GRSJ’s Caroline Locher-Lo was recently published in the International Multilingual Research Journal which publishes discussions on bilingualism, multilingualism, dual language, and translanguaging related to linguistics research, language policy, education, and practice.
Locher-lo co-authored the paper with Dr. Guofong Li (CRC in Transnational/Global Perspectives on Language and Literacy Education of Children and Youth, Language & Literacy Eduation, UBC).
Abstract
Asian students are often rendered voiceless and invisible in mainstream schools and society in North America due to prevailing racialized model minority discourses. This qualitative inquiry aims to center 16 recently arrived Chinese transnational youths’ (ages 10–16) experiences of negotiating multiple sociocultural, sociohistorical, and sociolinguistic discourses surrounding Asians in Canadian schools using Asian Critical Theory (AsianCrit) as a theoretical lens.
Thematic analyses of interviews with the youths reveal they were subjected to the intersectional harms of transnational school and home discourses, such as transnational differences in curriculum and instruction, double bind of the Asian model minority and forever foreigner stereotypes, racism, linguicism, social isolation in school, and high academic pressure and expectations from home.
Central to their experiences was the perceived importance of English proficiency, which the youths strategically tried to gain by exiting and avoiding the stigmatized English as a second language programs and losing their first language, Chinese.
The findings illuminate the struggles and compromises experienced by transnational students as they negotiate the multiple constraining discourses in Canadian schools, and that the flexible global citizenship they sought through transnational education may be unattainable in this climate of othering and without genuine multilingualism.
