TRANSFORMING IDENTITIES AND IDEOLOGIES: CREATING TRANSLANGUAGING SPACE WITH OVERSEAS CHINESE STUDENTS IN TAIWAN

Abstract

This study examines the relationships among language, identity, and interaction in multilingual multicultural classrooms through a case study of classroom interactions involving qiaosheng (overseas Chinese students). Qiaosheng education was created in the historical context of nation building in Taiwan. Qiaosheng Chinese ethnicity has been linked to Chinese language and culture. However, like foreign students, most qiaosheng are multilinguals, speaking various L1sand studying Chinese and English as L2s. While classroom interactions with foreign students have received increasing attention among applied linguistics scholars in Taiwan, classroom interactions involving qiaosheng have not. This study adopts an ethnographic and discourse-analytic approach to examine classroom interactions between an English teacher and qiaosheng in a high school for qiaosheng. Analyzing classroom discourse as well as interviews with the teacher from the theoretical lens of language socialization and language ideology, we show that through interacting with qiaosheng over time, the teacher was socialized into recognizing and subsequently addressing qiaosheng linguistic and cultural diversity by adopting a translanguaging pedagogy. We argue that when teachers recognize the taken-for-granted language ideology about qiaosheng and harness their multilingual multicultural repertoire to teach, qiaosheng can attain their maximum potential to learn when they are appreciated for their multilingual multicultural existence.