Transnational Research in English Language Teaching: Critical Practices and Identities 9781788927482

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Transnational Research in English Language Teaching

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Founding Editor: Viv Edwards, University of Reading, UK Series Editors: Phan Le Ha, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA and Joel Windle, Monash University, Australia. Two decades of research and development in language and literacy education have yielded a broad, multidisciplinary focus. Yet education systems face constant economic and technological change, with attendant issues of identity and power, community and culture. What are the implications for language education of new ‘semiotic economies’ and communications technologies? Of complex blendings of cultural and linguistic diversity in communities and institutions? Of new cultural, regional and national identities and practices? The New Perspectives on Language and Education series will feature critical and interpretive, disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives on teaching and learning, language and literacy in new times. New proposals, particularly for edited volumes, are expected to acknowledge and include perspectives from the Global South. Contributions from scholars from the Global South will be particularly sought out and welcomed, as well as those from marginalized communities within the Global North. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK.

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 107

Transnational Research in English Language Teaching Critical Practices and Identities Edited by

Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Jackson

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/JAIN7475 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Names: Jain, Rashi, editor. | Yazan, Bedrettin, editor. | Canagarajah, A. Suresh, editor. Title: Transnational Research in English Language Teaching: Critical Practices and Identities/Edited by Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah. Description: Bristol; Jackson: Multilingual Matters, [2022] | Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education: 107 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The edited volume contributes to the comprehensive and inclusive understanding of the global ELT landscape in instructional settings within and across countries. It brings together language teachers, educators and researchers who use their experiences of shuttling across borders to reflect on the shaping of their pedagogical and research practices”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022010005 (print) | LCCN 2022010006 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788927468 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788927475 (hardback) | ISBN 9781788927482 (pdf) | ISBN 9781788927499 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: English language—Study and teaching (Higher)—Foreign speakers. | Transnationalism. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PE1128.A2 T736 2022 (print) | LCC PE1128.A2 (ebook) | DDC 428.0071/1—dc23/eng/20220518 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010005 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010006 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-747-5 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78892-746-8 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31–34 High Street, Bristol, BS1 2AW, UK. USA: Ingram, Jackson, TN, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2022 Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan, Suresh Canagarajah and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by the CPI Books Group Ltd.

Contents

Contributors 1

vii

A Critical Exploration of the Complex Research Landscape of Transnational Practices and Identities in Global ELT Settings Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah

1

Part 1: Transnational Practices and Identities of ELLs in the US 2

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Understanding Transnational Childhoods through Young Immigrant Children’s Photographs Jungmin Kwon

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‘I’m not belonged’: Examining Transnational Undergraduate Students’ Sense of Belonging as English Learners Semi Yeom

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4

Dubious Battle in ‘Otherness’: Pride or Shame Hatice Altun

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Transnational Socialization of a Graduate Student from Turkey: Negotiating Identities, Asserting Agency and Navigating Emotions 62 Ufuk Keles and Bedrettin Yazan Part 2: Transnational Practitioners and Participants in Global Contexts Beyond the US

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‘Started working as a global volunteer …’: Developing Professional Transnational Habitus through Erasmus+ Ozgehan Ustuk and Peter I. De Costa

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Intercultural Experience and Transnational Culture Education: A Case Study of One Novice Teacher’s Personal and Professional Development 106 Tabitha Kidwell

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National Perspectives on Mexican Transnational EAL Teachers: Ideological and Professional Challenges David Martínez-Prieto and Kristen Lindahl v

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125

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Syrian Immigrants as Transnational TESOL Practitioners in Turkey Emrah Cinkara

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Part 3: Transnational Practices and Identities of TESOL Practitioners in the US 10 A Korean-American Teacher’s Journey of Professionalization: A TESOL Teacher Educator’s Identity Formation across Transnational Contexts Kyung Min Kim

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11 Two Transnational and Translingual TESOL Practitioners in the United States: Their Capital and Agency Pei-Chia (Wanda) Liao

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12 Teaching as Transnational Spaces: Exploring the Teacher Identity Construction of International Graduate Teaching Associates of Second-Year Writing Courses Min-Seok Choi, Tamara Mae Roose and Christopher E. Manion

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13 Becoming Critical Transnational English Teachers: A Narrative Inquiry of Fulbright Pre-service English Language Teachers Willa Swift Black, Danning Liang and Gloria Park

223

Afterword

239

Index

245

Contributors

Hatice Altun is a lecturer in the School of Foreign Languages, Pamukkale University, Turkey. Her major research interests lie in the areas of bi/ multilingualism, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, study-abroad and higher education research. Willa Swift Black is a PhD candidate in the Composition and Applied Linguistics program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has worked as a language tutor and teacher at multiple levels and contexts that range from kindergarten to undergraduate courses and has developed pedagogical materials and curriculum for a private kindergarten and elementary language school. She currently works in the Graduate Research office at IUP. Her research interests include video game pedagogy, language acquisition, learning transfer, teacher identity, and narrative inquiry. Suresh Canagarajah is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Applied Linguistics, and Asian Studies, and Director of the Migration Studies Project at Pennsylvania State University. He teaches World Englishes, Second Language Writing, and Postcolonial Studies in the departments of English and Applied Linguistics. His recent edited publication, The Routledge Handbook of Language and Migration (2019), won the 2020 AAAL best book award. Min-Seok Choi is a doctoral candidate in Teaching and Learning at The Ohio State University. His research interests include multilingual students’ learning and use of disciplinary literacy practices, identity construction and communicative repertoires in and out of school contexts. Min-Seok’s current research examines the roles of imagination in international students’ second and academic language socialization in an architectural design studio. Emrah Cinkara is an Associate Professor at Gaziantep University, Department of English Language Teaching. He received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate degrees in English Language Teaching and currently teaches Language Teaching Methodology, Assessment and vii

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Evaluation, and Teacher Education courses. He is also the Director of the School of Foreign Languages in the same institution. His research interests include but are not limited to the sociocultural and psychological aspects of language learning, assessment of language skills, and language teacher education. Peter I. De Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages and Cultures and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University, where he directs the master’s in TESOL program. His research areas include emotions, identity, ideology and ethics in applied linguistics. In addition, his ecologically- and social justice-oriented work looks at the intersection between second language acquisition (SLA) and language policy. He is the co-editor of TESOL Quarterly and the second Vice-President of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Rashi Jain is an associate professor in the Department of English Language for Academic Purposes, Linguistics and Communication Studies at Montgomery College in Rockville, Maryland. Rashi has published her research in practitioner-oriented journals, including the TESOL Journal, contributed to edited volumes and co-edited (with Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah) the recently published Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners and Autoethnographies in ELT Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices. Ufuk Keles received his PHD degree in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Alabama, USA as a Fulbright grantee. Previously, he was an English instructor at Yildiz Technical University, Turkey for 15 years. His research interests include transnational socialization, social justice in ELT, multicultural education, ELT teacher training, language learner and users’ autoethnographies along with qualitative research and ethics in education. He has published his work in international journals and edited books and presented his research in several national and international conferences. Currently, he is working at Bahçeşehir University as a visiting instructor. Tabitha Kidwell is a faculty member in the TESOL program at American University. Her research focuses on language teacher education and the role of culture in language teaching. Her recent work has been published in TESOL Journal, Language and Intercultural Communication and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. She has taught French, Spanish and English to students ranging from pre-schoolers to adults and has conducted professional development for language teachers around the world. Dr Kidwell has served on the Standards Professional

Contributors ix

Council for TESOL International and is a frequent presenter at regional and international TESOL conferences. Kyung Min Kim is an Assistant Teaching Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute in China. Her research focuses on second language writing issues and creative writing pedagogy. Her articles have been published in TESOL Quarterly, Teaching in Higher Education, Language Awareness and the Journal of Creative Writing Studies. Jungmin Kwon is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. Her research areas include language and literacy, immigrant children and families, and transnationalism. To foreground the voices of bilingual children and families, she designs and employs linguistically responsive and child-centered research methods. She is the author of the forthcoming book, Understanding the Transnational Lives and Literacies of Immigrant Children (Teachers College Press). Her publications can be found in International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Bilingual Research Journal, Language Arts and Language and Education, among others. Danning Liang is currently a doctoral candidate in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. As a teacher, she taught fi rst-year composition and basic writing courses. She now works for undergraduate students as a writing center tutor and as a Chinese language tutor. Her research interests include multiliteracies, collaborative writing and narrative inquiry. Danning’s other co-authored articles are about multimodal poetry reading and peace education through translingual poems. Pei-Chia (Wanda) Liao is an Assistant Professor at the Foreign Language Center at Feng Chia University in Taiwan. Pei-Chia holds a PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Washington in Seattle. Her teaching experience includes teaching ESL for adult immigrants and international students in the US and she has been teaching EFL at Taiwanese universities for nearly ten years. Her research interests include sociocultural theory in EFL teaching, EFL/ESL teaching methodology and practices, and identity issues of translingual/transnational Englishspeaking teachers and English language learners. Kristen Lindahl is Associate Professor in the Department of BiculturalBilingual Studies in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She specializes in teacher education for multilingual/multicultural contexts. Dr Lindahl’s research

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interests focus on teacher language awareness, identity approaches to educators’ lives, and language ideologies in educational contexts. Dr Lindahl has served as President of TexTESOL II (2019) and Chair of the Teacher Educator Interest Section for TESOL International Association from 2017-2020. Current representative scholarly articles appear in TESOL Quarterly, The New Educator, TESOL Journal and English Teaching & Learning. Christopher E. Manion is the coordinator of the Writing Across the Curriculum program in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing at the Ohio State University. His research focuses on instructor and curriculum development in writing courses across the disciplines. David Martínez-Prieto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bilingual and Literacy Studies at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research aims to challenge the reproduction of the status quo by examining the intersections of transnationalism, curricular ideologies, and the identities of (pre-service) language teachers. His most recent work can be found at the Journal of Latinos and Education, TESOL Quarterly, among others. Gloria Park is a Professor and Program Director in the Graduate Studies in Composition and Applied Linguistics at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, specializing in language teacher education and applied linguistics. Gloria’s teacher-scholar interests focus on critical pedagogy, teachers’ (auto-ethnographic)/gendered narratives, and arts-based inquiry. Gloria is the author of Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English: Where Privilege Meets Marginalization (Multilingual Matters, 2017). Her publications also appear in TESOL Quarterly, TESOL Journal, ELT Journal, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, Race, Ethnicity and Education and Journal of Pedagogic Development, to name a few. Tamara Mae Roose is an Assistant Professor of English Composition and Rhetoric at Mercy College in the Department of Language and Literature. Her research is centered on the intercultural dimensions of second language reading and writing. She is particularly interested in how students and educators draw upon diverse language and cultural resources as they develop new academic literacy practices. Her work has been published in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, ELT Journal, TESOL Journal and TESL Canada. Ozgehan Ustuk is a research assistant at Balikesir University, Turkey. He has worked as an EFL teacher and a teacher educator since 2009 and has engaged in research since 2012. His research interests include drama in

Contributors xi

language education, language teacher education and professional development, teacher identity and emotions, and action research. He currently serves on the Research Professional Council of the TESOL International Association. Bedrettin Yazan is Associate Professor of TESL Teacher Education/ Applied Linguistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research focuses on language teacher identity, teacher collaboration, language policy and planning, and World Englishes. Methodologically he is interested in critical autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and qualitative case study. Bedrettin has an active research program and has published in Linguistics and Education, Language Teaching Research, TESOL Journal, World Englishes and Critical Inquiry in Language Studies. Semi Yeom is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include fair assessments for diverse students and English learners’ sense of belonging. She has worked with schools in Washington, DC and Maryland using quantitative and qualitative research methods. She is currently teaching Korean language at the Defense Language Institute.

1 A Critical Exploration of the Complex Research Landscape of Transnational Practices and Identities in Global ELT Settings Rashi Jain, Bedrettin Yazan and Suresh Canagarajah

What practices do the inhabitants of a global English language teaching (ELT) landscape engage in, and what identities do they form within and across the diverse communities spread throughout that transnational landscape? The practices and identities of members who inhabit the diverse communities that comprise the global TESOL landscape seem to be certainly evolving in response to 21st-century shifts. As WengerTraynor and Wenger-Traynor (2015: 15) postulate, ‘Landscapes of practice are coming into focus as globalization, travel, and new technologies expand our horizons and open up potential connections to various locations in the landscape’. However, in West-based and West-oriented academia, a significant amount of past and recent work on transnationalism in ELT has focused primarily on specific communities of practice located within a country, such as the US (e.g. Canagarajah, 2020; Robinson et al., 2020) or has been (de)limited to teacher education programs (e.g. Ahmed & Barnawi, 2021; Barnawi & Ahmed, 2020), with some notable exceptions (e.g. Canagarajah, 2013; You, 2018). More needs to be done, therefore, to create a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of the complex global ELT landscape across countries and across English language teaching and learning settings (see also Jain et al., 2021). Our edited volume thus contributes to the evolving knowledge base as an attempt to deepen our understanding of the transnational ELT landscape. We, the three co-editors, identify ourselves as transnational TESOL pracademics (Jain, 2020; Jain et al., 2021; Yazan et al., 2021): two of us originally hail from South Asia and one from a country that bridges Asia and Europe, and all three of us maintain enduring connections with our 1

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respective countries of origin, while our professional practices are currently primarily embedded in the West (see also Jain et al., 2021). As such, we recognize ourselves as members of a transnational community of scholars and practitioners endeavoring to answer questions relating to diverse practices and identities across the ever-evolving global ELT landscape. Our collaborative work, including this volume, is an extension of that endeavor. Putting the book together helped us develop community with other transnational professionals, learn from each other, develop shared research and pedagogical approaches, and generate a cosmopolitan understanding. While the companion volumes to this book (see Jain et al., 2021; Yazan et al., 2021) feature transnational TESOL practitioners telling their own stories through such research methods as self-study, autoethnography and narrative self-inquiry, this volume complements that work with its focus on, what is often perceived as, more ‘traditional’ research, with researchers inquiring into the identities and practices of their participants using a range of qualitative approaches, methods and methodologies (discussed in more detail later in this chapter). However, although the main focus of each chapter in this volume is on ‘reporting’ research, many of the researchers have added further depth to the content by engaging in reflexive writing and explaining their own positionalities (also explored in more detail later in this chapter). Reflexivity is indeed key to the kind of critical scholarship that moves a field forward. Oftentimes, the editorial processes in compiling scholarly works remain invisible, but just as research becomes more ethical and research reports are rendered more authentic when researchers are reflexive about their positionality and make themselves visible in their writing (Drake & Heath, 2011; Sultana, 2007), editors also need to demystify the editorial process by making themselves and their positionality more visible in their work through reflexivity – as we endeavor to do here. We do so with the belief that this self-reflexivity brings our collaboration into the realm of criticality (Canagarajah, 2006; Pennycook, 2001) for, as Pennycook (2001: 1) writes, ‘critical work should always be self-reflexive’. As part of our common goal to engage in authentic and critical work, we thus share here some of the decision-making we engaged in and the inherent tensions we encountered as collaborators. As editors, we strove to ensure that the entire process of inviting and selecting chapter proposals for the project was a democratic and an equitable one: we sent out an initial call for chapter proposals via a website we created for this purpose (with an online form for proposal submissions), which we then shared and distributed on multiple social media platforms and academic listservs, albeit in English with the unspoken understanding that the submissions would also need to be primarily in English despite our own focus on transnationalism and translingualism – an ongoing and an unresolved tension that we fully acknowledge. We endeavored, however, to ‘decenter’ (Kumaravadivelu, 2006) and ‘decolonize’ (Motha,

A Critical Exploration of the Complex Research Landscape of Transnational Practices

3

2020) our project by welcoming (and inviting through direct communication) contributions from scholars and practitioners around the world in our initial call for proposals. Next, in reviewing the proposal submissions, we did not make decisions based primarily on how ‘well-established’ the contributors’ scholarship already was in our field; all of the 50-plus proposals that were submitted were thus given equal consideration, and each proposal was evaluated solely on the basis of the quality of the content and in terms of whether it fit into the overall scope and vision of the project. Many of the submitted proposals were strong in terms of the content and fit well into the broad transnational scope of our proposed work. However, as we began to organize the proposals thematically, two distinct categories emerged: (1) rich empirical inquiries where the researchers turned the ‘research lens’ on to themselves and (2) equally rich research studies where the researchers trained their ‘research lens’ on to others in their communities of practice (and it is this second category of research studies that we brought together to create this volume that you are reading right now). Within the first category, researchers employed a diverse range of methodologies and approaches, with many falling within the scope of autoethnography. Given the substantive nature of all these proposals and our own editorial goals of ‘equity, inclusion and diversity’, we decided to create three volumes instead of the initially-planned single book. We also took this decision as a further effort to deliberately decenter and decolonize the field by ensuring that we included non-US-centric studies from scholars embedded across a wide range of ELT contexts (though it meant tripling the amount of work entailed and required a greater time commitment than we had initially planned for). To make this increased workload manageable, Bedrettin agreed to take the lead on one of the edited volumes with a specific focus on autoethnography (Yazan et al., 2021), and Rashi took charge of the other two (Jain et al., 2021), with Suresh as the paradigmatic insider (Jain et  al., 2021; Wenger, 1998) providing sage counsel and mentoring throughout the multi-year and multi-project collaboration via in-person meetings and e-communication. To coordinate the different tasks involved, we used Google Drive extensively, sharing all the files in a common folder and keeping each other regularly updated, via emails and (video and text) chats, about the progress that was being made in compiling the three books. Once we fi nalized the shortlisted proposals for each of the three edited volumes, including this one, we invited the contributors to send in the complete manuscripts. For this volume, we shared the key task of reviewing the chapter manuscripts equitably, providing extensive comments for each submission, and striving to fi nd a good balance between preserving the diverse and unique authorial voices, helping contributors reflect academic rigor in their research reports as needed, and ensuring that the language and content throughout the volume remained accessible to a wide spectrum of readers. This resulted in multiple drafts as the contributors patiently accommodated our

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suggestions (and many wrote to us specially to thank us for the detailed feedback and commented on how it helped improve their work). And then 2020 happened, with a significant spillover into 2021. A pandemic swept through the world, upending lives in its wake. As practitioners working across a variety of higher education settings, many of us (the editors and the contributors) had to make the sudden switch to remote teaching, while ensuring that we continued to provide additional support to our students as we collectively navigated uncharted waters. This coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in modern US politics (paralleling the political unrest and transitions experienced in other parts of the world that the contributors of this volume have transnational connections with, including where they originally hail from or are currently located), which had direct and indirect impacts on our personal and professional lives, given that many of us who currently work in US-specific contexts identify ourselves as immigrants and/or persons of color (POC) – identities that, ironically, may hold more salience in the country of reception than the country of origin, for instance, when we are minoritized on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and/or language in our Western contexts of practice (as the experiences of some of the participants in the following chapters within this volume also illustrate). Despite these myriad challenges that we (the editors and the contributing authors) faced, we persevered and continued to make progress with our collaborative work, often working on weekends and through holidays during the pandemic months; and, as co-editors, we are now proud to showcase the scholarship of a diverse group of authors on different academic trajectories and at different points in their professional careers within global ELT – higher education faculty, students pursuing their masters or doctorates, as well as educational administrators engaging in transnational work. Collectively the editors, the researchers and the participants in this volume represent 15 countries of origin: Afghanistan, China, Costa Rica, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey, the UAE, the US and Vietnam. While many of us are currently embedded in the US, the studies in this volume showcase transnational identities and practices (Levitt, 2001, 2004) formed and informed by both countries – ‘home’ and ‘host’ – and include narratives that are not unidirectional (i.e. ‘home’ to ‘host’ only). However, even with this diversity and our deliberate efforts to decenter our work as a site for transnational professional practice, this volume could not entirely escape inadvertently reifying some of the same inequities that it proposes to disrupt. The 12 contributions in this volume, besides this introductory chapter, are categorized into three equal parts (with four chapters each). The first and the third parts – ‘Transnational Practices and Identities of ELLs in the US’ and ‘Transnational Practices and Identities of TESOL Practitioners in the US’ – span research studies that examine participants’ identities and

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practices resulting from their movements across the US and other countries; the second part – ‘Transnational Practitioners and Participants in Global Contexts Beyond the US’ – encompasses research grounded in ‘other’ (i.e. besides the US) global settings. The decision to create three primarily geographically-defined sections within a broader transnational focus, instead of more traditional thematic or linear categorizations seen in many edited volumes (though we discuss some common themes that arose from a cross-chapter analysis later), was a deliberate one. When we sent out the call for contributions on global platforms, our hope was that we would receive proposals from ELT practitioners and academics around the world, especially given the transnational focus of the proposed volume along with the careful wording of the call for proposals to ensure inclusivity and diversity. While we were not disappointed (and we deeply appreciate the hard work that all contributors put into co-creating this volume with us), the number of proposals that fit into the scope of this book from those currently embedded professionally within the US was significantly higher than those who were working in other countries (and, as a result, this imbalance is reflected in this volume as well). However, as part of our critical self-reflexivity, instead of trying to obfuscate the imbalance, we have chosen to present it front and center (literally) in the organization of the chapters of this book, while simultaneously endeavoring to provide a level space to showcase the chapters that focused on other global contexts along with those that were more US-centric. In organizing the three parts, we further and deliberately ‘decenter’ the content by placing the chapters that span ‘other’ global contexts in the middle flanked by the two other parts. Symbolic as this ‘decentering’ of the ‘center’ may be, we hope that this atypical organization provides a visual (and textual) disruption of the ‘normed’. And we do so while being fully cognizant of the problematic nature of identifying all non-US-centric contributions in this volume collectively as ‘other’ global contexts. These are, indeed, ongoing tensions in our writing and theorizing that we – as colleagues who are both practitioners and researchers – acknowledge and continue to grapple with, in an ongoing effort to fi nd a more equitable and a more inclusive resolution. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we provide an overview of the three sections of the book, looking at each of the four chapters within, one by one. At the end of the volume, when you have had the opportunity to peruse the chapters comprising each of the three parts, we discuss in the afterword some common themes that emerged across the three parts and the entire volume as a whole. Part 1: Transnational Practices and Identities of ELLs in the US

Part 1 comprises four chapters, each examining participants’ identity construction as English language learners across a broad spectrum of ages

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as well as teaching and learning contexts spanning the US and other countries. In Chapter 2, Kwon examines the transnational childhoods of second-generation immigrants, as exemplified by three cases (embedded within a larger research study), and envisions her young participants as ‘active social agents’ in maintaining connections across countries, cultures and languages: ‘Minsu’ and ‘Taehoon’ live transnational and translingual lives across the US and South Korea, while ‘Yena’ (whose parents were originally Korean ethnic minorities in China) blends Chinese, Korean and US cultural and linguistic influences into her everyday lived experiences. Kwon specifically looks at the participants’ transnational lives as captured through their digital photography along with the narratives the children created (recorded via photo-elicitation interviews) around those selfselected photographs. As the research fi ndings indicate, the participants constructed links between the two worlds they occupy through comparisons and contrasts in terms of freedom and choices available to them in both settings, connected with family members across ‘multi-local’ spaces through a ‘transborder family network’, and expressed transnational longing in and through the photographs. Kwon’s research study thus has important implications for those engaged in teaching and studying multilingual and transnational children and ends with some helpful pedagogical suggestions for implementation in K-12 settings. In Chapter 3, the focus shifts to a higher education setting in the US as Yeom also employs a multiple case-study design to examine how four transnational students from different countries of origin and pursuing undergraduate studies at the same American university, shape a sense of belonging (SB) despite the challenges they face as racioethnically and linguistically minoritized participants in their ‘new’ context. Yeom initially interviewed the four research participants – identified as ‘English learners’ by virtue of speaking English as a second language (despite varying degrees of exposure to the language through both schooling and media in their countries of origin prior to their move to the US), then observed them as they engaged in community activities, and conducted a fi nal postobservation interview. The researcher’s in-depth analysis of the data revealed that the participant’s SB was shaped by how they were received in their host communities: when their existing ways of speaking English (in terms of both idioms and ‘accent’) were perceived as ‘different’ and ‘incorrect’ by the majority (White) American English speakers on campus, the participants experienced a low SB, and when the participants agentively sought on- and off-campus communities where members shared common experiences (that may or may not have included the same home languages and cultures), their SB increased. Yeom ends her chapter with some useful suggestions that university faculty and administrators can implement – including building host members’ translingual competence – to ensure that their international/transnational students may participate successfully in campus communities.

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While the participants in Yeom’s study endeavored to retain their connection to their original identities while creating a sense of belonging in their present contexts, Chapter 4 presents a study in contrasts, to some extent. Altun engages in an examination of how two international exchange students from Turkey enrolled in undergraduate engineering majors at a US university to pursue ‘unbelonging’ in an effort to create an identity separate from their ethnic identities and parallel this with efforts to claim ownership of English. From her analysis of the participants’ ‘translocal narratives’, built via ethnographic interviews, field observations and participant journaling, the researcher found that the two young men were creating transnational identities, but these identities were fragmented and problematic in their shifting stances in regards to associating with Turkish identity or American culture – thus possibly occupying an in-between third space that appeared to transcend nationalities. The two participants also contrast their use of Turkish and English, and see the latter as a pragmatic tool for creating a new agentive voice for themselves in ways that Turkish does not allow. At the same time they struggle with being accepted as credible English users in their host communities – a struggle that coincides with their own subscription to the native speaker fallacy, thus indicating the coexistence of successful resolution of some tensions with those problematic ones that remain unresolved. In Chapter 5, Keles and Yazan focus on another international student, also from Turkey and pursuing engineering studies (at the graduate level) in the US. However, the researchers examine their participant’s transnational L2 socialization, with its inherent challenges and emotional costs, as an ELL in his country of origin as well as his country of reception, mapping the participant’s transition from educational settings in Turkey to those in the US. Using narrative inquiry, Keles and Yazan explore the liminal transnational space that their participant occupies, with greater resolution, through agentive and transformative decision-making, than the participants in Altun’s study (in Chapter 4). As the researchers emphasize, successful co-creation of transnational spaces requires both ‘newcomers’ and ‘old-timers’ to engage in physical and ideological border-crossing. The researchers end their chapter with implications and suggestions for those engaged in working with transnational language learners as educators and researchers. Part 2: Transnational Practitioners and Participants in Global Contexts Beyond the US

Part 2 is composed of four chapters by contributors who specifically focus on research settings and participants in ‘other’ global settings. In Chapter 6, Ustuk and De Costa examine the development of the transnational identity, specifically a ‘transnational habitus’, of an emerging TESOL practitioner beyond national borders. The researchers examine the role that Erasmus+, a program that facilitates EU citizenship through

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lifelong learning projects offered to members of the EU as well as such countries as Turkey, played in the emergence of the participant’s transnational TESOL practitioner identity. As the study illustrates, the research participant ‘Kemal’, a citizen of Turkey who, through Erasmus+, engaged in professional development in three EU nations – Hungary, Lithuania and Ukraine – was able to access ‘practical, professional and disseminative profits’ that provided the space for him to both enact a transnational identity and develop a transnational habitus in and beyond his country of origin. The researchers list some relevant implications of their case study research for teacher-candidates, teacher educators and mentors, researchers and program administrators engaged in transnational settings. Kidwell, in Chapter 7, also examines, through case study research, the transnational experiences of an ELT practitioner, focusing specifically on the development of critical orientations along with intercultural competence (ICC) of her research participant ‘Nita’, both internationally (across Indonesia and India) and intranationally (within Indonesia). The researcher investigated – through one-on-one interviews, the participant’s journaling and classroom observations – the impact of the emerging critical orientation on the participant’s classroom practices, in terms of emphasizing the need for cross-cultural knowledge and understanding over the promotion of one specific culture (and language variety) as desirable in the acquisition of English. As the researcher found out, the participant’s intranational and international experiences contributed to the deepening of her ICC, which in turn facilitated – with varying degrees of success – the participant’s teaching about culture as a complex phenomenon to her students. Kidwell ends her chapter with some relevant implications for teaching and teacher education practices that acknowledge and build participants’ intercultural competence through transnational experiences and their ability to teach (about) culture critically. In Chapter 8, Martínez-Prieto and Lindahl shed light on the layered impacts of return migration of transnational English teachers and learners to Mexico by drawing upon Foucault’s ideas around disciplinary power to examine the perspectives of five Mexican-born, educated and trained language teachers (‘Mexican national English language teachers’ or MNELTs) in terms of their fluid identities relative to Mexican transnational teachers along with the language policies aimed at the reincorporation of the ‘returning’ teachers into ELT contexts in Mexican public schools. Using data from multiple interviews, conducted in Spanish, the researchers deduced that the MNELTs in their study both conformed to and contested nativist and colonial perspectives on language learning and teaching, both in terms of their own identities and in their perceptions of their transnational colleagues as well as the (re)incorporation policies for transnationals implemented by Mexican institutions. In Chapter 9, Cinkara focuses on the identity construction of six Syrian refugees as transnational EFL practitioners and researchers in their

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host context (in Turkey). The research participants, enrolled in a MAEFL program where they were exposed to both pedagogical and research practices designed for EFL contexts, perceived themselves as performing key roles as both teachers and researchers, in terms of facilitating integration of other members from their refugee community into the host community and supporting development schemes in their home country. Cinkara’s analysis also revealed how the participants’ engagement with teaching and research had a bilateral component with one informing the other and vice versa, and both playing an important part in how they contributed to their home and host communities. In shedding light on the complex and multilayered ‘refugee’ experience in a transnational context (Syria-Turkey, in this case), Cinkara’s chapter contributes significantly to the rich diversity of voices encountered in the second part of this volume. Part 3: Transnational Practices and Identities of TESOL Practitioners in the US

In Part 3, we meet a fi nal diverse group of transnational scholars and practitioners engaged in different US academic and professional ELT contexts, through four separate research studies, in which the researchers – themselves also embedded in global TESOL contexts – employ a range of qualitative research approaches and theoretical frameworks to examine the transnational identity construction of their participants. In Chapter 10, Kim focuses on Sae-Young (pseudonym) and the emergence of her fluid and shifting transnational-translingual identities across complex raciolinguistic settings; as the research study demonstrates, Sae-Young has experienced both privilege and marginalization in how her bilingual and bicultural backgrounds were perceived as ‘capital’ to varying degrees as she transitioned through different professional roles across South Korea and the US. Kim also reflects on her own role as the ‘facilitator researcher’ operating across a transnational and translingual landscape as she facilitated Sae-Young’s reconstructive autobiographical writing – tracing her personal-professional journeys from South Korea to the US as a child, from the US to South Korea as an emerging ELT professional in her late twenties, and then back again to the US a few years later to pursue advanced studies that led to her establishing herself fi rmly as a TESOL scholar-practitioner (through the medium of Korean sijo poetry) and emphasizes the translingual nature of the composition processes that was reflected in the fi nal products as well. Chapter 11 showcases Liao’s research with two US-based transnationaltranslingual practitioners of TESOL (‘Jia’ and ‘Steven’), who, like SaeYoung, also transitioned across national settings, albeit as adults; Jia completed her K-16 education and taught EFL for several years in South Korea and then migrated to the US to fi rst pursue a master’s and then a doctorate in education, while Steven emigrated from Hungary with his

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family and pursued an MA TESOL degree and transitioned to teaching fulltime in an English language center affiliated with his university. Like Kim (Chapter 10), Liao also focuses on her participants’ linguistic and cultural capital while expanding the scope of her research to specifically examine her two participants’ strategic enactment of their agency to overcome barriers they faced in the US professional contexts due to their ‘nonnativeness’, by turning the perceived ‘deficits’ into empowering identities that directly inform their classroom practice. Both of Liao’s participants noted separately ‘non-native’ professors (from China and Japan, respectively) in their TESOL programs who served as transnational-translingual role models for them, and now, in turn, the two participants serve as role models for their own students. In Chapter 12, researchers Choi, Roose and Manion continue the examination of agency in identity construction, but this time the scope is more interdisciplinary – the three participants in this study are international graduate assistants, all doctoral students at the time of the study, teaching second-year writing courses in two different disciplines, education and economics. Yasemin, originally from Turkey, has a background in English language and literature and curriculum and instruction; Jiayi, originally from China, pursued undergraduate studies in computer science in her home country, followed by a master’s in economics in the US; and Pari, originally from India, had completed her bachelor’s and master’s in economics in her home country before transitioning into the doctoral program in the US. The researchers explored how the three agentive participants constructed their transnational identities to engage in effective classroom-based practices to connect students’ growth as writers with their learning of the disciplinary content. Chapter 13, the final contribution to Part 3 and the volume, showcases Swift Black, Liang and Park’s collaborative narrative inquiry into the lived ‘teachers-as-students’ experiences of four Fulbrighters and ELT practitioners – two from Indonesia, one from Russia, and one from Afghanistan (with a substantial part of his formative years spent in Iran) – pursuing MA TESOL programs in the US as part of their Fulbright grants at the time of the study. The researchers examined the participants’ construction of their transnational teacher identities through their initial struggles with adapting to US academia as well as reflections on how to adapt the US-centered TESOL coursework to their own contexts of practices that they were planning to return to after the completion of the grant period – thus highlighting some of the generative tensions that international participants experience as they engage in and with transnational professional spaces. We now invite you, the reader, to proceed to the three parts of this volume and peruse the chapters contained within each part. At the end of the volume, we present a conclusion and identify some key themes that emerged across the three parts and the 12 chapters. We discuss those themes and conclude with some fi nal parting thoughts.

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References Ahmed, A. and Barnawi, O.Z. (eds) (2021) Mobility of Knowledge, Practice and Pedagogy in TESOL Teacher Education: Implications for Transnational Contexts. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Barnawi, O.Z. and Ahmed, A. (2020) TESOL Teacher Education in a Transnational World: Turning Challenges into Innovative Prospects. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2006) TESOL at forty: What are the issues? TESOL Quarterly 40 (1), 9–34. Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2013) Literacy as Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2020) Transnational Literacy Autobiographies as Translingual Writing. New York: Routledge. Drake, P. and Heath, L. (2011) Practitioner Research at Doctoral Level: Developing Coherent Research Methodologies. New York: Routledge. Jain, R. (2020) (Re)imagining myself as a pracademic, a translingual, and a transnational: A critical autoethnographic account. In B. Yazan, S. Canagarajah and R. Jain (eds) Autoethnographies in ELT: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices. New York: Routledge. Jain, R., Yazan, B. and Canagarajah, S. (eds) (2021) Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2006) Dangerous liaison: Globalization, empire and TESOL. In (Re-)locating TESOL in an Age of Empire (pp. 1–26). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Levitt, P. (2001) The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levitt, P. (2004) Transnational migrants: When ‘home’ means more than one country. Migration Information Source. See https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/ transnational-migrants-when-home-means-more-one-country. Motha, S. (2020) Is an antiracist and decolonizing applied linguistics possible? Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 40, 128–133. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge. Robinson, H., Hall, J. and Navarro, N. (2020) Translingual Identities and Transnational Realities in the US College Classroom. New York: Routledge. Sultana, F. (2007) Reflexivity, positionality and participatory ethics: Negotiating fieldwork dilemmas in international research. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6 (3), 374–385. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Learning in landscapes of practice: A framework. In E. Wenger-Trayner, M. Fenton-O’Creevy, S. Hutchinson, C. Kubiak and B. Wenger-Trayner (eds) Learning in Landscapes of Practice: Boundaries, Identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice-based Learning (pp. 13–30). New York: Routledge. Yazan, B., Canagarajah, S. and Jain, R. (eds) (2021) Autoethnographies in English Language Teaching: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices. New York: Routledge. You, X. (2018) Transnational Writing Education: Theory, History, and Practice. New York: Routledge.

Part 1 Transnational Practices and Identities of ELLs in the US

2 Understanding Transnational Childhoods through Young Immigrant Children’s Photographs Jungmin Kwon

Classrooms today flourish with languages and cultures that each child brings from his or her home and out-of-school spaces, locally and globally. Their unique knowledge, skills and experiences are important resources for teaching language and literacy. In the current transnational world, where individuals forge connections and linkages across nationstates, many immigrant children are able to sustain their connections with their parental homelands (Basch et al., 1994). Their everyday routines involve transnational and multilingual practices, such as watching ethnic media channels in foreign languages and communicating with their extended families utilizing digital tools and their own multilingual repertoires (Kim, 2018; Kwon, 2017). These children continually develop transnational awareness and bilingual identities, engage in transnational literacies, and acquire cultural flexibility and repertoires (Compton-Lilly et  al., 2019; Kwon et  al., 2019; Lam & Warriner, 2012; Levitt, 2009; Sánchez, 2007). Understanding their experiences which encompass languages, cultures and countries is imperative for anyone who teaches and works closely with linguistically and culturally diverse children (Bajaj & Bartlett, 2017). When it comes to researching these children’s fluid and mobile experiences, child-centered methods such as drawing, mapping and activityoriented interviews are effective ways for researchers to study transnationalism through centralizing children’s eyes and voices. For example, Luttrell (2016) explains that the use of visual images is compelling because it can introduce topics that may otherwise be overlooked or poorly understood, give children agency and power, and offer children opportunities to showcase their knowledge and experiences. Other researchers similarly assert that using photographs in research allow researchers to form a rapport with their participant children, contextualize 15

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their study, humanize the children’s portrayals of their childhoods, and position children as knowers (Einarsdottir, 2005; Ghiso, 2016; Gold, 2004). In other words, photographs help researchers work with children rather than work on them (Luttrell, 2010). This chapter focuses on second-generation Korean immigrant children living transnationally, whose family, language and culture occupy multiple different contexts and countries. As part of a multi-sited ethnographic project on understanding three children’s transnational experiences, I invited the participants to take photographs of their day-to-day practices in the United States and South Korea in order to teach me about their transnational childhoods through their images and stories. In this chapter, I describe what I learned from the three young transnational experts about their transnational experiences and explain how using photographs, which gave the children agency, power and opportunities to share their knowledge, allowed me to learn about transnational childhoods. Transnational Childhoods

Transnationalism refers to the mobility of people, artifacts, languages and cultures across nation states, particularly movement in multiple directions, maintained over time (Jiménez et al., 2009). The concept of transnational childhoods entails the experiences and practices of young immigrant children who are part of transnational communities (Orellana et al., 2001). As Gardner (2012) suggests, some transnational children may live in the US while forging and maintaining connections with other nation-states, while others may move across borders or may be left behind. The experience not only describes the ways in which children move across borders but also highlights the ways children take active roles and construct meanings in/through their mobile lives. For instance, many immigrant children sustain kinship relationships and family life across borders. These children engage in transnational literacy practices: receptive transnational practices, such as viewing written texts, images and television programs created in other parts of the world; and interactive transnational practices, such as communicating with individuals located in other countries (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019; Kwon, 2017). Through these practices, children learn multiple languages and cultures as they engage in transnational literacies and utilize their multilingual repertoires in transnational interactions (Lam & Warriner, 2012). They also expand their understanding of space, time, history and sociopolitical contexts (Kwon, 2021, 2022; Skerrett, 2012). In other words, not only the children’s mobility itself but also their ways of engaging in transnational practices and making contributions to a transnational network are important areas that need further research. Studying transnational childhoods begins with positioning young immigrant children as active agents in their mobile lives and honoring

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what the children already know. Children are active social agents who play key roles in building and extending relationships (Gardner, 2012). It is through children’s views that we can understand how transnational connections are made, sustained or transformed. However, there is a paucity of research on the voices and experiences of young immigrant children in the transnational context of migration (Gardner, 2012), perhaps due to the prevailing assumption that young immigrant children do not play significant roles in transnational movements (Levitt, 2009; Zeitlyn & Mand, 2012). Children’s Photographs

Photography is a meaningful resource through which educators can gain insights into ‘children’s views of their social worlds, lives, and futures’ (Orellana, 1999: 74), especially when researchers seek to centralize children’s experiences and avoid asking adult-centric questions. When photographs are carefully combined with interviews, researchers are able to mine more deeply into the experiences of children than they would through interviews involving only words (Harper, 2002). By giving children the responsibility of a camera and asking them to share their photographs, researchers position children as knowing subjects who can teach others about their lives (Einarsdottir, 2005; Luttrell, 2010). In many cases, researchers invite children to take photographs and ask them to select, discuss and explain their images. This process allows researchers to challenge power relationships and carefully listen to what children have to say about their photographs (Barker & Weller, 2003; Einarsdottir, 2005; Hodge & Jones, 2010; Orellana, 2016; Pink, 2007). The participant children and researchers can also form a strong relationship and a bond of trust (Barker & Weller, 2003). Photographs are particularly beneficial when there are children who prefer different modes of communication, other than oral language. More importantly, immigrant children become eager to share their transnational connections and funds of knowledge when they are encouraged to use, describe and explain their own photographs (Kwon et al., 2019). The Research Process for Understanding Transnational Childhoods

This chapter focuses on photograph-related data from a larger, multisited ethnographic study (Kwon, 2019), in which I documented young immigrant children’s transnational lives across geographic boundaries. For the larger study, I collected qualitative data, including participant observations, fieldnotes, parent interviews and questionnaires, childcentered interview activities, artifacts and documents. One of the childcentered interview activities involved children’s photographs, in which I

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invited participant children to take photographs and to share insights about their images. Below, I describe the three children and the processes of collecting and analyzing data. Participants

The three children I feature in this chapter, Minsu, Yena and Taehoon,1 taught me a great deal about what it means to live transnationally. The three children participated in a multi-sited ethnographic study I conducted in and across multiple spaces in North Carolina, United States, and Seoul, South Korea, for a year. These children were selected because they are second-generation immigrants born in the US, whose parent(s) moved to the US from South Korea. These children were multilingual and transnational, with their everyday lives encompassing multiple languages, cultures and countries. They were exposed to the Korean language in their domestic life: Minsu and Taehoon used Korean and English at home; and Yena, whose parents are Korean ethnic minorities from Yanbian, China, was exposed to Korean, Chinese and English at home. Similar to many other transnational immigrant students, the three children visited their parental homelands on a regular basis and maintained close contacts with family members abroad. All three children visited their parental homelands during the summer of 2018 – Seoul, South Korea, for Minsu and Taehoon; and South Korea and China, for Yena. Data collection and analysis

In January 2018, I handed over a digital camera to each of the participant children. I did not give a structured prompt to the children but invited them to take, choose and talk about the photographs of what matters to them (Luttrell, 2010, 2016). In this way, I sought to hand over responsibility and power to the children, to position them as transnational experts and to encourage them to share their knowledge and experiences. Whenever the children felt ready to share their pictures, I engaged each child in photo-elicitation interviews (Harper, 2002), whereby we engaged in dialogue about the images they selected and wanted to share (Luttrell, 2010). I intentionally planned one of the photo-elicitation interviews three weeks within the time the children returned from their visits to parents’ home countries to learn about what they had experienced during their transnational journeys. In each interview, I presented the developed photographs that the children had taken. I first asked the children to describe and explain each photograph by asking what the photograph was about, why she or he took it, and what the particular photograph meant to them. I also asked them to make decisions and pick out the pictures that were the most meaningful to them and to explain why those images were particularly significant to

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them. Phrases such as ‘What do you mean?’, ‘Could you elaborate on this more?’ and ‘I want to learn from you’ were intentionally used to encourage children to represent their points of view and to be more descriptive about their experiences and knowledge (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Luttrell, 2010). For the larger study, I engaged in data analysis of multiple sources of qualitative data collected in the US and South Korea between October 2017 and October 2018. As this chapter centers on the participant children’s photographs, I discuss here how I analyzed the children’s photographs and what they shared about their transnational experiences during photo-elicitation interviews. After collecting children’s photographs, I fi rst grouped the photographs produced by each child, uploaded them using computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software, and immersed myself in reviewing the photographs. I focused on understanding what was foregrounded in each photograph and what was shown in the background (Orellana, 1999). As I reviewed each image, I assigned codes for people (e.g. relatives, friends, age, gender), setting (e.g. home, school, Korea/US) and objects (e.g. book, toys and clothes). In terms of photoelicitation interview data, I first transcribed the recordings and reviewed them line-by-line as I assigned codes and wrote analytical memos. After determining a coding scheme, the list of codes and defi nitions, I engaged in pattern coding (Miles et al., 2014), where I identified patterns, categorized the data, and engaged in making connections across data. Findings

In this section, I elucidate the three themes identified from analyzing children’s photographs and their narratives: (a) constructing a linkage between ‘here’ and ‘there’; (b) connecting to family members in multilocal spaces; and (c) expressing transnational longing in/through images. Constructing a linkage between ‘here’ and ‘there’

Previous studies have shown that young immigrant children who take part in transnational practices hold meaningful funds of knowledge that encompass two or more languages, cultures and spaces beyond geographical boundaries (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019; Kwon et al., 2019). The three children in this study, as they shared their photographs, presented meaningful knowledge around various settings (e.g. restaurants and schools), people (e.g. grandparents, teachers and cousins) and objects (e.g. books and toys) in multiple contexts (e.g. Korea, US and China). What is unique about these children is the ways in which they made comparisons and connections between what they know about one particular setting/people/ object to another. Taehoon, for example, brought fi fteen images to our fi rst photoelicitation interview. Three of them featured his love of reading: the

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photographs of books, the bookshelf in his room and the local public library he regularly visits. Taehoon explained that it was a weekly routine for his family to visit the library to borrow books (e.g. picture books and chapter books) and spend some time reading and playing on computers. As Taehoon elicited one of his images (Figure 2.1), he drew on his comparative perspective and made connections between what he knows about a library in school and community in the US and South Korea. He narrated, ‘한국 library 가 더 작아요. 미국 library 가 더 커요. Our school library is much bigger. And it has many books.’ [Library in Korea is smaller. Library in the United States is bigger. Our school library is much bigger. And it has many books]. When I asked Taehoon what his school library looks like, he drew me a picture (Figure 2.2), which showed that a large section of his school library was allocated for books written in Chinese. Taehoon then articulated how the library in his elementary school, which offered both Mandarin Chinese immersion track and a regular-track, is bigger in size but limited in the fact it does not accommodate all students from different

Figure 2.1 Taehoon’s photograph showing a public library

Figure 2.2 Taehoon’s portrait of his school library and ‘dream library’

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linguistic backgrounds. He said, ‘It is unfair that so many books in our library are Chinese books. We have students from everywhere. There are not many books in Korean. I have some at home. But some people don’t’. Taehoon was aware he is privileged to have easy access to books written in his home language at home, while acknowledging it is unjust that the library space excludes certain students who do not speak Chinese and English, languages dominantly spoken and used in his school. When I asked Taehoon what the ideal library would look like, he drew a picture of his ‘dream library’, which would have English books, 한국 책 [Korean books], Japanese, Spanish, French, Chinese and others. What Taehoon shared through his pictures, narratives and a drawing highlights his skills in comparing and connecting what he knows about libraries, both locally and globally. More importantly, his insights demonstrate Taehoon’s critical views around what language is included/excluded in his library as well as his appreciation and advocacy of linguistic diversity. When Yena and Minsu introduced their photographs after they had returned from their transnational visits, they shared what they had observed, learned and experienced. Interestingly, both children described how the degrees of freedom and choices granted to them shifted across countries. When Minsu studied his photographs taken in South Korea, he contrasted his experiences in the US and South Korea, particularly in regards to the rules for playing outdoors with/without supervision. He explained, ‘In Korea, I can go to a convenience store on my own and buy gum. In America, 편의점 같은데 혼자 못 가요. [I can’t go to places like a convenience store by myself.]’ Similarly, when Yena presented her photographs, she connected what she had observed of her mother across China, South Korea and the US and explained, ‘In China and Korea, my mom bought us everything, but in America, she is like “No way!”’ The children’s elicitation shows that not only their experiences of different freedoms and choices, but also the decisions that their parents make for them, change as the families move across different communities and countries. More importantly, the observations in this section highlight how photographs, paired up with a ‘need-to-know-more’ stance and other child-centered methods, enable researchers to discover children’s knowledge, experiences and feelings that may otherwise be overlooked or remain undiscovered (Luttrell, 2010, 2016). Connecting to family members in multi-local spaces

A close connection to family members in multi-local spaces was shared among the three children. As Minsu showed a picture of his grandmother living in Washington state, he remarked that he misses his paternal grandmother, who lives in Seoul, South Korea which is ‘very far away from North Carolina’. When Taehoon shared his photograph of relatives with whom he interacted during his visit to South Korea, he pointed at his uncle

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and aunt and explained that they lived in India and were visiting South Korea, just like him. Yena, whose parents are Korean ethnic minorities from China, shared more photographs and stories about her family members living in multi-local spaces. An excerpt of her interview, reflecting this focus, is found below: My aunt, uncle and two of my cousins live in Korea. No, three of my cousins. My mom’s sister lives there and her husband and children. My dad’s brother and his wife plus two kids are in Korea. My dad’s side, grandma and grandpa, live in China. And 삼촌 [uncle] and my mom’s grandma and grandpa. No, my mom’s mom and dad live in Yanbian. Almost everybody. Almost all my relatives live in China.

The above quote highlights how Yena is connected to a transborder family network (Lam & Warriner, 2012) that encompasses multiple spaces, such as Yanbian, China and Seoul, South Korea. Unlike Minsu and Taehoon, who visited only South Korea during the summer, Yena visited both China and South Korea, and brought about 40 photographs from her transnational journey. The photograph that she selected as her ‘favorite one’ (Figure 2.3) showed Yena and her cousins doing a Saebae bow, a practice of formal Korean bowing, to her greatgrandmother. When I first encountered the image of Yena’s family practicing a special Korean ritual, I assumed that the picture had been taken in Seoul, South Korea, which turned out to be incorrect.

Figure 2.3 Yena’s photograph of her family in China

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Yena narrated her photograph, ‘That’s my great grandma. I see her every time I go. All my relatives in China speak Korean. That’s one of my relatives’. She said that the picture was taken of her family living in Yanbian, China, and she gave a detailed description of the picture: ‘It’s a Chinese place, but every single person there speaks Korean and everything is in Korean’. Her photograph and the narrative of the image challenged my own assumption around Korean culture by showing me how Korean language and culture are practiced, celebrated and sustained beyond the geographical boundaries of South Korea. They also demonstrated how the transnational connection to family members in multi-local spaces assisted Yena in constructing transnational identities and understanding the world. Expressing transnational longing in/through images

Baldassar (2008: 250) explains that there are four ways of expressing the emotions of ‘longing for’ or ‘missing’ particular people and places: ‘discursively (through words), physically (through the body), as well as through actions (practice) and imagination (ideas)’. The focal children in this study expressed their transnational longing for cousins, grandparents and friends in Korea and China discursively (through words) and visually (through images). For example, a number of Taehoon’s photographs featured his grandparents, and he expressed his transnational longing, ‘수지 할아버지 더 많이 보고 싶어요. 많이 못 봤으니까’ [I want to meet my grandfather living in Suji more often. I did not see him that much]. Similarly, Yena selected a photograph displaying her cousins and herself holding hands together as the most meaningful picture. She explained that she taught them various playful activities, and that this picture depicted her teaching ‘Down by the river’ to her cousins. As she described the picture, she emphasized that she missed them. Similarly, as Minsu looked through his photographs from his trip to Korea, he was reminded of his people and the places he visited during his stay and said, ‘친구 보고싶어요’ [I miss my friends] ‘아, 할아버지 보고싶다’. [Ah, I miss my grandfather]. Minsu then pointed at the five photographs, showing the city view, which he took from a mountain peak. All pictures seemed very similar at fi rst glance, but they were photographed at slightly different angles with a different zoom setting (Figure 2.4). Minsu explained the images were purposefully taken because it was the area where his cousin, whom he described as a ‘real brother’, lived: ‘You see this park? I went with Haesol. We played some soccer. This is his school. This apartment is where they live’. As he described his photographs, he made me refocus my understanding on his memories and emotions about family in multi-local spaces. It was evident that the five photographs, which could be passed off as simple, blurry images of a city view, represented a clear capture of Minsu’s memory with family in South Korea and thereby reflected his transnational longing.

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Figure 2.4 Two of Minsu’s photographs of the city view

Concluding Thoughts

The photographs, dialogues and multimodal artifacts the children created in this study provide insights about children’s experiences of living in an interconnected, transnational world. They particularly teach us about the connectivity of people, knowledge and culture, and demonstrate how photographs allow researchers to delve more deeply and meaningfully into their experiences and voices. The children’s skills in comparing and connecting what they know about different contexts and nation-states contribute to previous research which emphasizes transnational funds of knowledge possessed by young immigrant children that are often left unnoticed (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019; Sánchez, 2007; Kwon, 2019). The three children also shared their complex connections to family members in multi-local spaces, as well as feelings of longing and belonging regarding their parents’ home countries. These fi ndings challenge the assumption that meaningful connections to their parents’ home countries or cultures are confined to first-generation immigrants (Min, 2017; Zhou, 1997). What is more, the current study shows how using photographs, when combined with the act of careful listening (Yoon & Templeton, 2019), is an effective way to position young children as transnational experts (Einarsdottir, 2005; Luttrell, 2010) and encourage children to discuss and explain their experiences through multiple modes of communication. In Taehoon’s case, his photograph of the library, the space he likes and habitually visits, served as an entry point for him to showcase what he knew about libraries in the school and community in both the US and Korea. When invited to continue sharing his knowledge, he was generous in sharing his views on the school library through drawing and narratives. Not only was Taehoon positioned as a transnational expert, but he also felt eager to put forward his points of view. The findings of this study provide implications for educators who work with multilingual and transnational children by showing the necessity of creating a learning space that honors the transnational experiences and

Transnational Childhoods through Young Immigrant Children’s Photographs 25

knowledge of children shaped by mobility and connectivity. Scholars suggest that this can be done through recognizing children’s transnational funds of knowledge (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019; Kwon, 2021), partnering with transnational immigrant parents, and using materials and resources (e.g. books, digital texts) that explore transnational issues (Compton-Lilly et al., 2019). Inviting immigrant children to bring and share photographs, specifically the images of individuals, places and artifacts of their own or parents’ home countries, is one way that educators can tap into children’s transnational funds of knowledge and transcultural identities (Honeyford, 2014). Teachers may compile the children’s transnational photographs and design a lesson which introduces the language of comparison, sequencing of events and a summary of the experience. Engaging transnational children in multimodal literacy practices, such as creating a digital text (using text, image and sound) about transnational practices by using all their languages, can foster children’s multilingual learning. More importantly, doing so will contribute to the creation of an innovative, child-centered and culturally relevant learning space for transnational immigrant children. Note (1) All participants are identified by pseudonyms.

References Bajaj, M. and Bartlett, L. (2017) Critical transnational curriculum for immigrant and refugee students. Curriculum Inquiry 47 (1), 25–35. Baldassar, L. (2008) Missing kin and longing to be together: Emotions and the construction of co-presence in transnational relationships. Journal of Intercultural Studies 29 (3), 247–266. Barker, J. and Weller, S. (2003) ‘Is it fun?’ Developing children-centered research methods. Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 23 (1-2), 33–58. Basch, L., Glick Schiller, N. and Szanton Blanc, C. (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nationstates. London: Gordon & Breach. Bogdan, R.C. and Biklen, S.K. (2007) Qualitative Research for Education: An Introduction to Theories and Methods (5th edn). Boston, MA: Pearson. Compton-Lilly, C., Kim, J., Quast, E., Tran, S. and Shedrow, S. (2019) The emergence of transnational awareness among children in immigrant families. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 19 (1), 3–33. Einarsdottir, J. (2005) Playschool in pictures: Children’s photographs as a research method. Early Child Development and Care 175 (6), 523–541. Falicov, C.J. (2005) Emotional transnationalism and family identities. Family Process 44 (4), 399–405. Gardner, K. (2012) Transnational migration and the study of children: An introduction. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38 (6), 889–912. Ghiso, M.P. (2016) The laundromat as transnational local: Young children’s literacies of interdependence. Teachers College Record 118, 1–46. Gold, S.J. (2004) Using photography in studies of immigrant communities. American Behavioral Scientist 47 (12), 1551–1572.

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Harper, D. (2002) Talking about pictures, a case for photo elicitation. Visual Studies 17 (1), 13–26. Hodge, R. and Jones, K. (2010) Photography in collaborative research on multilingual literacy practices: Images and understandings of researcher and researched. In M. Martin-Jones and K. Jones (eds) Multilingual Literacies: Reading and Writing Different Worlds (pp. 299–318). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Honeyford, M.A. (2014) From Aquí and Allá: Symbolic convergence in the multimodal literacy practices of adolescent immigrant students. Journal of Literacy Research 46 (2), 194–233. Jiménez, R.T., Smith, P.H. and Teague, B.L. (2009) Transnational and community literacies for teachers. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53 (1), 16–26. Kim, S. (2018) ‘It was kind of a given that we were all multilingual’: Transnational youth identity work in digital translanguaging. Linguistics and Education 43, 39–52. Kwon, J. (2017) Immigrant mothers’ beliefs and transnational strategies for their children’s heritage language maintenance. Language and Education 31 (6), 495–508. Kwon, J. (2019) Moving across linguistic, cultural, and geographic boundaries: A multisited ethnographic case study of immigrant children. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. Kwon, J. (2021) Mobilizing historical knowledge through transcultural play: A multi-sited ethnographic case study of an immigrant child. Early Child Development and Care 191 (4), 624–639. Kwon, J. (2022) Parent-child translanguaging among transnational immigrant families in museums. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 25 (2), 436–451. Kwon, J., Ghiso, M.P. and Martinez Álvarez, P. (2019) Showcasing transnational and bilingual expertise: A case study of a Cantonese-English emergent bilingual within an after-school program centering Latinx experiences. Bilingual Research Journal 42 (2), 164–177. Lam, W.S.E. and Warriner, D.S. (2012) Transnationalism and literacy: Investigating the mobility of people, languages, texts, and practices in contexts of migration. Reading Research Quarterly 47 (2), 191–215. Levitt, P. (2009) Roots and routes: Understanding the lives of the second generation transnationally. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 35 (7), 1225–1242. Luttrell, W. (2010) ‘A camera is a big responsibility’: A lens for analyzing children’s visual voices. Visual Studies 25 (3), 224–237. Luttrell, W. (2016) Children framing childhoods and looking back. In J. Moss and B. Pini (eds) Visual Research Methods in Educational Research (pp. 172–188). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M. and Saldaña, J. (2014) Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook (3rd edn). California: SAGE. Min, P.G. (2017) Transnational cultural events among Korean immigrants in the New York-New Jersey Area. Sociological Perspectives 60 (6), 1136–1159. Orellana, M.F. (1999) Space and place in an urban landscape: Learning from children’s views of their social worlds. Visual Sociology 14 (1), 73–89. Orellana, M.F. (2016) Immigrant Children in Transcultural Spaces: Language, Learning, and Love. New York: Routledge. Orellana, M.F., Thorne, B., Chee, A. and Lam, W.S.E. (2001) Transnational childhoods: The participation of children in processes of family migration. Social Problems 48 (4), 572–591. Pink, S. (2007) Doing Visual Ethnography. California: SAGE. Sánchez, P. (2007) Urban immigrant students: How transnationalism shapes their world learning. The Urban Review 39 (5), 489–517. Skerrett, A. (2012) Languages and literacies in translocation: Experiences and perspectives of a transnational youth. Journal of Literacy Research 44 (4), 364–395.

Transnational Childhoods through Young Immigrant Children’s Photographs 27

Yoon, H. and Templeton, T.N. (2019) The challenges of hearing children out in an adultregulated world. Harvard Educational Review 89 (1), 55–84. Zeitlyn, B. and Mand, K. (2012) Researching transnational childhoods. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38 (6), 987–1006. Zhou, M. (1997) Growing up American: The challenge confronting immigrant children and children of immigrants. Annual Review of Sociology 23, 63–69.

3 ‘I’m not belonged’: Examining Transnational Undergraduate Students’ Sense of Belonging as English Learners Semi Yeom

How transnational undergraduate students perceive and build their sense of belonging as English learners is an emerging and important area of study in need of more investigation, a gap that this chapter hopes to address. A sense of belonging (henceforth, SB), a basic emotional need for human beings, indicates ‘a pervasive drive to form and maintain lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships’ (Baumeister & Leary, 1995: 497). College students gain SB when they feel accepted, respected and valued by a university community (Strayhorn, 2012). Students’ sense of belonging to the university is crucial for their academic success and socioemotional well-being. Although many studies have discussed factors that impact college students’ SB, little research has illustrated how transnational students who study abroad at a university shape SB as racial/ ethnic and linguistic minorities. Transnational students are connected across the communities of different nation-states with diverse linguistic and cultural-historical experiences and practices (Glick Schiller et  al., 1995; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). They form new social fields through dynamic processes of sustaining multiple communities beyond a ‘national’ framework (Appadurai, 1996; Hopper, 2007). Transnational students re-construct their identity in diverse social fields and networks situated within and/or outside the university. These deliberate efforts can be represented as ways of belonging (Glick Schiller, 2003), which refer to concrete actions and awareness to realize identity that show a connection to a specific community. Transnational students engage in interactional practices that signal their belonging within social fields. 28

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However, it is not always easy to adjust to a new academic environment for students who are from linguistic, cultural and/or ethnic backgrounds minoritized in society. They may struggle for a position in the new host society, and at the same time, try to maintain the one they previously had in their countries of origin. Since it is difficult to gain SB when one is perceived as different and foreign (Anderman & Freeman, 2004; Hurtado & Carter, 1997), transnational students who were born and raised in different societies may view their SB as significantly lower than the majority of students who are from the host country (Glass et al., 2013; Poyrazli et al., 2004). With a lack of SB, one can feel alienated, leading to negative emotional states such as anxiety and depression (Hagerty et al., 2002). The US recorded over 1 million transnational students coming to study in its colleges and universities in 2018 (Zong & Batalova, 2018), who contribute to expanding diversity in US higher education settings. However, a recent change in the policy regarding student applications and visas has led to hurdles in transnational students’ enrollment as well as their stay in the US after graduation (Federis, 2019). In addition to the policy change, US society has witnessed violence against minorities and a sociopolitical atmosphere against immigration and diversity (RoseRedwood & Rose-Redwood, 2017). These factors can negatively affect SB of transnational students at American universities, who may feel unsupported, unwelcomed and isolated outside of, as well as within the college community. This chapter reports a study on the perception and construction of SB by transnational students learning English, an institutionalized and socially dominant language in the US. Students who speak a home language other than English are expected to be proficient in English to study and survive. Therefore, it is fundamental to view these students’ positioning as English learners when drawing attention to their ways of belonging in a new social and academic context. Before elucidating my study, I address three key aspects discussed in literature that may influence how transnational students perceive and construct their SB: academic work, social identities and interpersonal relationships. Sense of Belonging and Academic Work

Transnational students are expected to excel in academic work as much as domestic students despite their relative absence of social support (Campbell & Li, 2008; Glass & Westmont, 2014; Yao, 2016). The academic burden due to parental expectations, for instance, and the requirements of their sponsoring agency may prevent students from getting involved in social networks on campus, contributing to a sense of loneliness and depression (Abel, 2002; Mwangi, 2016).

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Moreover, transnational students may have difficulties adjusting to new cultural modes of learning, leading to a sense of distance from the college community (Geiger, 2013; Smith & Khawaja, 2011). Specifically, students from non-European backgrounds who have not been exposed to a culture of learning that emphasizes ‘questioning, criticizing, and persuading’ (Major, 2005: 85) may struggle with attaining academic literacy that involves ‘disciplinary enculturation’ and an understanding of cultural values and norms (Casanave, 2002). Although academic work can play an important role in SB and overall satisfaction with college life, transnational students’ academic success does not automatically increase their SB. According to Van Horne et al. (2018), even high-achieving transnational students may have the same degree of feeling of disconnectedness as other transnational peers. Therefore, to understand transnational students’ SB and experiences outside of classes, sociocultural dimensions should also be taken into account. Sense of Belonging and Social Identities

Social identities such as race/ethnicity, nationality and culture (Marshall et al., 2012; Strayhorn, 2012) can affect how transnational students perceive and construct their SB. For instance, racial discrimination and stigma may prevent transnational students of color from developing SB (Geiger, 2013). Even when transnational students have the same race as domestic students, their countries of origin may be associated with lower SB (Mwangi, 2016). Furthermore, gaps in cultural values and practices between transnational students’ communities and the host society may increase difficulties in the students’ interaction with and adjustment to the host culture (Mehdizadeh & Scott, 2005). These gaps can also precipitate discrimination and ethnocentric attitudes by the majority (Sodowsky & Plake, 1992; Ward et al., 2001). Several studies emphasize the importance of language skills for transnational students’ SB. Proficiency in the majority language can help the students interact with domestic counterparts and integrate into a college community (Kennedy & Miceli, 2017). Transnational students often relate a low SB to misunderstandings in communication or lack of pragmatic awareness such as the use of humor (Yao, 2016). Even when transnational students used English in their home countries, they distinguish their use of English from the English spoken in the US due to different accents (Mwangi, 2016). Although a handful of studies examine the impact of language proficiency on transnational students’ SB, there is little research that discusses how students’ positioning as English learners in the US may influence their SB. Therefore, it is essential to examine how transnational students whose home languages are not ‘American’ English recognize their SB in light of language learning.

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Sense of Belonging and Interpersonal Relationships

Rapport with faculty, staff and peers plays a crucial role in building SB for transnational students (Van Horne et al., 2018). Students expect faculty and staff to provide resources for their integration into a college (Glass et al., 2017; Kennedy & Miceli, 2017). A body of literature suggests that transnational students’ SB can also be strengthened by peer networks with other transnational students, students with similar cultural backgrounds, and domestic students (Hendrickson et al., 2011; Kashima & Loh, 2006; Rienties & Nolan, 2014; Trice, 2004). However, transnational students may fi nd it difficult to be friends with domestic students due to intergroup boundaries (Lyakhovetska, 2004; Fischer, 2012). According to Yao (2016), who interviewed Chinese students studying in the US, domestic and transnational student groups did not approach each other. Rather, transnational students may seek to engage with peers who share backgrounds to deal with cultural transition and homesickness (Ward et al., 2001). Although previous studies can inform us about important factors related to transnational students’ SB, an in-depth understanding is still needed about how these factors interconnect to shape students’ experiences regarding SB. Transnational students’ academic life is related to the dynamics of languages and cultures in their new social fields, which affect their interpersonal relationships and ways of belonging as minorities in a college community and the society. By linking these structural, cultural and individual factors and centering on students’ positioning as English learners, this study aims to understand their views and experiences in the US college environment and an English-dominant society.

Case Study of Four Transnational Students

This chapter focuses on a specific question: How do transnational undergraduate students perceive and construct their sense of belonging as English learners in the US? The study adopts the framework of structure, culture and agency (Mehan & Wood, 1975; Datnow et al., 2002) to delineate complex and intertwined relationships between macro- and microfactors that contribute to SB. ‘Structure’ enables and constrains human participation (Giddens, 1982); ‘culture’ refers to the accumulated practices and beliefs that form the norms and boundaries of a community (Ancess, 1998; Lipka, 1998); and ‘agency’ embodies a person’s choice and control of social practices and structures (Goffman, 1974; Douglas, 1970). For the purposes of this study, the elements of structure, culture and agency that may influence SB of transnational students as English learners were conceptualized as part of a specific framework (see Figure 3.1), where the dimension of structure consists of current sociopolitical contexts of the US and the climate of a college community, and current political and

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Figure 3.1 A conceptual framework for transnational students’ sense of belonging

ideological shifts such as immigration reform, White supremacy and the English-only movement which can affect SB of lately-arrived English learners (Pac, 2012; Bonds & Inwood, 2016). The climate of a college community can also be shaped by these dynamics and tensions (Mwangi, 2016; Glass & Westmont, 2014). The dimension of culture is connected to these structural factors as they define or recreate senses of otherness and sharedness. When the sociopolitical climate and system marginalize social identities of minorities such as language, culture, race/ethnicity and immigration status, transnational students can experience an increased sense of otherness. On the other hand, when a college community respects diversity, transnational students can attain a high SB (Hurtado & Ponjuan, 2005). When students find commonalities with groups from similar backgrounds, they can feel a sense of sharedness and an increased SB (Geiger, 2013; Yao, 2016). The dimension of agency reflects the choices students make by taking both structural and cultural factors into account. Motivation to stay in the country is influenced by contemporary sociopolitical contexts. How students perceive otherness and sharedness can affect how they engage in interpersonal relationships. Transnational students also possess a need to belong that may vary according to their personality and situation (Hagerty et al., 1996). The aspect of learning English penetrates dimensions of structure, culture and agency. English is normalized as an institutional language and considered a language of power in the US (Wiley & Lukes, 1996). In addition, proficiency in English gives access to knowledge, social networks and high-paying jobs not only in the US but also in the global market (Modiano,

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2001), which is a driving force for transnational students to learn English and migrate to study. Although varieties of English exist in the US, the distinction between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ English is still conspicuous (Pennycook, 2017). Speakers with a ‘non-native’ English accent can feel a greater sense of otherness and a decreased sense of belonging to society than those with ‘native’ accents (Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010). This conceptualization implies the significance of learning English, which permeates structure, culture and agency, on transnational students’ SB. Context

I conducted this study at a Research I university in a mid-Atlantic state where the majority of undergraduate students are racially white (50%). In the 2017 academic year at the university, 1424 students at the undergraduate level were classified as ‘non-immigrant enrollment’ out of a total of 29,868 students (4.8%) and could be identified as transnational. Among the 130 countries of origin presented, Chinese (46%) and Indian (20%) students made up the majority of transnational enrollment. Eighty percent of the transnational students had citizenship from countries in Asia/ Oceania while those from countries in Europe or Americas made up 6% each. Although many varieties of English are used in the state, a mixture of dialects of English specific to the region of Upper South is predominant (Delaney, 2013). The state also recorded that about 15% of its population are migrants from other countries (US Census Bureau, 2018). Participants

In the study, I opened the recruitment to include participants from different cultural backgrounds to explore how students’ experiences varied according to the cultural distance from the US mainstream norms (Zhang & Goodson, 2011). I advertised the study through the university’s International Student Services newsletter. I received emails from nine international students and narrowed the pool further to four participants according to the recruitment criteria: (a) the participants were expected to be 19 years or older at the time of recruitment and had come to the US for undergraduate studies; and (b) they did not use English as their home language (HL), which is defi ned in this study as a language primarily used at home (see Table 3.1 for the participant demographics). All of the participants self-identified themselves as female. Shira and Fiona are second-generation immigrants from the UAE and Costa Rica respectively; the former’s parents were born in India and the latter’s in Peru.1 English is a second language for all participants. They identified their English proficiency as fluent but ranked the four skills – listening, speaking, reading, writing – in a different order. The participants stated that they were exposed to English in formal education settings and popular

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Table 3.1 Demographics of the participants Ying

Tili

Shira

Fiona

Country of origin

China

Vietnam

UAE

Costa Rica

Home culture

Chinese (Han)

Vietnamese

Indian

Peruvian

School year

Senior

Junior

Junior

Junior

Length of stay

3 years 6 months

2 years 6 months

2 years 6 months

3 years

Languages

Mandarin* English Japanese

Vietnamese* English Korean

Hindi* English Arabic

Spanish* English

Self-report about English proficiency

Fluent (Listening Fluent (Listening/ Fluent (Reading Fluent (Reading > > Speaking/Writing > Speaking/Writing/ > Speaking > Reading > Reading/Writing) Speaking/Writing) Listening) Listening)

Number of communities engaged in college

3

0

3

4

Living situations

Off-campus with roommates

On-campus with roommates

Off-campus with roommates

Off-campus with roommates

Note:* = home language.

media such as Hollywood movies and TV shows before arrival. All participants except Fiona live with students studying at the same university. Data Collection and Analysis

I implemented a multiple case-study design to listen to in-depth stories of the four participants and to identify complexities within each individual’s lived experiences as well as common themes across participants (Creswell, 2013). First, I conducted a semi-structured, preliminary interview (1 to 1.5 hours) asking about demographic information, communities they belonged to, and languages used. Next, I conducted an observation (1 to 1.5 hours) of one community activity per participant to explore how they interact with other members. The activity of the participants’ choice encompassed regular meetings or casual gatherings. By taking detailed field notes, I documented noticeable factors that could be connected to their SB. I recorded vignettes and later described details of the settings by listening to the audio-recordings. After each observation, a post-interview (1 to 1.5 hours) was conducted, including questions about when the participants feel high or low SB, with member checking about my interpretation of the observation. All interviews and observations were audio-recorded upon obtaining the participants’ consent.

Transnational Undergraduate Students’ Sense of Belonging 35

I transcribed the audio-recorded data along with analytic memos and vignettes. Then, the transcribed data went through a series of inductive and deductive coding steps. I created and applied a combination of codes to the data using NVivo 12 Pro. The codes were organized and assembled into hierarchical trees to detect patterns. I re-analyzed these patterns as well as the transcripts to determine initial concepts and to form categories by clustering patterns. Then, I combined and collapsed categories of overlapping ideas into themes for data reduction. This process generated two main themes: (a) students perceive low SB when their ways of speaking are seen as different from the majority; and (b) students construct SB by communicating with people sharing linguistic backgrounds. Findings Finding 1: Ways of speaking and sense of belonging

The participants stated that they perceived low SB when their ways of speaking English were considered diff erent from those born and raised in the US. They said they sensed people looking at them differently when their pronunciation, intonation and use of expressions were distinct from how the majority on campus spoke. For example, Shira explained how her peers would point out her ways of pronouncing and choosing phrases: The way I say things might be wrong, or the way I put my sentences together, might just not be the way people do it here … So that little difference you can catch up on the fact that I don’t know these things? So people point it out to me all the time … You can tell you’re not natively from America, just by speaking … Cause I can’t help but it’s the way I’ve spoken for most of my life, and nobody who was there [Dubai] pointed it out for the longest time because over there it was okay.

For the participants, how one spoke English was an indicator of one’s origin; whether one was from the US or not. Shira provided examples of phrases, such as ‘today morning’, which were not unusual in Dubai but perceived as unconventional by domestic students. She felt uncomfortable when her peers pointed out differences more than once during the conversation, saying, ‘Sometimes it gets too much. I’m defi nitely like, you guys need to stop’. Fiona also implied her ways of speaking ascertained her origin. She said, ‘It’s just you can tell, because I didn’t grow up here? I don’t know some words’. She considered her pronunciation in English was sometimes ‘not right’. When she delivered a presentation in front of an Englishspeaking audience, she was concerned about not meeting the rules of English pronunciation considered as the norm by the majority in the

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university. Fiona described a case when she felt self-conscious and uncomfortable, leading to low SB: I know if I don’t pronounce something, right way or I forget a word, I don’t want professors or other people to look down on me. So I feel like at school I’m kind of self-conscious sometimes? … Mostly during in presentations or if I’m just deliver, say something to a group and I don’t pronounce a word right, and they have to ask me, wait, what did you mean? Like, I don’t know, so I would get uncomfortable.

Furthermore, the participants mentioned their ‘accents’ stood out from the majority of their classmates. They occasionally characterized an ‘American accent’ as a dominant norm among people born and raised in the US. Shira said she adjusted her accent to be similar to the norm, of which the main motivation was not to be perceived as different: This is not my usual accent. It kinda just developed when I was here, and I think, it’s like adaptation technique? Because people, when you speak differently, they’ll stare, and question, and they would like, what … Because people don’t want to be spotted out as a different person, you know … It wasn’t like conscious thinking like, I wanna say things like this, but I feel more natural now when I speak, like an American accent.

Shira experienced people staring and asking questions about her origin when she spoke with an accent different from the one used by the majority. Therefore, she adapted her way of speaking English so that her accent would not stand out. During my observation of her interaction with her friends of Indian heritage, I found that she spoke with an accent that was different from the one she used in the interview. Shira said in the post-interview that, with Indian friends, her accent would change back to how she used to speak English in Dubai. Shira stated she would switch between the two accents depending on whom she talked with. This statement implies that Shira demonstrates translingual competence, which refers to the ability to utilize diverse codes across language varieties to transport sociocultural information and express identity (Jain, 2014; Kramsch, 2009; Müller, 2013). By switching accents, Shira applies various communicative modes to contexts where different language communities are involved. This strategy could act as a means not only of facilitating interaction but also signifying her belonging to a community of members with similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds. When the participants interacted with domestic students, race/ethnicity played a critical role in accentuating different ways of speaking. For example, Tili stated she did not feel comfortable and like she ‘belonged’ when talking to English-speaking students, especially to ‘white people’. The main reason was that she was afraid they might judge her accent as being

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different from theirs. Tili said she would avoid talking to them during a group discussion in class: I’m comfortable speaking English around like non-native speaker … They [English speakers] might judge me. So I kinda try not to talk a lot? … I feel belonged when I’m, with other Asians. So with non-Asians, especially White people? I feel very uncomfortable and I feel not welcomed at all … With other White, uh, people? especially, university student? They don’t really, come to talk to you. Not at all. And they only kinda talk to each other, have their own group, they don’t really come to talk to you. That’s why I feel very uncomfortable, I’m not belonged.

By using the word ‘belonged’ twice in the course of this significant commentary, Tili revealed how she was concerned about her accent being judged by groups of students of the racial majority, where she felt unwelcomed as a racial minority, and how that shaped her sense of (lack of) belonging. When conversing with people from Asian backgrounds, on the other hand, she felt comfortable and enjoyed talking to them in English. During the observation of Tili interacting with her group of Asian American friends, I found her initiating conversations and sharing her opinions many times. In the postinterview, I asked how the conversation was different from talking to ‘white students’ considering her friends also did not have the same accent as hers. Tili said she felt people with Asian backgrounds would understand and not mind the difference. This remark implies that, for Tili, whether or not she shared a racial background with the members she was communicating with indicated the degree of tolerance to different ways of speaking. In this sense, ‘being different’ is perceived and represented based on the intersections of race/ethnicity and language backgrounds, which shapes transnational students’ SB in the college community.

Finding 2: Communicating in the home language and sense of belonging

The participants joined a group with whom they shared linguistic backgrounds to construct their SB. Ying and Shira were able to find their own groups of transnational students on campus respectively. Ying spoke with her peers predominantly in Chinese, while Shira spoke with her peers in both Hindi and English. Ying stated that she felt the greatest sense of belonging when she spoke in Chinese in the group. She acknowledged that if she did not have this ‘inner circle’ in the college community, she would feel less stable. Knowing that people with similar situations existed not only in the university but also in the host society helped Ying construct SB: Just knowing they’re [Chinese students] here, makes me feel safer … Cause Chinese population is huge and so many of us come to US, so I still feel some sense of belonging because there’re so many of us. I know I’m not the only one or only group that is new or strange to this land.

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Cultural elements also mediated the relationship between SB and communication via one’s HL. For Ying, her SB was connected to the opportunities ‘to talk about certain things only in Chinese in terms of content, expression and cultural background’. Ying stated specific topics and expressions could be conveyed only via her HL and clearly understood by people with similar cultural backgrounds. This remark suggests a strong tie between linguistic and cultural elements that could influence one’s SB. Shira also felt comfortable when talking with her Indian friends because she ‘does not need to explain’ about the popular culture and media of Bollywood that they all enjoyed. She said, during conversations where they switched back and forth between English and Hindi, they would ‘always default back to Hindi when making jokes or referring to a movie or music’. When she talked with her roommates who were born and raised in the US, however, Shira sometimes did not feel she belonged due to jokes and cultural references she was unfamiliar with (e.g. ‘snow dance’). This experience was echoed by Tili and Fiona who also perceived low SB when encountering ‘language barrier and different culture’ related to humor, jokes and slang. Shira not only talked with peers from Indian backgrounds but also started to learn Arabic, the language of her country of origin (Dubai), at the university. She stated she felt a high SB when she participated in an intensive Arabic language program during the summer. Communicating in Arabic helped Shira create rapport with her classmates who shared many commonalities. Faculty members in the program from the same country of origin also enhanced her SB. According to Shira, interaction with a professor from Dubai helped her navigate her academic life as well as learn Arabic. She stated that communicating with faculty from the same background who could understand her situation increased her SB. Unlike Ying and Shira, Fiona and Tili had a hard time fi nding their own groups on campus speaking their HLs. As stated earlier, transnational students from Costa Rica or Vietnam are considerably fewer in numbers than Chinese or Indian students in the college community. This difference regarding student populations shaped how the participants created a community. Fiona perceived her way of speaking Spanish was different to how the majority of people around the campus, who were from Mexico or El Salvador, spoke Spanish. Even in the Latinx community on campus, Fiona did not feel belonged because of the difference: I don’t know anybody in the US who’s from either my country or my parents’ country. So that’s really lonely? … The fact that I’m international student, most of them are not? Um, so they don’t have similar restrictions I have … I’m self-conscious about the difference about our accent and slang terms … I think even with the Latinx community, I feel like, nobody speaks like me. They’ll immediately tell I’m different.

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Fiona said that although she sometimes wanted to ‘take a break from speaking in English’, she could not fi nd people to speak Spanish with on campus. She distinguished herself from the Latinx community because most of the students were born and raised in the US. She found they had different cultures as well as different concerns (e.g. visa issues were important to her). Instead, Fiona built interpersonal relationships with Latinx migrants in her residential area. Like Fiona, Tili did not think she would belong to the Vietnamese American community on campus because she was a transnational student; she wished a Vietnamese transnational student community existed. In this sense, not only culture but also immigration status mattered when the participants chose whom they would interact with to construct SB. In sum, Ying and Shira constructed their SB by interacting in their HLs. It was possible because of the presence of many students from the same background on campus and institutional programs supporting language learning. However, Fiona and Tili did not have sufficient opportunities to speak in their HLs due to the lack of transnational student populations from their countries of origin. As a result, they sought out groups outside of the college community to construct their SB in a new society. Discussion and Implications

This chapter has explored transnational students’ perceptions and experiences about their SB when navigating college life in the US as English learners. According to the findings, the participants perceived their SB as low when their ways of speaking English were recognized as different from how the majority of the college community spoke. This theme is consistent with existing studies which reveal that communication in English is connected to transnational students’ SB in English-dominant countries (Campbell & Li, 2008; Mwangi, 2016). Specifically, the participants differentiated their past or current English accent from ‘the American accent’ which is considered the norm in their host country. Their perception of low SB may have stemmed from how the majority would react to different ways of speaking rather than the level of language proficiency, considering the participants identified themselves as fluent in English. Related to reactions of listeners, the race/ethnicity of their audience influenced the participants’ perception of SB when speaking English. The participants did not feel welcomed when talking to students of the racial majority because these students might judge different accents and therefore the participants did not initiate conversations in these groups. This fi nding implies that intergroup boundaries exist between domestic and transnational students, as discussed in previous studies (Yao, 2016; Lyakhovetska, 2004). On the other hand, when the participants spoke in English with people from similar racial/ethnic backgrounds, they felt

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comfort and a higher sense of belongingness. This study thus demonstrates that race/ethnicity hindered or facilitated transnational students’ interaction in English, which resonates with existing research that highlights the connection between race/ethnicity and one’s SB (Strayhorn, 2012; Marshall et al., 2012). The fi ndings corroborated previous studies in that the participants constructed their SB by joining a group with similar backgrounds (Glass & Gesing, 2018; Mori, 2000; Ward et al., 2001). This study extends the discussion to highlight the importance of engaging with students of the same immigration status as well as background for constructing SB. The participants who were among many transnational students from the same country of origin created groups and increased their SB. On the contrary, the ones with few students from their country of origin did not have the support group on campus to share languages, culture and status. Participants did not feel connected to domestic students, even those with the same ethnic backgrounds, because of their concerns of being nonimmigrant aliens as well as their distinctive ways of speaking HLs. The conceptual framework linked with the fi ndings can elucidate SB of transnational students as English learners across the dimensions of structure, culture and agency. The contemporary sociopolitical contexts of the US emphasize the divide between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ English use (Pennycook, 2017). For the participants, ways of speaking perceived as different by the majority signified that they were ‘not from America’. Their pronunciation and usage of expressions represented their different origins and immigration status, underscoring a sense of otherness. At the same time, the participants constructed SB by interacting with people with shared cultures, thus gaining a sense of sharedness (Geiger, 2013) in the process. The participants with opportunities to speak in HLs were able to choose which language to use when conveying cultural elements such as jokes and popular media references. Conversely, the participants without many peers to talk to in their HLs sensed the lack of SB in the college community. This fi nding indicates that cultural aspects permeate the dimension of agency when transnational students decide to engage in certain social fields. As mentioned earlier, two of the participants found peer groups on campus, but the other two chose to seek them outside of campus. This choice largely stemmed from the fact that few students from the same countries of origin existed in the college community, which also reflects the link between agency and social context. This study helps expand our understanding of transnational students’ struggles to signal their identity by constructing SB in social fields that involve structural, cultural and agentic factors. As English learners, the participants tried to de-emphasize differences in ways of speaking so that they could decrease perceived otherness and increase SB. They also created rapport with people of shared backgrounds, with whom they can feel a sense of acceptance and represent their transnational identity (Levitt &

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Glick Schiller, 2004). The participants navigated the possibilities of belonging to a new environment while sustaining connections with their home languages and cultures. This chapter suggests possible paths for higher education institutions to support transnational students’ attainment of SB. As ‘American’ English used by the majority is legitimized in the US (Leeman, 2018), ways of speaking English by linguistic minorities are often considered foreign and unconventional. Yet, a key to increasing transnational students’ sense of acceptance is to recognize equal values of different language varieties and encourage all community members – students, faculty and staff – to build translingual competence for open and inclusive communication. Therefore, universities could endeavor to create communities that value diverse ways of speaking English by increasing the awareness that there is no single norm in speaking English. In addition, universities can extend opportunities for transnational students to interact with domestic students. It is essential for university educators to encourage student networking across diverse backgrounds. For example, they can support clubs with a high proportion of transnational students or operate a peer mentor system between domestic and transnational students. Lastly, universities should provide extra care for transnational students with small populations of fellow students from their home countries. Not having a steady community of their origin may lower students’ SB. Faculty and administrators can support these students to create communities and promote their events and activities. Transnational students spend a critical period for their career path and future lives immersed in the host society. Like domestic students, they deserve to cherish living and learning experiences in a college community. However, transnational students go through unique challenges when becoming members of a new environment as linguistic, cultural and/or ethnic minorities. By extending our knowledge about their college lives and how they construct their sense of belonging, we can move further along in our understanding of their multifaceted experiences and build environments that can boost their belongingness. Note (1) The names of all participants are pseudonyms.

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Anderman, L.H. and Freeman, T.M. (2004) Students’ sense of belonging in school. Advances in Motivation and Achievement 13, 27–63. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Baumeister, R.F. and Leary, M.R. (1995) The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin 117 (3), 497–529. Bonds, A. and Inwood, J. (2016) Beyond white privilege: Geographies of white supremacy and settler colonialism. Progress in Human Geography 40 (6), 715–733. Campbell, J. and Li, M. (2008) Asian students’ voices: An empirical study of Asian students’ learning experiences at a New Zealand university. Journal of Studies in International Education 12 (4), 375–396. https://doi.org/10.1177/1028315307299422 Casanave, C.P. (2002) Writing Games: Multicultural Case Studies of Academic Literacy Practices in Higher Education. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Creswell, J. (2013) Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Datnow, A., Hubbard, L. and Mehan, H. (2002) Extending Educational Reform: From One School to Many. London: Routledge. Delaney, R. (2013) Dialect map of American English. See http://robertspage.com/dialects. html. Douglas, J. (1970) Understanding Everyday Life. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Federis, M. (2019) Visa rules are restricting the future of international students in the US. June 20. See https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-06-20/visa-rules-are-restricting-futureinternational-students-us. Fischer, K. (2012) Many foreign students are friendless in the U.S., study fi nds. The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 14. See http://chronicle.com/article/Many-For eign-Students-Find/132275/. Geiger, B. (2013) Female Arab students’ experience of acculturation and cultural diversity upon accessing higher education in the Northern Galilee-Israel. International Journal of Higher Education 2 (3), 91–106. https://doi.org/10.5430/ijhe.v2n3p91 Giddens, A. (1982) Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Glass, C.R. and Gesing, P. (2018) The development of social capital through international students’ involvement in campus organizations. Journal of International Students 8 (3), 1274–1292. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1254580 Glass, C.R. and Westmont, C.M. (2014) Comparative eff ects of belongingness on the academic success and cross-cultural interactions of domestic and international students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 38, 106–119. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2013.04.004 Glass, C.R., Buus, S. and Braskamp, L.A. (2013) Uneven Experiences: What’s Missing and What Matters for Today’s International Students. Chicago, IL: Global Perspective Institute. Glass, C.R., Gesing, P., Hales, A. and Cong, C. (2017) Faculty as bridges to cocurricular engagement and community for fi rst-generation international students. Studies in Higher Education 42 (5), 895–910. Glick Schiller, N. (2003) The centrality of ethnography in the study of transnational migration: Seeing the wetland instead of the swamp. In N. Foner (ed.) American Arrivals: Anthropology Engages the New Immigration (pp. 99−128). Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Glick Schiller, N., Basch, L. and Blanc, C.S. (1995) From immigrant to transmigrant: Theorizing transnational migration. Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1), 48–63. Gluszek, A. and Dovidio, J.F. (2010) The way they speak: A social psychological perspective on the stigma of nonnative accents in communication. Personality and Social Psychology Review 14 (2), 214–237.

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Goff man, E. (1974) Frame Analysis. New York: Harper & Row. Gutiérrez, K.D. and Rogoff, B. (2003) Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoires of practice. Educational Researcher 32 (5), 19–25. Hagerty, B.M., Williams, R.A., Coyne, J.C. and Early, M.R. (1996) Sense of belonging and indicators of social and psychological functioning. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 10 (4), 235–244. Hagerty, B.M., Williams, R.A. and Oe, H. (2002) Childhood antecedents of adult sense of belonging. Journal of Clinical Psychology 58 (7), 793–801. Hendrickson, B., Rosen, D. and Aune, R.K. (2011) An analysis of friendship networks, social connectedness, homesickness, and satisfaction levels of international students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35 (3), 281–295. Hopper, P. (2007) Understanding Cultural Globalization. Cambridge: Polity. Hurtado, S. and Carter, D.F. (1997) Effects of college transition and perceptions of the campus racial climate on Latino college students’ sense of belonging. Sociology of Education 70 (4), 324–345. Hurtado, S. and Ponjuan, L. (2005) Latino educational outcomes and the campus climate. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education 4 (3), 235–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/153 8192705276548 Jain, R. (2014) Global Englishes, translinguistic identities, and translingual practices in a community college ESL classroom: A practitioner researcher reports. TESOL Journal 5 (3), 490–522. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.155 Kashima, E.S. and Loh, E. (2006) International students’ acculturation: Effects of international, conational, and local ties and need for closure. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 30 (4), 471–485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2005. 12.003 Kennedy, C. and Miceli, T. (2017) Lingua e comunità in coro: A community choir as a space for language learning, social interaction, and wellbeing. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 40 (2), 140–158. https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.40.2.04ken Kramsch, C. (2009) The Multilingual Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leeman, J. (2018) It’s all about English: The interplay of monolingual ideologies, language policies and the U.S. Census Bureau’s statistics on multilingualism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2018 (252), 21–43. https://doi.org/10.1515/ ijsl-2018-0013 Levitt, P. and Glick Schiller, N. (2004) Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review 38 (3), 1002–1039. Lipka, J. (1998) Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup’ik Eskimo Examples. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Lyakhovetska, D. (2004) Welcome to Canada? The experiences of international graduate students at university. In L. Andres and F. Finlay (eds) Student Affairs: Experiencing Higher Education (pp. 189−216). Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press. Major, E.M. (2005) Co-national support, cultural therapy, and the adjustment of Asian students to an English-speaking university culture. International Education Journal 6, 84−95. Marshall, S., Zhou, M., Gervan, T. and Wiebe, S. (2012) Sense of belonging and fi rst-year academic literacy. Canadian Journal of Higher Education 42 (3), 116–142. Mehan, H. and Wood, H. (1975) The Reality of Ethnomethodology. New York: Wiley. Mehdizadeh, N. and Scott, G. (2005) Adjustment problems of Iranian international students in Scotland. International Education Journal 6 (4), 484–493. Modiano, M. (2001) Linguistic imperialism, cultural integrity, and EIL. ELT Journal 55 (4), 339–347. https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/55.4.339 Mori, S. (2000) Addressing the mental health concerns of international students. Journal of Counseling and Development 78, 137–144.

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Müller, M. (2013) Conceptualizing pronunciation as part of translingual/transcultural competence: New impulses for SLA research and the L2 classroom. Foreign Language Annals 46 (2), 213–229. https://doi.org/10.1111/flan.12024 Mwangi, C.A.G. (2016) Exploring sense of belonging among Black international students at an HBCU. Journal of International Students 6 (4), 1015–1037. Pac, T. (2012) The English-only movement in the U.S. and the world in the twenty-fi rst century. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 11 (1), 192–210. Pennycook, A. (2017) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. New York: Routledge. Poyrazli, S., Kavanaugh, P.R., Baker, A. and Al-Timimi, N. (2004) Social support and demographic correlates of acculturative stress in international students. Journal of College Counseling 7, 73–82. Rienties, B. and Nolan, E.M. (2014) Understanding friendship and learning networks of international and host students using longitudinal Social Network Analysis. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 41, 165−180. Rose-Redwood, C. and Rose-Redwood, R. (2017) Rethinking the politics of the international student experience in the age of Trump. Journal of International Students 7 (3), I−IX. Smith, R.A. and Khawaja, N.G. (2011) A review of the acculturation experiences of international students. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35, 699–713. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijintrel.2011.08.004 Sodowsky, G.R. and Plake, B.S. (1992) A study of acculturation diff erences among international people and suggestions for sensitivity to within-group differences. Journal of Counseling and Development 71 (1), 53–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6676. 1992.tb02171.x Strayhorn, T.L. (2012) College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students. New York: Routledge. Trice, A.G. (2004) Mixing it up: International graduate students’ social interactions with American students. Journal of College Student Development 45 (6), 671–687. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1353/csd.2004.0074 US Census Bureau (2018) QuickFacts, July 1. See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/md. Van Horne, S., Shuhui, L., Anson, M. and Jacobson, W. (2018) Engagement, satisfaction, and belonging of international undergraduates at U.S. research universities. Journal of International Students 8 (1), 351–374. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1134313 Ward, C., Bochner, S. and Furnham, A. (2001) The Psychology of Culture Shock. Sussex: Routledge. Wiley, T.G. and Lukes, M. (1996) English-only and standard English ideologies in the U.S. TESOL Quarterly 30 (3), 511–532. https://doi.org/10.2307/3587696 Yao, C.W. (2016) ‘Better English Is the better mind’: Influence of language skills on sense of belonging in Chinese international students. Journal of College and University Student Housing 43 (1), 74–89. Zhang, J. and Goodson, P. (2011) Acculturation and psychosocial adjustment of Chinese international students: Examining mediation and moderation effects. International Journal of Intercultural Relations 35 (5), 614–627. Zong, J. and Batalova, J. (2018) International students in the United States. See https:// www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-students-united-states-2017.

4 Dubious Battle in ‘Otherness’: Pride or Shame Hatice Altun

When contemplating on one of the most frequent and curious questions of the 21st century: ‘Where are you from?’, Brutt-Griffler (2005: 113) contends that this post-imperial question indeed inquires for a mythical sense of ‘space and place’ and poses the almost unanswerable question: ‘Where do you belong?’ In relation to this intrusive and judgmental question, one might fi nd it strange to see that globalization is placed in opposition to imperialism. Imperialism was built on national pride and motherland as the frame of reference, whereas globalization feeds on transnational migration of people and products that transcend nation-states. Canagarajah (2018), similarly, distinguishes between space and place and argues that homeland as a distinct geographical place, governed by the nation-state, is no longer relevant in explaining today’s superdiversity (Rampton et al., 2015) and interconnectedness. However, space as a liminal social field is constructed socially and historically, and experienced affectively, so it motivates people to ‘search for identities and literacies that go beyond bounded, static, and territorialized constructs and norms’ (Canagarajah, 2018: 41). He describes this space as transnational. In Appadurai’s (1996) terms, ever-evolving ethnoscapes create transnational communities, and traveling for education or tourism changes people’s ideoscapes. Thus, transnationalization entails developing and enacting new identities, which are not necessarily restricted by national, cultural or ethnolinguistic constructs. Transnationalism requires us to explore alternative identity formations in relation to mobility (Blommaert, 2011), border-crossing (Rampton, 2001) and deterritorialization (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983). Blommaert (2011) discusses the mobile resources that people bring along to use within new spaces and cultural formations afforded by globalization. Therefore, an emphasis on mobility and mobile sociolinguistic resources instead of stable and fi xed categories and rigid boundaries requires us to re-visualize and analyze new cultural mélange created by flows of ideas, people and technology (Blommaert, 2007). These social contexts require questioning the monolithic labels of nativity and placing hybridity in a central position. Hybridity as a post-colonial 45

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notion (Bhabha, 1994) means the mixing of two sources, and Nederveen Pieterse (2009: 55) sees hybridity as an antidote to essentialism particularly pertaining to nationalism and ethnicity. He explains that ‘if modernity stands for an ethos of order and neat separation by tight boundaries, hybridisation reflects a postmodern sensibility of cut’n’mix, transgression, and subversion’. Block (2012) contends that hybridity is the ‘master construct’ to interpret social and cultural activity in today’s world. New hybrid possibilities can emerge in pastime activities, social and government institutions and business life, yet hybridity appears particularly in human contact in the sense of inter-ethnic/racial/national contacts. Building on the existing scholarship on transnationalism, identity and language learning (Canagarajah, 2005; Jain, 2014; Kanno & Norton, 2003; Pennycook, 2007; Warriner, 2007; Whiteside, 2006; Yazan, 2018), in this study I examined the discursive construction of L2 selves of two Turkish international students within the narrative of border-crossing (Kramsch, 1994). Drawing on a longitudinal narrative analysis, I explored the multiple layers of these students’ tensions while they develop linguistic and ethnic hybridity and cohesion. This study contributes to the existing literature of identity investigations by analyzing the transformative potential and dialogic nature of discourse across multiple timescales. The study answers the overarching question: How do undergraduate international exchange students from Turkey reconstruct their second language identities through language socialization and ecology in a multilingual environment, the United States? Theoretical Framework: Language Ecology and Identity

The current study employs the framework of language socialization with an ecological perspective. Language ecology is described as the study of any language and its environment (Haugen, 2001). It proposes an approach that combines linguistic data with a total language context which encompasses the speakers’ situational positioning, and speech communities’ sociocultural and socioeconomic features (Kramsch & Whiteside, 2008). According to the language socialization approach, linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge are interwoven and coconstruct each other (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986). Therefore, the language ecology approach offers a hybrid of social semiotics and ecosystem dynamics which include not only people, but artifacts, architectures, landscapes, food, among others (Lemke, 2004). It consists of social processes and semiotic practices by which individuals interact with other ‘actants’ in a continuous, nonlinear and fractal way (Lemke, 2004). The language ecology approach contributes to the poststructuralist understanding of identity (Uryu et al., 2013). Instead of considering ‘one’s multiple social identities as given by one’s position in the social world’, Kramsch and Steffensen (2008: 26) argue that ‘an ecological paradigm

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would see them as so many subject positions emerging in the interplay between the social world and the discursive situation at hand’. Identities are fractal but not repetitive in ecological understanding (Lemke, 2002) and are neither stable nor constructed yet emergent (Uryu et al., 2013). Bucholtz and Hall (2005) propose a framework that conceptualizes identity with the ecological paradigm, and analyze identity as an intersubjective accomplishment rather than an individually constructed concept. At any moment of speaking, an individual’s words are symbolic representations of who she is, where she is from, what she has gone through and what she would like to be in the future. The discourses emanate from a variety of worldviews that are developed as one goes through different social conditions and occurrences. According to Ochs and Capps (1996), narratives are liable to be challenged from without (i.e. by others) and from within (i.e. by multiple, incompatible selves). Hence the ensuing worlds are never thoroughly consistent because they are ever in the making. Ochs and Capps (1996: 37) observe that ‘whenever narrators launch a story, they open themselves to the reconstrual’. This notion of discourse as a symbolic expression of identity will be used to explore the narratives of international students from Turkey. Bucholtz and Hall (2010) explain that identity is a relational phenomenon and they describe these relations as complementary processes in three groups: adequation and distinction, authentication and denaturalization, and fi nally, authorization and illegitimation. In their words, ‘Identities are intersubjectively constructed through several, often overlapping, contemporary relations, including similarity/difference, genuineness/artifice and authority/delegitimacy’ (2010: 23). They termed these relations as tactics of intersubjectivity and explained them in a relational continuum (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). For the analysis of the second language identity constructions of international students from Turkey, this framework will mainly be applied to their storylines as they encounter life as international students in a globalized context. I particularly focus on authentication and denaturalization to refer to the identity reconstruction processes of the participants in this study based on their similar discursive acts. The Study

In this chapter, I discuss a segment of data drawn from a larger corpus compiled from 2014 to 2016, as part of a longitudinal mixed-method study of ten undergraduate students from Turkey in the US. The study presented here focuses on two of the subjects due to their translocal narratives, which allowed me to examine their ongoing multilingual language socialization and identity reconstruction processes influenced by their struggles with the tensions of language, belonging and hybrid identities in a global contact zone through the lens of language ecology. I used data

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gathered through interviews, personal narratives, diaries and field observations as evidence for contestation and negotiation of many facets of the participants’ identities (social, linguistic, historical and otherwise). The intersubjective nature of their identity negotiations was located discursively with its symbolical dimensions. Participants

The participants, Jerome and Kiel, are two male undergraduate students from Turkey pursuing an engineering degree in the US. They were exchange students who originally studied at the same public university in Turkey, and were already friends when I met them. I convened with them on a monthly basis and interviewed them about the experiences they considered noteworthy. The meetings lasted around an hour at a place where they felt comfortable, and I took field notes during these meetings. The data discussed in this chapter were collected in several places on campus such as libraries, cafes, classes, also in shopping centers and participants’ apartment complexes. For the journal logs, I gave them some prompts to describe their language socialization while keeping their journals in English. Our extended conversations (also mostly in English – they wanted to conduct the interviews in English in order to show their command of the language) were influenced by the depth and nature of the topics of the narratives produced by them. Thanks to this series of ethnographic interviews, I achieved an extensive understanding of their emotional reactions to the specific events they presented to me as important, their world views, sense making and history. Jerome

Jerome is a 23-year-old successful student from a wealthy family who runs a large farm in a small commercial city to the west of Istanbul. Although he likes farming and spending time in the fields, he does not want to take over his family business, and wishes to pursue a career in engineering. His professional plans and aspirations cause family disputes. He thinks he is an introvert person and does not interact with people unless he is forced to. He speaks English fluently, yet he thinks his English is not good enough because he cannot fi nd a local (American) girlfriend. He said ‘Although girls like me physically, say at a bar, they put a huge distance between us as soon as I open my mouth’ (Interview 2, 12 October 2014). He wants to pursue a graduate degree in civil engineering, and he was accepted on the master’s program. He feels quite lonely in the US, so he tries to engage himself with recreational activities such as playing basketball, the guitar and dancing. He usually hangs out with his two friends from Turkey and avoids the other students who come from Turkey. He thinks Americans are very lonely people, and he described it in Turkish

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‘Yalnızlıktan geberiyorlar, bir televizyonları var, bir de köpekleri. Onlar da bizim kadar yalnız aslında’ (Americans are dying of loneliness, it’s just a dog and a TV set they have, that’s all. They are as lonely as we are in the US) (Interview 4, 17 March 2016). He has some international and American classmates but does not hang out with them often. Kiel

Kiel, 25, an only child of a wealthy family, is from Istanbul. He studied at English-medium private schools throughout his life. He is quite fluent and proficient in English. He describes himself as a grumpy person, and alienates himself from ‘the crowds’ (in his words). Therefore, he does not have many friends, neither from Turkey nor the locals. He thinks people from Turkey in his city in the US are varoş (ghetto people), meaning they are not ‘elite’ enough – a recently coined word in Turkey among youths to express dislike for others. He fi nds no one elite enough except for his friends in New York City, San Francisco, London and Paris. He meets them frequently in one of the big cities chosen as a gathering destination. He likes frequenting upscale restaurants and hotels when meeting his friends. He does not like the US because he thinks the US is dispersed residentially across the entire country, and except for the big cities like New York City and San Francisco, Americans are leading a conservative, rural life. Data Analysis

In order to analyze the interviews, journal entries and observations, I used narrative analysis, which refers to a method for interpreting texts that have in common a storied form (Saldana, 2009). Aware of the fact that I would be interrogating cases (rather than population-based samples), I tried to make conceptual inferences about the social process, that is, the construction of an identity from close observation of individuals. In consideration of that, I picked up Wolcott’s (1994) further analysis technique, and tried to form descriptions from the data, as well as relating the description to the literature; that is, I grouped my data according to the descriptive codes I developed during the fi rst-cycle coding. In this way, I started to establish a statement describing a major theme, a specific pattern and a network of interrelationships. Based on categories emerging from descriptive coding, I tried to develop basic headings and themes emanating from my personal visceral choices. Then, the categories grew more and more precise until it was obvious that all patterns were saturated with examples. I was able to create a text of important categories and themes, such as ethnic unbelonging, strong linguistic power. I analyzed each participant’s narrative by fi nding themes connecting their English language ownership and second language identity.

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After sorting data into more concrete themes and time periods, I examined them through the lens of language ecology and analyzed the second-language socialization process in order to create a more detailed and clearer structure for data analysis. This approach allowed me to recognize the distinct discourses taken up by my participants. The following section presents linguistic instantiations of how the participants perceived, positioned and composed themselves in relation to others, institutions and the ecology of the context. Findings

Although the relations in the relationality principle are arranged in polarized terms, none of these pairs are categorical and mutually exclusive. That is, a language user can switch tactics and locate themselves anywhere on the relational continuum as well as simultaneously exploit overlapping tactics that are on the opposite poles. However, since I could capture only frozen moments of speech, I studied one tactic at a time while keeping possible limitations in mind, and tried to analyze two participants’ social identities according to authentication and denaturalization tactics based on their similar discursive acts. Theme one: Ethnic ‘unbelonging’ and evolving transnational identities

‘Authentication’ and ‘denaturalization’ represent the processes through which speakers make claims of genuineness and artifice, respectively. Jerome and Kiel both demonstrated consistent enactments of identity but at the same time there were a lot of disruptions in the assumptions regarding the seamlessness of their identities. These problematic and fragmented identity enactments made me consider presenting the narratives/ fi ndings of these participants together. Both participants rejected being associated with a Turkish identity. When I asked them about a defi nition of Turkish identity, they came up with the common theme of ‘authentic mode of being Turk’ (Jerome, Interview 1, 14 September 2015), which involves two main components: religion and cultural identity. Both said they were nonbelievers and never saw religion as the source of their morality. They also rejected being associated with Turkish cultural identity since they believe Turkishness is not something they would be proud of. Kiel said ‘I didn’t choose to be a Turk. It’s something imposed upon us like many other things’ (Interview 2, 12 October 2015). They consider their ethnic identity as a given construct rather than something to be built on. Religion functions as a tool to preserve the original Turkish identity … For example, they don’t eat pork but it’s in everything. They just deceive themselves. I don’t believe such things. They make fake arguments like

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pork is dangerous to health and this annoys me. Many people in the world eat pork but they don’t die of sickness [mocking]. (Jerome, Interview 3, 20 November 2015) Turkish people are hypocrites. They custom their religion according to their wish. They drink alcohol but they go to the mosque every Friday and they lie. But when you ask them, they are conservative and patriotic people. (Kiel, Interview 2, 12 October 2015)

In these extracts, the participants gave their personal accounts of their unbelonging and reflected upon the reasons for their inability to develop a sense of belonging. Uttering these sentences in a mocking and angry mode, they made explicit their negative evaluations about the ethnicity of ‘Turkishness’, thereby positioning themselves somewhere outside Turkishness or in a kind of hybrid or third space (Kramsch, 1994) of unbelonging. They associated their negative evaluations (‘fake arguments, hypocrites’) with their ethnic group. The pronoun ‘they’ used by both participants made it clear that both considered themselves as outside the Turkish people and their ‘othering’ and ‘distancing’ themselves was evident in the use of the pronoun. They tried to authenticate their unbelonging for the rest of their discursive acts on many occasions by positioning themselves outside of their ethnicity. Although both participants alienated themselves from their student cohort coming from Turkey, they still felt the need to socialize with other classmates and to fi nd strategies to facilitate their participation in classes, and social situations. Jerome made issues of power and agency particularly relevant when talking about his expertise in school subjects during his classroom encounters with his classmates. The following extracts, for example, reveal how Jerome constructed himself, though not linearly, moving from being powerless to more empowered, and also as an agentive self in his classes. In the diary entries and the interviews at the beginning of the fall 2015 semester, Jerome presented himself as ‘shy’, ‘introvert’, ‘naïve’ and ‘unable to talk back’. In the following extract, he mentions his feelings of intimidation and his efforts to communicate with his classmates and professors. When I fi rst came here, I noticed that there was a common perception about the Turkish students who came from [the university in Turkey], as unsuccessful, constantly cheating, plagiarizing, poor English speakers, not decent and not disciplined. I know this perception was developed by previous Turkish students, who are really annoying and lazy. And since I am a shy person, and felt intimidated with native-speaker professors at the beginning of the semester, I couldn’t speak and was paralyzed often times. I am usually very polite and gentle. I wished I could get over my shyness and correct the misrepresentation of Turkish people. I wanted to prove that I am different and hardworking. (Jerome, Diary entry 2, 14 October 2015)

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Jerome’s initial interactional positioning showed that the internal dispositions of himself (‘shy, intimidated, polite and gentle’) have constructed some external inactions (‘couldn’t speak’, ‘paralyzed’). He had to overcome the bias which he believes was caused by the previous students from Turkey. In our early interviews in October 2015, he presented himself as a transnational person and said that he did not identify with being Turkish, remarking ‘I don’t believe in nationality. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I am not a typical Turkish person but I am not an American either’ (Interview 1, 10 October 2015). However, in this narrative, he wanted to rectify the image of Turkish people whom he believes were misrepresented by those previous Turkish students. So, he denaturalized his claims of unbelonging. Even though he contradicts himself, he revealed that he is unavoidably attached to his Turkish identity. In this narrative, he positions himself as the victim of unfair biases that he believes were constructed by the host community based on the earlier Turkish students’ actions (‘annoying and lazy’). As a strategy to overcome this self-perceived victimization, he offers his other personal traits such as ‘gentle’ and ‘polite’, and he attempts to appeal to his classmates through his diligent work. He fi nally gained access to begin some interactions with his classmates and professor thanks to his efforts to present himself as hardworking and gentle: But then, before the second midterms, I solved a problem in our Dynamics course, and the professor was amazed with my quickness and correctness because he showed a very longer way to solve the problem and when he recalculated it, he noticed he was wrong and I was correct … after that course I became a poster child of that professor and I had made some American and international friends … We don’t hang out but I feel I am respected and very qualified. Now my friends usually consult me with the assignments and projects. (Jerome, Diary entry 4, 12 March 2016)

Jerome’s later narrative constructs a self that is quite agentive through his experiences in class with his classmates and professor. Strong emotional expressions (‘amazed, quickness and correctness, correct, poster child, respected, really happy, very qualified’) reveal his construction of an empowered and agentive self. This construction of agentive self might have taken place in the narrative only, but I observed him outside in his social interactions with his service encounters and with his Turkish friends. Although he argued that he was an introvert and not confident enough in social interactions, he was very capable and strong, and aware of his knowledge and skills as a multilingual person. Thus, he authenticated his story and himself as the teller of it. Similarly, Kiel has the same conflict about his ethnic identity. Although he argues that he does not feel Turkish, he could not help separating himself from his Turkish background. He said: I never feel like I am a Turkish person. I never adapt to traditional celebrations, I so quitted them. I just see my grandparents during those unnecessary

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festivals. I consider them as vacation times; I mean my family thinks that way. (Kiel, Interview 1, 25 September 2015)

Although he criticizes (‘quitted them’) the ‘unnecessary’ traditional festivals, he aligns himself with his Turkish identity when he compares the Americans with Turkish people: I like Turkish people’s warmness because I (..) see, for (..) feel the US people trying to be warm and friendly but I think it’s pretentious, and I don’t feel like they’re acting like they wanted to act because they know that they have to act that way. But, we, Turkish people are friendlier. (Kiel, Interview 5, 19 April 2016)

He chose to identify with Turkish people by the pronoun ‘we’, and distanced himself from the American people by the pronoun ‘they’. Yet again, in another instance he sympathizes with Americans and says: I got used to drinking coffee, when I first came here, when I saw everyone, all the shuttle drivers and everyone was drinking coffee and walking or driving with a coffee cup in their hands [laughing]; at fi rst I found this hilarious because they were acting like they have to drink something all the time. But now I am also like them, walking around with a coffee cup because I feel dehydrated [laughs]. (Kiel, Interview 6, 24 May 2016)

He justifies his mimicking of Americans’ coffee-drinking habits, which he found ridiculous previously. His use of the deontic modal verb phrase ‘like they have to’, indicating an unreal (like) pressure from outside, reveals his sarcasm. This has become a salient fluctuation in his narrative throughout our conversations. Not only does he criticize his own ethnic identity, but he also alienates himself from Americans. Yet, at the same time, he adopts both identities about the issues he criticizes. So, he denaturalizes both identity positions. The following excerpt shows how Kiel forefronts his ethnic unbelonging and how he dissociates himself from his ancestors: When I went to the summer school in England once I saw a boy and he told me he was from France and I was like ‘Hi, I’m Kiel and I’m Turkish’ and he was like ‘Don’t think, ummh, I am French, I am Armenian, uhmm, and I don’t like you’ [laughs sarcastically] and I was like ‘OK, I don’t care’. Those historical hostilities are not important for me. I was being polite but he was being hostile, so I don’t care. (Kiel, Interview 4, 7 February 2016)

He animates the voice of the French-Armenian boy through reported speech in order to give his personalized account of being humiliated and Othered by the boy. He utters these sentences in an angry, mocking and sarcastic tone. In this way, he made his resentment salient to the listener. By positioning himself outside of his ethnic identity, he seeks to empower himself with his uncaring attitude to confront the unexpected hostility. In our other exchanges, he made it clear that he was very unhappy about

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such ‘historical crimes committed by the previous Turkish or Ottoman ancestors’ (Interview 4, 22 April 2016) and he repeatedly noted that ‘people cannot choose where they were born’. Thus, Kiel relates to some set of historical facts on a cultural timescale because it has a direct impact on his denaturalizing himself as Turkish and, I understood, that he sees those historical facts as the reasons hindering international and intercultural understanding. He positioned himself in-between and at a noncommittal zone. The following conversation reveals his defi nition of self: Kiel:

I don’t feel like I’m trying to adapt because I feel like I am rejecting the adaption here [the US]. I’m trying to preserve my own being. Hatice: What is it? Your Turkish being? Kiel: Turkish being! uhmm I don’t feel like a Turkish person and I don’t think, I don’t wanna, that I don’t like putting everyone in, on the wrong word, but I am preserving my own self and I don’t want to act like anyone else, I never try to act like American people. (Interview 3, 22 November 2015)

His earlier stories revealed that Kiel’s self-construction process is not linear, and he keeps on negotiating his self, place and feeling of belonging as an ongoing process. He admits that he feels neither Turkish nor American but he describes the place where he stands as ‘preserving my own self’, yet that self is not clearly defi ned. He even considers that calling people ‘Turkish’ is profiling them: ‘I don’t like putting everyone in, on the wrong word’. His image of ‘Turkishness’ is so distorted that he does not want to use it as an identity construct either for himself or for others. But neither does he feel American. His journey of in-betweenness and the related pressures, contradictions and inconsistencies were evident in his narratives throughout the year. Theme 2: Linguistic belonging and claims of ownership

Both participants claim ownership of English. They both described their sense of selves in the new language over time as different people. Kiel constructed himself as a new person and the new language allowed him to change: ‘Speaking a different language makes you a different person’ (Interview 5, 16 March 2016). Jerome, too, constructed his new language as a chance to take a different position: I know that I am, uhmm, a different person, different from what I used to be. I could never speak in Turkish but I think, me as a person who can speak English, I can express myself particularly about intimate things. (Jerome, Interview 5, 28 March 2016)

Jerome found a voice in English. He was able to verbalize his inner thoughts about his ‘intimate’ feelings more freely in English because of the distance he put between himself and the language. That space provided

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him with the freedom he needed to convey his messages more easily. Similarly, Kiel noticed that English allowed him to express himself differently and released him from constraints which affected him in Turkish. Uhmm, I believe, I think it is easier for me to speak in English, you know, when I speak in English I can easily swear [laughs]. I can say really terrible things which I never dare say in Turkish. Since English is more, uhmm, like artificial, it is not as disclosing as in Turkish. (Interview 5, 29 April 2016)

Kiel also put the same distance between himself and the language to be able to move freely around his feelings. The word he chose to describe the language – ‘artificial’ – is self-explanatory. I can understand that he considered the language as a manufactured substitute for his real, concrete language, Turkish. He took English for granted; to him, the language is like a disposable tool to be used at certain times. In that sense, their ownership of the language is quite a pragmatic task for them. They preferred to use it at certain times of need. Both Jerome and Kiel thought that their interlocutors sometimes rendered them inarticulate in English, and this had profound impacts on their sense of selves as English speakers. Jerome argued that acquiring fluency and native-like performance is crucial to challenge stereotyping: When I went to the field work in Lockport for internship, since those Americans in the field have never seen international people, they were making fun of my lack of daily language and accent. But I noticed that self-confidence is the most important thing. After a few defeats, I started to talk back, and once, I was so pissed off by the way one of the bullies in the field talk to me and treated me, I asked him explicitly why he harassed me constantly and I said ‘At least, I can speak two languages. You claim that you speak English only, and I suspect how much of the language you know properly’. You can understand how ignorant he is from the remarks he made about police shootings in Ferguson. He was like ‘If police shoot one of those n******,1 all of ‘em will buzz off, f******!’ (Jerome, Interview 4, 18 October 2015)

Jerome demonstrated how much he owns the language over a local person. According to the widespread and still very much alive ideology in the English language teaching (ELT) profession in the ‘expanding circle’, traditionally, the native speaker is the unquestioned better language model that embodies a superior Western teaching methodology. And Jerome, saddled with this contention, tried to authenticate his advanced proficiency in English as the teller of this narrative, solidifying his linguistic identity. Also striking is his use of direct reported speech, particularly in his performance of several scenarios for his listener. He used this series of mistreatments and bullying as a reason for his anger, agentive actions and marginalizing this person as ‘ignorant’ and a white supremacist. In some other instances as well, Jerome revealed a series of angry expressions and confrontation narratives which exemplified that his resentment is

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linked to the ‘unacceptable belittling’ about his language performance by others. When citing such incidents of mistreatment, he made it clear that he is very willing to talk back and he believes he could only do this by becoming more articulate in English. Although he was a silent and shy person at the beginning of the academic year, he turned into an angry, assertive and tenacious person at the end of his second year in the US. We can assume that the change in his narrative accounts might also be related to his ease with the interviewer that evolved/shifted from interviewerinterviewee to friends, familiarity with the local setting and the use of English as a neutral third space. Kiel, too, reported several instances of owning the language, yet illustrated a more legitimate positioning of the ‘native speakers’ in his mind. There has been a noted history in language teaching that almost equates non-native speaker status with impairment and promotes the colonial agenda that casts L2 speakers in a marked identity. Due to those discourses of nativespeakerism, those who speak the language with accents are met with prejudices and stereotypes. Certain identities are also imposed upon those speakers as immigrants or outsiders. Under the influence of similar discourses, Kiel questioned the reliability of his instructors. During the language courses he took at the university, Kiel had some conflict with two of his instructors several times. One of the instructors was a ‘non-native’ speaker and Kiel complained about the teacher’s accent and his mispronunciation of words. The writing instructor was not credible enough, according to Kiel, mainly due to his lack of ‘proper’ American accent; also, his being a ‘non-native’ speaker made Kiel think he was not knowledgeable enough to teach Kiel as an authority. Other sources such as the movies are more credible, according to Kiel. He empowers himself through his command of language and questions the authority of the nonnative English teacher. I learned English from English, American or Canadian teachers in Turkey and in England, so I know the importance of native speakers teaching their own language, so, actually, I don’t wanna learn something from someone that sometimes I know that I knew better than him. So, actually, I sometimes feel like, uhmm, a bigger person than my teacher, so that’s why I never want to get a class from a non-native speaker, not in the US exactly, maybe in Turkey it could be acceptable but not here because we pay a lot of tuition to get higher education. So I don’t wanna get the same education that I can get in Turkey. (Kiel, Interview 6, 24 May 2016)

Kiel’s authenticating himself as the owner of the language (even though he was also considered as ‘non-native’ by his interlocutors which he complained about in some instances) is violated by denying his instructor the same ownership. His denaturalization is also observed in his contention that the language still belongs to the inner circle countries. The interesting thing, however, was his attitude towards his ‘non-native’ instructors at the

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engineering department. According to him, those instructors were authorities even though they had a ‘non-native’ speaker accent because he appreciates their command over their area of expertise in engineering. Kiel also appreciates that they were ‘like native speakers’, which legitimizes their authority in his mind as instructors. Along with the impasse about the native speaker myth in their minds, both mentioned a hierarchy about the true owner of the language: American or British. In his previous remarks, Jerome criticized Americans harshly for being ‘insincere and fake’, and I assume as a way of resistance to enculturation and to question Americans as the authorities of language, he worked on his British accent. He was aware of his prejudices about Americans. But he seems to prefer British over American culture and appears more at ease with British culture. On several instances, he mentioned watching British sitcoms to improve his accent. He wrote ‘I suddenly started sounding like British people, and Americans particularly like my new accent and they say it is “dreamy” and polite. I really enjoy being recognized with this accent’ (Kiel, Diary entry 5, 17 April 2016). He equated culture to language, and the accents became the embodiment of the culture. Additionally, the associated traits of the language, such as politeness and desirability of the British accent, were all part of this equation. Kiel also reported that he imitated some clichés and stereotypes. Bakhtin (1981) explains that individuals try to position themselves in the new language by speaking in clichés, and also using the ‘social’ of the language, and interpreting the language as ‘monologic’ rather than ‘heteroglossic’. Based on the linguistic data I collected for the quantitative part of the broader study, I argue that in order to perform in their second language, both participants drew on some stereotypical and formulaic expressions until they found a genuine way to own the language. They were consciously aware of the fact that they were constructing these formulaic expressions, and were acutely aware that they borrow others’ words. So, their performance while speaking in clichés and memorized strings was like a parody. Yet, their performance based on imitations of others led to the loss of authenticity. In that sense, such stereotyping of language and culture was not useful to claim ownership. Kiel and Jerome’s feeling that they perform in another language created a dilemma in the sense that although they claim genuineness, they perform based on imitations of others, which leads to the loss of authenticity. Denaturalization in their discourse demonstrated that their assumptions about the seamlessness of their identity were disrupted once again. Discussion

Bucholtz and Hall (2005) described identity as a rather fluid construct of the intersubjective positioning of the self in relation to ‘Other’, so identity emerges dynamically through discourse and interaction. When I

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analyze the intersubjective tactics Kiel and Jerome adopted in their discourse, I can observe that there were many violations of their identity expectations, while they made claims of genuineness and artifice (e.g. they denaturalized their ethnic unbelonging claims, but violated their assertion that they were the owners of the language when they denied the same right to their non-native English teachers). How they empowered their second language identities throughout their stay in the US was also revealed in their narratives. In terms of their linguistic identity-making, however, they were very confident to claim ownership. Their authentic linguistic identity formation was also disrupted by their use of formulaic language in the process of owning the language. I observed both participants’ reconstruction process and negotiation through their contradictory narratives. They keep negotiating and remolding their identity in each instance or encounter on multiple timescales, past, present and cultural. Both identified with the ideoscapes of the host community of practice, so they embraced it and built an intercultural way of understanding the world. They adopted a translocal perspective of culture and language. Jerome and Kiel envisioned that their culture emanates from their international experiences, either touristic or educational, rather than the dominant discourses in/about their home country’s culture or language. They demonstrated a meta-analysis of their identity formation in their second language as they distanced themselves away from their home culture and opted for hybrid identity formations. They analyzed and criticized their own value system, beliefs and attitudes from outsiders’ perspectives. Kiel and Jerome detached themselves not only from their home culture but also from the local community’s culture (e.g. Kiel disowned his Turkish and Ottoman background in his encounter with the Armenian boy in France; Jerome emphasized that he identified himself as neither Turkish nor American). And several cases in their narratives illustrated their inhabiting a third space located neither in their home culture nor in the host society (e.g. Kiel: ‘I don’t feel like a Turkish person … but I am preserving my own self and I don’t want to act like anyone else, I never try to act like American people’). They wished to develop a global citizenship identity even though they felt alienated in their cultural and linguistic communities. All the hybrid identities constructed within the translocal ideoscapes emerged in a third space where territorial notions of culture did not build the participants’ understanding of the world. Yet they identified with translocal perspectives about culture and language. Although they developed fragmented, unconventional and marginal positionalities, they were intentionally able to develop a transnational stance in which they could engage in diverse cultures. Both participants demonstrated agency in terms of being legitimate owners of the language at varying degrees; and their evaluations on their beliefs about native-speaker status, language learning and success and language ownership found some solid expressions in their discourses (e.g.

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Jerome: ‘I suddenly started sounding like British people, and Americans particularly like my new accent and they say it is “dreamy” and I really enjoy being recognized with this accent’. Kiel ‘I don’t wanna learn something from someone that sometimes I know that I knew better than him’). This sense of performing in English led to a growing awareness of the contingency of their selves in English, which then turned into either ‘doing a linguistic identity’ or a natural performance. They regarded themselves as highly successful and proficient users of language. Although they learned English in foreign language contexts, they developed a good sense of proficiency and they thought rather highly of themselves in terms of their language production. In their narratives, they referred to some proficiency areas as more valuable, such as fluency, appropriateness and accent. As for their performance, they attributed ownership to language training rather than nativespeakerism. Yet they did not offer the same generosity to their language instructors (e.g. Kiel’s negative remarks about his writing instructor). They adopted some learning strategies to be able to maintain their sense of successful communication, such as mimicking movie or TV stars for their accents and formulaic use of language. Jerome tried to adopt a British accent through TV shows and believed that he was perceived as a ‘native speaker’ and adored by Americans for his ‘dreamy British accent’. Kiel was praised for his articulate speech and nice American accent. They both claimed to carve authentic linguistic identities; however, their speaking in clichés and formulaic language disrupted their claim of genuineness in English and could not prevent them from interpreting the language as monologic rather than heteroglossic. This is a fundamental paradox because on the one hand, they experienced the pain of using and imitating a symbolic system that belongs to Others; on the other hand, they achieved a pure bliss because by gaining access to this symbolic system they became subjects who could reproduce the system. With the awareness that the language belongs to Others and their imitation will never suffice, my participants as social actors attempted to own their second language and reinvented it by remolding it every day. Conclusion

All the language dynamics in today’s world, the resonances of which are still ongoing, have been caused by the territorialized nation state, yet it can safely be said that mobility is the most central concept of culture and identity in late-modern societies. An individual or a group’s access to resources is related to mobility. Hence, there are many repercussions about the idea of ‘belonging’ in relation to nationalism. In light of the combining concepts of ‘transnationalism’ and ‘hybridity’, belonging cannot determine who the Other is, yet the Other describes who and what we are, what space we occupy in the world, what functions we show in it.

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And how we construct ourselves intersubjectively in relation to the Other becomes our identity. Throughout the chapter, I attempted to show that dynamic human interaction involves the emergent and dialogic nature of narrative and its transformative function. Border crossers organize their hybrid lives and their multiple reconstructions of their identities, which are shaped not only by the sociophysical structure of the host country but also by the multiple alternative identity positionings offered by the interplay between the social world and the discursive situations in the multilingual language ecology. In terms of their intersubjective identity negotiations, the participants were in the grip of a clash: whether to belong and where to belong. One important take-away from the study is that there is now a pressing need to move beyond the local to the transnational. The new language learning contexts allow for revising the traditional contexts where homogenous, nation-state ideologies are/were prominent. Successful communication in a second language would require understanding what the other party in a dialogue remembers from the past, how they position themselves in the present time and what they imagine for the future. And there is ever the need to understand the same things for ourselves, too. Note (1) The participant quotes someone else’s use of the n- word and f- word which were spelled out in the interview, but the researcher abbreviated these words of profanity when sharing the data.

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Canagarajah, S. (2005) Changing Communicative Needs, Shifting Pedagogical Priorities, Revised Assessment Objectives. Paper presented at the featured symposium on The Assessment of World Englishes, 14th World Congress of Applied Linguistics, Madison, WI. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Transnationalism and translingualism: How they are connected. In X. You (ed.) Transnational Writing Education: Theory, History, and Practice (pp. 41–60). New York: Taylor & Francis. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haugen, E. (2001) The Ecology of Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Jain, R. (2014) Global Englishes, translinguistic identities, and translingual practices in a community college ESL classroom: A practitioner researcher reports. TESOL Journal 5 (3), 490–522. Kanno, Y. and Norton, B. (2003) Imagined communities and educational possibilities. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 2 (4), 241–249. Kramsch, C.J. (1994) Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C.J. and Steffensen, V.S. (2008) Ecological perspectives on second language acquisition and socialization. In N.H.Hornberger (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2nd edn, pp. 17–28). Kramsch, C.J. and Whiteside, A. (2008) Language ecology in multilingual settings: Towards a theory of symbolic competence. Applied Linguistics 29 (4), 645–671. Lemke, J.L. (2002) Becoming the village: Education across lives. In G. Wells and G. Glaxton (eds) Learning for Life in the 21st Century: Sociocultural Perspectives on the Future of Education (pp. 41–60). Oxford: Blackwell. Lemke, J.L. (2004) Language development and identity: Multiple time scales in the social ecology of learning. In J.C. Cramsch (ed.) Language Acquisition and Language Socialization (pp. 68–87). New York: Continuum. Nederveen Pieterse, J. (2009) Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (2nd edn). Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. Ochs, E. and Capps, L. (1996) Narrating the self. Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1), 19–43. Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Rampton, B. (2001) Crossing. In A. Duranti (ed.) Key Terms in Language and Culture (pp. 49–51). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Rampton, B., Blommaert, J., Arnaut, K. and Spotti, M. (2015) Superdiversity and sociolinguistics: Introduction. In B. Rampton, J. Blommaert, K. Arnaut and M. Spotti (eds) Language and Superdiversity (pp. 21–48). New York: Routledge. Saldana, J. (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London: Sage. Schieffelin, B.B. and Ochs, E. (1986) Language Socialization across Cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press. Uryu, M., Steffensen, V. and Kramsch, C.J. (2013) The ecology of intercultural interaction: Timescales, temporal ranges and identity dynamics. Language Sciences 41, 41–59. Warriner, D.E. (2007) Transnational literacies: Immigration, language learning, and identity. Linguistics and Education 18, 201–214. Whiteside, A. (2006) Research on transnational Yucatec Maya-speakers negotiating multilingual California. Journal of Applied Linguistics 3, 103–112. Wolcott, H.F. (1994) Transforming Qualitative Data: Description, Analysis, and Interpretation. London: Sage Publications. Yazan, B. (2018) Contexts of English language teaching as glocal spaces. In A.F. Selvi and N. Rudolph (eds) Conceptual Shifts and Contextualized Practices in Education for Glocal Interaction: Issues and Implications (pp. 219–234). Singapore: Springer.

5 Transnational Socialization of a Graduate Student from Turkey: Negotiating Identities, Asserting Agency and Navigating Emotions Ufuk Keles and Bedrettin Yazan

Over the last two centuries, education has been one of the main reasons why individuals leave their home, cross national borders and engage in transnational spaces (Phan, 2016). Such transnational movement for education purposes has become more commonplace and intense as the neoliberal global economy promotes the internationalization and transnationalization of higher education (Francois et  al., 2016; Huang, 2007; Naidoo, 2009). Therefore, in the last two decades more and more scholars and students have become border crossers (Canagarajah, 2016a, 2016b). Emrullah (hereafter, all proper names are pseudonyms), the focal participant of the research study narrated in this chapter, is one of these students. Originally from Turkey, Emrullah is on the path to becoming a researcher in engineering in the US. Utilizing narrative inquiry as a research method (Barkhuizen et al., 2013), we share his story based on the data we collected via journals along with focus group and individual interviews. Our research goal is to explore Emrullah’s acts of agency as he transforms into a transnational researcher through his engagement and socialization in transnational spaces (Canagarajah, 2018; Duff, 2019) in which he negotiates varying dimensions of his identity (i.e. racial, linguistic, religious, cultural, national). Theoretical Framework

Our study is guided by the theorization of transnationalism (Vertovec, 2009), second language (L2) socialization (Duff, 2012, 2019) and liminality/ 62

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in-betweenness (Bhabha, 1992; Canagarajah, 2018). Transnationalism denotes a number of networks, communications and relationships connecting people and institutions that span across cultural, ideological, linguistic and geopolitical borders of nation-states (Vertovec, 2009). With the increasing flow of people, commodities and ideas – both physically and virtually through globalization – transnational mobility has been changing the ways in which applied linguists approach the use and learning of languages (Canagarajah, 2017; Duff, 2019). In this study, we focus on our participant as a transnational graduate student who crossed the borders of nation-states and took part in transnational spaces during his studies in the US. Because Emrullah’s transnational experiences involve socialization into both monolingually- and multilingually-oriented English-speaking communities in the US, we rely on Duff ’s (2012, 2019) theorization of L2 socialization. She defi nes it as a process by which language learners socialize into an L2 community through their interactions with more experienced members of the community. Seeking legitimate membership (Wenger, 1998), language learners navigate and negotiate the practices of the target language. Such negotiation involves exposure to and engagement with cultures and languages. However, L2 socialization is not a static, straightforward, unidirectional process, but rather a fluid, complex, multidirectional one. L2 socialization does not necessarily result in the reproduction of cultural and discursive practices, but may have unpredicted outcomes including ‘hybrid practices, identities, and values; the incomplete or partial appropriation of the L2 and status within the L2 community; or rejection of target norms and practices’ (Duff, 2007: 311). In Emrullah’s case, his L2 socialization involves ongoing renegotiation of a transnational identity through his experiences in the US, which makes him self-aware in terms of his nation of origin, race, gender, religious beliefs and accent. His participation in multilayered transnational spaces, physically and virtually, leads him to reimagine languages and cultures beyond the physical boundaries of Turkey and the US as well as the binary, simplistic understanding of EFL and ESL contexts. Transnational socialization inevitably involves traversing liminal, inbetween spaces, in which individuals situate themselves ‘for identity construction, ideological reflection, and communicative practice’ (Canagarajah, 2018: 41). This situatedness leads them to seek identities and language practices which transcend ‘bounded, static, and territorialized constructs and norms’ in terms of communities, cultures and languages (2018: 41). Liminality liberates border crossers from the pressure of nation-state ideologies as it allows them to fashion new social identities and ‘new indexicalities and conventions for voice’ (2018: 43). Crossing, problematizing and redrawing borders, these individuals enjoy the hybridization and deterritorialization in their in-between spaces. At the same time, however, liminality poses new challenges to these individuals inhabiting the borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987; Bhabha, 1992; Canagarajah, 2016a). That is, because they maintain their connections with multiple languages, communities, cultures and

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nations, they may still feel pushed and pulled by the dominant borderpatrolling nation-state ideologies. Therefore, we theorize that as transnational individuals venture into and position themselves in liminal spaces, they defy these ideologies, which involves constant emotional labor emerging from and leading to intense and inevitable identity work (Ajsic, 2015; Jain, 2021; Lieb, 2021; Rudolph et al., 2019). Methodology

Our purpose in this study is to narrate Emrullah’s transnational socialization story through his experiences as an English language learner in Turkey and the southwestern US, and then as a graduate student who completed his master’s studies in a southeastern state university in the US. To that end, we analyzed data from multiple sources (i.e. journals, interviews and documents) and organized our fi ndings by utilizing narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen et al., 2013). Data Collection and Analysis

The data in this study derived from a larger study in which the primary data included four journal entries (JE), two video-recorded focus groups (FG), three audio-recorded interviews (Int), and field observations (FO). We conducted both the focus group and interviews in a semistructured format. As secondary data, we examined the websites of the language schools Emrullah attended and looked at Emrullah’s curriculum vitae (CV) and his statements of purpose. We collected FG, JE and Int data in sequential steps over almost two and a half months in 2018 (see Table 5.1). In the larger study, we carried out data collection and analysis concurrently, and we conducted further analysis after we completed the data collection. Initially, we held the first focus group interview with six language learners from Turkey who lived in Secondville and were current or Table 5.1 Data collection procedures Date

Source

Overarching Theme

Mode

Language

Feb 24

FG1

Language learning in Turkey and the US

Video

Turkish

Mar 14

JE1

Initial experiences in the US

Written

English

Mar 27

Int1

Open-ended questions about JE1

Audio

Turkish

Apr 3

JE2

Experiences with Turkish people in the US

Written

English

Apr 12

Int2

Open-ended questions about JE2

Audio

Turkish

Apr 23

JE3

Experiences with L1 English speakers in the US

Written

English

Apr 26

Int3

Open-ended questions about JE3

Audio

Turkish

May 2

JE4

Experiences with L2 English speakers in the US

Written

English

May 7

FG2

Retrospective self-evaluation of sojourn in the US

Video

Turkish

Transnational Socialization of a Graduate Student from Turkey

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potential graduate students at the time. Then, we translated and transcribed the conversation in order to start the first round of coding. Based on this initial analysis, we formulated open-ended questions (both in Turkish and English) to provide prompts for the journal entries. In the present study reported in this chapter, we chose to focus on Emrullah’s case for two main reasons that specifically pertain to the scope of this volume on transnational practices and identities. First, among all the participants, Emrullah was the only one who reported self-transformation throughout his journey crossing national, linguistic and cultural borders, and he commented on this transformation in his journal entries and interviews. Second, Emrullah stood out among all the participants in the larger study in terms of asserting his agency in shifting his approach to learning English and socializing into the cultures of monolingual and multilingual communities in the US. We believed his case would provide us with the data to examine a graduate student’s transnational trajectory following that shift towards agentive decision-making. Emrullah chose to write all his entries in English. After receiving a JE from him, we coded it. We used open-ended questions to explore his experiences in the subsequent individual interview. We asked him questions, such as: ‘In your journal entry, you said … Can you please talk about it more?’, ‘What did you mean by saying … Can you elaborate on that?’, or ‘You mentioned [person], can you talk about your relationship with [person] a little bit more?’ After the first author (Ufuk) conducted all the interviews, we transcribed, translated and coded them. Once we completed data collection, transcriptions and translations, we went through all of the codes and came up with initial themes. We also collected supplementary data from Emrullah’s CV to further explore how Emrullah’s transnational socialization is reflected in his own words. Informed by narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen et al., 2013), we created rich descriptions using Emrullah’s own words to support our interpretations (Denzin & Lincoln, 2011). In a similar vein, we used extracts emanating from interview and journal entry data to scrutinize how Emrullah’s English language and graduate studies have helped him develop a transnational identity before, during and after his three-year sojourn in the US. During focus groups and interviews, he very often code switched between Turkish and English (while he chose to write all of his JEs in English). In our presentation of the fi ndings, where direct quotes are used, Emrullah’s original statements are cited without any changes. However, we translated all his Turkish utterances into English. Once we organized the themes and wrote our fi ndings section, we shared it with Emrullah for member checking (Denzin & Lincoln, 2017). After he read the text, he sent us the manuscript back with his comments. He confi rmed our interpretations but suggested minor changes. After incorporating Emrullah’s feedback, we fi nalized the narrative of his story, which we present below.

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Participant Background

When Emrullah was a little boy, his family emigrated from Eastern Anatolia in Turkey, a rural region populated predominantly by the Kurdish minority, to a small industrialized Western Anatolian city in Turkey due to the ongoing economic and political turmoil in the eastern regions in the 1990s. They settled in a neighborhood populated by fellow former villagers, with whom they had family bonds. In time, they and their neighbors built a Kurdish community surrounded by ethnically ‘Turkish’ neighborhoods. The ethnic differences in the city often caused tensions between the two ethnic groups leading to further marginalization of the Kurdish population. Emrullah’s extended family lived together in a four-story house. They were all devout Muslims and raised their children according to Islamic practices. Their religious identity played a more defi ning role than ethnic identity in their everyday life. However, they were marginalized by the secular nation-state ideologies both for their religious and ethnolinguistic identities. As a result of such ideologies, like many of his Kurdish peers, Emrullah experienced discrimination at elementary school. Since Kurdish (Emrullah’s family language) did not have an officially recognized status in Turkey, and Turkish was the only official language of schooling, Emrullah did not receive any Turkish as a second language education at school. Against this backdrop, having received no formal education about how to serve Kurdish-speaking students, his elementary school teacher ignored Emrullah’s presence along with that of three other Kurdish students in his class. The teacher told them to remain silent instead of seeking ways to incorporate their linguistic and cultural backgrounds into the pedagogy. He even condoned Emrullah’s absence in class. Emrullah’s father used this to his advantage and took Emrullah to work with him on construction sites. As a result, Emrullah did not learn to read and write in Turkish until sixth grade. Although he started off with these serious disadvantages, Emrullah succeeded in his later academic life owing to his personal efforts and his older sisters’ support. He graduated as a high honors student from a university in a small city in Turkey with a double major in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical and Electronics Engineering in 2013. With a desire to learn English and pursue his MS and PhD degrees in the US, he applied to the Ministry of National Education’s (MNE) scholarship to study abroad. Upon being granted the scholarship, he started a six-month intensive English course (28 hours a week) at a state university in Istanbul. After completing the intensive course, Emrullah participated in the one-year-long ESL course in Firstville, a large cosmopolitan city in the southern US. There, he successfully completed his English language studies and received a satisfactory TOEFL score. Then, he moved to Secondville, a small southeastern college town, to pursue his MS degree

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in Mechanical Engineering at Secondville State University. He fi nished this program in two years. Upon graduation, he returned to Turkey for a year before he started his PhD in another southeastern US university. Positionality Statement

Our acquaintance with Emrullah played a prominent role in all aspects of this study – from research design to data analysis. Coming from similar backgrounds as Emrullah, we, as researchers, believe that our ‘insider’ perspective provided us with a unique vantage point to approach Emrullah’s case. Ufuk especially had the opportunity to build a close relationship with Emrullah as a language learner in Turkey and, later, as a sojourner in the US. Ufuk was one of the English teachers at the university where Emrullah studied English in 2014 before his sojourn to the US. Along with teaching English, Ufuk shared with Emrullah his personal experiences of the US culture he had had during two short stays in various US cities. He also helped Emrullah write his initial statements of purpose, prepare his CV and recommendation letters, and search for graduate schools in his field. After Emrullah completed his intensive English course, he moved to the US. Although they had developed a close teacher/student relationship, for two years, Ufuk and Emrullah had lessened contact until 2016, when Ufuk was awarded a scholarship to pursue a doctoral degree at a southeastern state university in the US. Upon learning on social media that Ufuk was coming to Secondville, Emrullah reached out to Ufuk on his Facebook account to offer help and hosted Ufuk for a week in his home while Ufuk searched for more permanent accommodation. Emrullah had been in Secondville for eight months when Ufuk arrived there. As an old(er)-timer, he helped Ufuk fi nd an apartment, open a bank account, get a cellphone and apply for a social security number. Emrullah also introduced Ufuk to his close friends and members of the Turkish community. Owing to Emrullah’s help, Ufuk settled down smoothly and easily in his new context. Although Emrullah maintained his respect for Ufuk as his former teacher, and despite an age difference, they became good friends in time. Together, they took week-long road trips to different parts of the US, and spent time going to the bars, cafes and restaurants. Emrullah also stayed in Ufuk’s house in the last semester of his master’s program. They had many discussions about different topics, which helped Ufuk get to know Emrullah even better. Ufuk observed (in fascination) the personal, social and linguistic transformation Emrullah went through from a quiet EFL learner from a religiously conservative family to a sociable ‘party boy’ who made a lot of friends from international backgrounds. In a way, Ufuk and Emrullah played important roles in each other’s lives. At fi rst, as a teacher, Ufuk played a significant part in Emrullah’s L2 socialization, but later, Emrullah became one of the key actors in Ufuk’s

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socialization in the US. This study was borne out of this unique relationship between Ufuk and Emrullah. Bedrettin is also from Turkey and was a tenure track assistant professor at the same university where Ufuk and Emrullah pursued their graduate studies at the time of the study. Bedrettin became Ufuk’s mentor, and later also advisor and chair of his dissertation. Bedrettin also knows Emrullah well outside the university. They have occasionally played soccer together and met up on different occasions. All three – Emrullah, Ufuk and Bedrettin – have thus been members of the same campus community as well as the local Turkish community. This ‘insider’ perspective has afforded us – Ufuk and Bedrettin – to understand the dynamics of the communities in which Emrullah participated over three years. Findings: A Story of a Border Crosser

In this section, we narrate Emrullah’s story of border-crossing fi rst as an English language learner/speaker, and next as a graduate student. We present our findings in three parts: ‘The story so far’, ‘Interactions with(in) different communities’ and ‘(Re)adjustment and (re)adoption: Streamlining the process’. The fi rst section focuses on Emrullah’s experiences in a chronological fashion. The second section centers on the communities of practice to which he sought membership in the US. The third section discusses the changes in his life stemming from his adaptation to the circumstances he encountered along the way. The story so far

Emrullah’s transnational socialization began in Turkey and continued in the US. He took an intensive English course at a Turkish university for six months prior to his sojourn in the US. At the time of the study, Emrullah had been in the US for about three years. In his fi rst year, he was an ESL learner in Firstville, a cosmopolitan city in the southern US. Then, he went to Secondville, a small college town in southeastern US, for his master’s degree in mechanical engineering. Learning English: Getting ready for the American Dream

Emrullah’s participation in transnational spaces is rooted in his conscious choices informed by his future prospects. He ‘will be going beyond [his] imagination as a[n] engineer or as a human being, … interacting with different people … exposed to different culture’ (Int1). His awareness of English as a global language, and his desire to learn it developed gradually. He stated, ‘Learning English is a real milestone in my life whereby I will make my dreams come true’ (JE1). For his dreams, Emrullah decided that he needed to go abroad, preferably to the US, to receive his MS and PhD degrees in an English-dominant context. He believed studying

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abroad was the only way to build a strong international network in the field of mechanical engineering. Emrullah received advice from close friends who had moved to the US for graduate studies. