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Unlike Korean or Vietnamese adoptees who came to the U.S. during the postwar era, Chinese adoptees are mostly abandoned female infants under China’s one-child policy from 1980 through 2015. Little work has documented Chinese adoptees’ identity (trans)formation across time and space. This study examines how three Chinese adoptees from the U.S. who chose to go to Taiwan to teach English make sense of their Chinese heritages and their lives in and out of Asia. Drawing on the frameworks of positioning and chronotopic identities, this cross-sectional, multiple case study documents the participants’ identity (trans)formations through their narratives on their moves across the U.S., China, and Taiwan during different points of their lives. Our adoptee participants’ home and work experiences over time represent diverse pathways for their negotiations of various aspects of their identities – linguistic, cultural, Chinese, American, Asian American, and adoptee – in their life trajectories transnationally. Their diverse experiences complicate current understandings of adoptee identities within and across the adoptive home, the “homeland” of their birth places, and beyond.

Building on research that has demonstrated the benefits of Dual-Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) programmes on students’ bilingual, academic, and cross-cultural development (Lindholm-Leary and H...

While the role of parental ideologies on children’s bi/multilingual development and the role of children’s beliefs about multilingualism are well-documented, less work examines how parental and stu...

This paper examines non-Mandarin-speaking Chinese Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area who speak a variety of Cantonese called Hoisan-wa , whose histories and experiences are often muted in wider contemporary academic and public “Mandarin-as-Chinese” discourses. Drawing on 93 interviews, I focus on language awareness of Chinese(s) through: a) participants’ anchorings of Chinese varieties; b) self-reported fluency data; c) the use of the term “Chinese. The data suggests that if we aim to promote equitable “Chinese” language maintenance opportunities for all Chinese Americans, rather than viewing Chinese language acquisition as linear and limited to only one variety at a time, there needs to be more inclusion of the diverse Chinese languages that are in the local communities, Hoisan-wa among them.

Translanguaging theory re-conceptualizes the linguistic systems and practices of multilinguals as well as multilingual classroom pedagogies. While many studies have documented translanguaging in bi...

In a broader context where English is marketed as a desirable product of consumption, hiring English speakers as language teachers and de facto cultural ambassadors is a common practice in some Eas...

Though Cantonese has been spoken in the United States since the 1880s, very little is known about the attitudes of younger Cantonese speakers and learners and their ideas about their bi/multilingua...

Translingual practice is an emergent theoretical perspective which emphasizes the capacity and disposition for meaning-making across linguistic boundaries. Following on studies of globalized workplaces that have focused on lingua franca English, this article explores translingual practice as represented in interview and blog narratives recounted by multilingual, multiethnic young adults hired by Japanese schools and companies for their English proficiency. In these metapragmatic narratives of interactions with supervisors and coworkers, participants portray themselves surmounting communicative challenges through investment in L2 Japanese, and especially through pragmatic accommodation to local norms. In this way, they avoid maintaining widespread ideologies that delegitimize Japanese L2 speakers.

Previous research reports the positive impact of dual immersion programs on students’ language proficiency, yet fewer studies have examined students’ attitudes in such programs. The current study examined student attitudes and language proficiency in a Cantonese dual immersion school and explored relationships between students’ attitudes and language proficiency in Cantonese. Language proficiency results showed that, on average, Cantonese immersion student performances indicated attainment of Intermediate‐High level in listening, Novice‐Mid level in reading, and Novice‐High level in writing and speaking. In addition, heritage learners outperformed nonheritage learners in reading and listening skills. Survey data revealed that heritage learners held more positive attitudes toward learning Cantonese compared with nonheritage learners, but there were no differences in attitudes toward the focal school between the two student groups. Regression analysis revealed that students’ attitudes toward the dual immersion school explained significant variance in their Cantonese reading, listening, and speaking skills. Qualitative data also revealed that students’ positive attitudes toward their school were shaped by their experiences with their principal, teachers, and school activities. These findings shed light on the role that positive school and learning environments play in helping dual language immersion school students acquire proficiency in the partner language.

