In this presentation, I will report a narrative study of 16 adult CHL learners who attended university Chinese language classes in Hong Kong. Through reporting their experiences learning CHL from early childhood to adulthood, the participants reveal a transformative identity changing from passive to active learners of Chinese.
Research into the identity of heritage language learners has acknowledged the interconnection between HL learner identity and their motivation to learn HL (Berardi-Wiltshire, 2012; Lee & Kim, 2008; Seals, 2018). Research has also revealed that the learning needs of HL learners are not fixed but change over time through various social interactions with others (He, 2006; 2010). Thus, the identity of HL learners also evolves over time. For instance, many HL learners rejected learning their HLs during their childhood but turned out to be highly agentive learners at university. This transformational process involves identity reconstruction in CHL learners from passive to active learners.
In this presentation, I will show how identity is discursively constructed in discourse about Chinese learning experiences across different spaces and time periods. Bamberg's (1997) positioning framework is used as an analytical lens for studying the participants' positioning as CHL learners in their narratives from both micro and macro perspectives. Bamberg's framework allows the data analysis not only to focus on the interactive perspective of identity construction in the narratives but also to provide a wider perspective of how the larger social processes mediated the participants' investment in learning Chinese. The interaction between the different narrators and the other characters in their stories has shown that agency is a dynamic construct of identity construction and is subject to change. From the narratives of changing attitudes toward learning Chinese during late adolescence or early adulthood, it can be seen that the participants' positioning on themselves as CHL learners changed across time. Their changing self-positioning from passive language learners to active language learners emerged through the interactions with the other characters in the narratives.
This presentation evaluates the narrators' self-positioning about changing learning experiences from being passive learners to truly active learners of Chinese. For the participants in this study, reconstructing their identities as CHL learners was related to the transformation from passive, unmotivated learners to active, motivated learners. This identity reconstruction is a vital experience in their narratives, and mostly occurred in their late juvenile and young adult years. It has not been uncommon to see investment change in HL learners who changed from unmotivated learners who had no enthusiasm to learn their HLs to highly motivated learners who strongly care about learning their HLs. The participants' narratives about their investment change in the course of their HL learning experiences provide a great deal of information on the dynamicity and changeability of their identity construction. The narratives presented are grouped into three major categories: peer influence, pop culture and career benefits, which are also the three leading factors that contribute to the narrators' investment change associated with the narrators' experience before investment change occurred to them.
