychological growth (Jay 2003). People are connected to one another because of languages. Through languages, we are able to share our internal states of being with one another. It is also a medium of exchange for reaching out to our surrounding realities and sharing the experience with others (Samovar and Porter 2004). Individuals may attempt to change the style of their language or even the language itself in order to build relationships with those they imagine or interact with (Dicker 2003). People who share the same language or dialect often share the same feelings, beliefs, and behaviours. It is no wonder that people have a bond when they share the same linguistic heritage.

When people move from school to school, region to region, languages or dialects spoken also change (Gollnick and Chinn 2006). Individuals exhibit cultural similarities and differences related to languages, gender, class, ethnicity, religion and age. Language is much more than a tool for communication. It is used to socialize individuals into their linguistic and cultural communities. This multilingual nature reflects the rich cultural heritage of people, and language diversity is an asset to a nation. This is more important when a nation needs to interact with other nations in the domains of trade, commerce, education, science and technology. However, the asset of multilingual competence is often overlooked due to the sense of ethnocentrism, or belief in each nation’s self-perceived superiority of its own ethnicity or culture. From a linguistic perspective, there is no such thing as one language being better than the other. There is nothing limiting or demeaning about any language because each language can satisfy the social or psychological needs of its speakers. In fact, there are always benefits related to the existence of one language. Hence, all languages share equal importance, although society may place different levels of social statuses or functions to each language.

Language diversity is a feature of language education in Asia. Based on the concept of bilingual education (e.g., Fishman 1976), multilingual education refers to the regular use of three or more languages for teaching and learning in an instructional setting (Abello-Contesse 2013). Because of globalization and the widespread use of English, the term multilingualism has acquired a different meaning. However, there exists tensions between a monolingual ethos (the first language or the second language) and the development of bilingualism (English and national language) or multilingualism (English, national language and local languages). Grosjean (1985) suggested balanced bilingualism, which means developing similar levels of proficiency in two languages. We can also stress a need to equate multilingualism with balanced multilingualism, which refers to the development of similar proficiency in three or more languages.

However, to develop intellectually, academically and socially in multiple languages that learners have been in contact with is not an easy job to accomplish. Problems and tensions exist in the unbalanced multilingual education mode. There is also a marked tendency to place a greater emphasis on the development of foreign language rather than the first language. Likewise, there exists an emphasis on enhancing the proficiency of the national language to build a national identity. These factors, as well as learners’ mental imagination of community, affect multilingual education. We may conclude that there is an increasing interest in finding effective ways to address the problems rooted in multilingual education.

1.2 Multilingual education

Multilingual education is perhaps one of the thorniest issues faced by many post-colonial states today. The historians of languages as well as the specialists in multilingualism are faced with very complex historical processes that often pull in different directions: the construction of mother tongues, medium of instruction, official languages, standard literary languages, and Creoles, apart from Anglicization (understood mainly as the spread of English either as a local or as an international language) and, last but not least, the processes of language extinction (Ribeiro 2010). Multilingual education can affect the learning of any language, from formerly highly prestigious colonial languages such as English in Singapore and Portuguese in various Asian territories as well as Creoles of colonial origin, to diverse indigenous languages (for instance, some indigenous languages in Brazil and Mexi co are no longer spoken or used). In addition, each of these processes may hybridize and overlap with others in numerous and shifting ways across time. Therefore, multilingual education is becoming more important in different contexts around the world (Cenoz 2009). As proposed by Edwards (2007), multilingualism is a facet of life around the world, a circumstance arising, at the simplest level, from the need to communicate across speech communities.

In post-colonial states, schools are mostly colonial creation. This required the schools to integrate in terms of both the construct of the mother tongue and that of the standard medium. This left little room for manoeuvring towards a more non-hierarchical, empowering multilingualism. In some countries, for example India, there is a trend towards monolingualism, particularly when considering tertiary education. Although India has had a modicum of experience in using languages other than English as mediums of instruction for higher education, English is still the dominant language. The Philippines has undergone a losing battle to keep Spanish as a main language. In a similar way, the Republic of Timor Leste, a Southeast Asian nation occupying half the island of Timor, also experiences difficulties in keeping Portuguese as an official language. Although Macau manages to make Portuguese survive, it is only within restricted circles. The last extant Portuguese-medium school in Macau turned into a bilingual school (both English and Portuguese) in 2008. This situation seems to suggest that equality between different languages is still unattainable in many countries in the Asian context. Multilingual education becomes an even thornier issue when mother-tongue education is considered. This is because the mother tongue can hardly be described as a non-contentious construct. Therefore, we need to come up with new ideas or ways to rethink our current predicament involving multilingual education. There is a need to explore new paths for multilingualism to be taught and used as a boon rather than as a burden or something to be kept strictly at bay in higher education. One of the paths to be noted is the learners’ imagined communities and learners’ investment in learning a language.

1.3 Imagined communities and investment

The current interest in multilingual education suggests the connection among globalization, linguistic diversity, community affiliations and options in language education. Learners invest in multilingual education so that they acquire the language resources essential to access various imagined communities nationally and abroad. Imagined communities refer to ‘groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination’ (Kanno and Norton 2003: 241). Anderson (2006: 5) used the term imagined communities to explain the development of nationalism. It is argued that the nation ‘is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’.

According to Wenger (1998: 178), imagination refers to ‘a mode of belonging that always involves the social world to expand the scope of reality and identity’. Through imagination, we are ‘expanding our self by transcending our time and space and creating new images of the world and ourselves’ (ibid., 176). This suggests that imagination is a distinct mode of belonging to a community with which an individual creates images of the world and the self, transcending both time and space. Individuals, while joining social actions, may choose to meet ways of doing in the community – whether imagined or real – and locate, define, identify and rectify their membership through constant negotiations of their participation (Teng and Bui 2018). Imagination impacts the process of creating new identity options (Hall 1990). This process is often aided by the efforts to create new practices of self-representation and, thus, the new imagined communities (Anderson 2006).

English is increasingly becoming a language detached from any specific Anglophone community. It is becoming the representative of a worldwide global community. Hence, the process of learning English seems to be a process of learners’ negotiation of their identities as members of such a global community conceived in their minds, or an imagined global community (Ryan 2006). Historically, emerging modern nation-states have promoted ‘national’ languages to create a sense of commonality, or a way to create ‘imagined communities’ with a sense of national unity and loyalty among their citizens (Bonfiglio 2010). In addition, a shift in parent’s attitude has led to a change in the process of their current participation, membership alignment and their perception of the social value of each language. Finally, the changing context or the movement from one community to another tends to influence learners’ development of identity and, hence, their investment in language learning.

The construct of investment was proposed by Norton (2013). Norton’s proposal was based on Bourdieu’s (1991) theories of capital, language and symbolic power. Based on Norton, there is a need to consider the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners with the target language and the way power relations are implicated in language learning and teaching. As noted by Norton (2013), if learners invest in learning a target language, they do so with an awareness that they would acquire various symbolic resources (language, education, friendship), as well as material resources (capital goods, real estate, money). Through this, learners can enhance the value of their cultural assets and the sense of social power. As argued by Bourdieu (1991), a legitimate language learner is an individual who is engaged in a social context, characterized by unequal struggles for meaning, access and power. This reflects the different status and power relationships between dominant and minority languages. Learners may not limit themselves to an economic rationale for investing in learning a language. They may, in practice, associate multilingualism with symbolic capital, for example, increased social status and access to communities of practice. They recognize being multilingual as a cumulative source. However, they also acknowledge that not all languages have equal importance. In multilingual education, learners’ relationship to and interest in each language and the value attributed to each language in different contexts is an issue that should be considered.

Learners invest in learning a language because they believe that learning a particular language and its related education resources will enable them to gain membership in a community (Teng 2019a) . They extrapolate from their own experience and create a new image of the world. Engagement, alignment and imagination in communities of practice determine their relationships with various language groups. Imagination, in this regard, is considered as a role in building learners’ relationships to the practical community. Therefore, learning a language is not only learning the linguistic system of words and sentences but also a social practice that engages the identities of learners in diverse and often contradictory ways (Norton 2015). The concepts of imagined communities and investment emphasize the social dynamics and language education. Overall, they provide multiple lens for analysing learners’ relationships among languages, multilingual education, power relationship and motivation. Learning a language is usually considered to occur in face-to-face communities of practice. This refers to the negotiation of becoming a certain person in the immediate situation. However, a learner’s participation in an imagined world, or a learner’s imagination in a community, also exert an effect on the learners’ motivation. The construct of investment is similar to the construct of motivation, which is to be explored later.

1.4 Motivation

The term motivation is generally defined by psychologists as the process involved in arousing, directing and sustaining behaviour, or what causes a person to have a desire to repeat a behaviour and vice versa (Reeve 2009). The motivation for and causes of language change continue to be the subject of great discussion. In research on motivation, the relationship between contextual and situational influences and the self is important to the intrinsic/extrinsic approach to motivation (Bui, Teng and Man, forthcoming). According to Noels (2001), a more or less self-determined action is related to the degree to which a learner is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated. Additionally, when learners learn the language because they love it, they are intrinsically motivated, and they may internalize the learning objectives as part of their self-concept. By contrast, when a language is learnt as an attempt to achieve an external goal, individuals may be externally motivated. In this case, the learning process may be determined through analysis of context and external pressure.

As described by Noels et al. (2000), motivation is a continuum with a motivation (e.g., I am not interested in learning this language) at one pole and intrinsic motivation (e.g., I learn this language because I love it) at the other. In between these poles, different types of extrinsic motivations are distinguished: external, introjected and identified regulation. High self-perceived competence or self-determined motivation may facilitate intrinsic learning motivation (Ryan and Deci 2000). That said, the more the motivation is self-determined, the more it shifts towards the intrinsic pole. External regulation refers to the desire to learn this language for external purposes (e.g., I want to learn this language for passing the exam). Introjected regulation suggests a more internalized pressure felt by some learners while learning an L2 (e.g., I would feel guilty if I could not learn this language well...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction to Multilingual Education in Asian Contexts
• 1 Imagined Communities, Motivation and Multilingual Education in Asia
• 2 English as a Lingua Franca, Multilingual Identity, and Multilingual Education in Asia
• 3 Language Learning, Motivation and Identity in Asian Multilingual Education Contexts
• 4 Multilingual Education in Hong Kong: Motivation and Identity
• 5 Motivation and Identity of the Stakeholders: The Case of Hong Kong
• 6 The Dynamics of L2 and L3 Learning, Identity Development, and Motivation Change: A Hong Kong Learner’s Perspective
• 7 Identities, Imagined Communities, and Communities of Practice: Thai Students in China
• 8 L2 and L3 Learning, Motivation and Identity: A Chinese EFL Learner’s Reflection
• Conclusion and Future Directions for Multilingual Education in Asian Contexts
• References
• Index
• Copyright