RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH USING ENGLISH
المؤلف:
Tara Goldstein
المصدر:
Teaching and Learning in a Multilingual School
الجزء والصفحة:
P16-C1
2025-09-23
188
RISKS ASSOCIATED WITH USING ENGLISH
As linguistic capital was associated with achieving social and academic success at school, Cantonese was associated with social and academic benefits. These were benefits that were not associated with the use of English. In fact, the use of English was risky because its use could jeopardize the access to friendship and assistance that was so important to academic and social success in school. Cantonese-speaking students reported that other Cantonese students told them that they were "rude" if they spoke to them in English. When asked why it was rude to speak in English, one student told us that some people thought that you were trying to be "special" if you spoke English or that you liked to "show off your English abilities." In the following interview excerpt, student Victor Yu explains "showing off' this way:
For the Hong Kong people, right? We will, we will rarely use English to speak to each other except for people who are born here or have been here for a long time. If that is not the case, right? We will speak Cantonese because if we like talk English with them, right? They do think you are really, like, showing off your skill in English.
[Victor Yu, Interview, October 9,1996]
To understand the reasons behind the association between the use of English and showing off, it is helpful to refer to the work undertaken by Angel Lin, who talks about English as the language of power and the language of educational and socioeconomic advancement in Hong Kong.1 To illustrate her point, Lin writes that a student who wants to study medicine, architecture, and legal studies in Hong Kong must have adequate English resources (linguistic capital), in addition to subject knowledge and skills, to enter and succeed in English-medium, professional training programs (gain cultural capital). After graduating from these programs, students also need to have adequate English resources to earn the credentials to enter these professions that are accredited by the British-based or British-associated professional bodies (Hong Kong was a British colony until July, 1997). Students' access to linguistic capital that provides them with the mastery of English needed to enter high-income professions in Hong Kong is uneven. Only a small elite group of Cantonese speakers has had the opportunity to obtain such mastery. The elite bilingual class in Hong Kong includes people who are wealthy enough to afford high-quality, private, English-medium secondary and tertiary education and a very small number of high-achieving students get access to such education via their high scores in public examinations. It is the association of English with membership in this elite bilingual class in Hong Kong that helps explain why Cantonese-speaking students at Northside associated speaking English with showing off. Back in the city of Toronto, English is also the language associated with educational and socioeconomic advancement. Students at Northside passed courses and acquired cultural capital by demonstrating what they had learned in English. Students from Hong Kong who were first-generation immigrants to Canada used English with varying levels of proficiency and mastery. This meant they had varying levels of linguistic capital at school. When Cantonese-speaking students used English with other Cantonese students, they demonstrated their proficiency or mastery and could be seen as showing off their linguistic capital and flexing their linguistic power. Students who depended on friends and classmates for assistance with academic activities and a social life at school did not want to risk being considered a show-off.
Bonny Norton, bringing feminist poststructuralist theory into current discussions on language, identity, and the political economy, has written that as well as being related to markets and different forms of capital, language is a place where people construct their sense of selves.2 As mentioned earlier, Cantonese was associated with being part of the Hong Kong community at Northside. In addition to being associated with showing off, English was also associated with being "too Canadianized." Student Max Yeung told us that when a Cantonese speaker used English, it was a sign that most of his or her friends were "Canadians" (people who were born in Canada and were English speakers) and that "they [were] in their own group." Such speakers were considered outsiders to the Hong Kong community at Northside. Although the use of Cantonese was associated with social and academic resources, the use of English was associated with costs, and most students in the Hong Kong community at Northside avoided using English with each other. This strategy, demonstrating ambivalence in students' investment in English, rubbed against the desire for students to only use English at school, it also created several dilemmas for the students.
1 See Lin (2001) for a fuller discussion of English as symbolic domination, a term used by Pierre Bourdieu (1982/1991).
2 See Norton (2000) for a discussion of what poststructualist feminist theory and the theory of subjectivity can contribute to current understandings about second language learning. For a discussion of other critical theories and the contribution they make to the field of second language acquisition see Pennycook (2001).
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