This paper investigates Mandarin learning experiences of Chinese American teenagers from working-class families. Drawing on a subset of data from a larger ethnographic study, we focus on 14 middle schoolers who studied Mandarin as a heritage language at a socially engaging school with Mandarin as part of its official curriculum. The data highlight a mismatch between students’ true heritage language and the institutionalized surrogate heritage language, which created unwanted implications for students’ investment and identities in the presence of Mandarin hegemony. In a time when the teaching of Mandarin receives unprecedented educational support, this study calls for more educational efforts that attend to the large population of heritage language learners from non-Mandarin language backgrounds. We suggest that Mandarin educators have critical language awareness so they can address Chinese American students’ multilingual backgrounds in ways that can value their home languages and support their investment ...

This article examines the reported language ideologies and family language policies of the parents of Cantonese-English bilinguals in the U.S. in relation to their children's achievement scores in Cantonese and English. We explore the relationships first by language of instruction. Results show children in bilingual classrooms scored higher than those in mainstream (English-only) classrooms on the Cantonese tasks, but significantly more children in bilingual programs had Cantonese as a home language than children in mainstream classrooms. Parents from mainstream classrooms were significantly more satisfied with their children's English-language attainment than parents from bilingual classrooms. Using cluster analysis, we then identify four new groups of children based on their language proficiency: (a) English-dominant, (b) Cantonese-dominant, (c) “balanced bilingual,” and (d) “ideal bilingual.” Results show all children scored at or above the monolingual English mean on English decoding, but the ideal bi...

This article explores uninvestigated issues in Cantonese and Hoisan-wa language maintenance from an ethnic Chinese diaspora point of view. Data come from a larger study looking at Frog Story narratives from 140 Cantonese–English bilingual children in California. Fourteen of these children were found to display uniquely Hoisan-wa phonology and lexicon in their narratives. Focusing on these 14 children, this article attempts to answer the following questions: Due to low prestige factors and lack of support for the maintenance of Hoisan-wa, have these speakers assimilated to the standard Cantonese-speaking community? Are there any signs that Hoisan-wa language backgrounds are still reflected in elementary school students attending schools with a relatively high Cantonese-speaking enrollment? If yes, what are these signs? Because nearly nothing is known about Hoisan-wa maintenance in the United States, the author documents markedly Hoisan-wa lexicon and phonology, and offers evidence of intergenerational lang...

This paper investigates the ways languages are used in Philadelphia Chinatown through qualitative content analysis of 330 photos. Examining the linguistic landscape of public spaces exposes issues of linguistic tensions, language vitality, and language shift in multilingual settings. While Chinese in the form of Mandarin is highly publicized, thereby placing disproportionate emphasis upon one language over others, Philadelphia Chinatown shows diversity, coexistence, and creative uses of multiple Chinese languages alongside English. The signage suggests linguistic rescaling connecting real and imagined audiences, conforming to broader ‘Chinese’ linguistic norms while localized to connect to a range of Chineses. We show how linguistic and cultural pluralism of ‘Chinese’ have always existed – and continue to exist – and the importance of developing socially sensitive literacy pedagogy, especially when there is a mismatch between the informal, community-level signage and what is formally taught in ‘Chinese’ language classrooms in the U.S. Keywords: linguistic landscape; Chinatown; Chinese languages; literacy education; heritage language; education

The term “Chinese” can refer to an ethnicity, a group of people, or language(s). This conflation makes disentanglement especially difficult, yet not disambiguating perpetuates an oversimplification of a nation, languages, peoples, and cultures. While this blanket term collapses plurality into a monolithic entity, the converse seems to hold when looking at Romanized naming practices of Chinese Americans. The alphabetic rendition of Chinese American names draws relatively clear boundaries of country of origin and general time of arrival to the United States. This paper problematizes the term “Chinese” and looks at the Chineses like Cantonese and Hoisan-wa, which have long overlooked histories in the United States and hold critical clues to disambiguating the cultural and linguistic pluralities of what many would lump together as an immutable term. These findings have implications for using this naming phenomenon to raise linguistic awareness and for the teaching of Chinese American history.

Revitalising indigenous languages: How to recreate a lost generation is a remarkable and inspirational book that chronicles the language revitalization efforts, triumphs, and tribulations of the Co...

We come at this review as a graduate student of economics with a focus on Game Theory (Tan) and as an applied linguist specializing in Chinese American language maintenance (Leung). As such, from t...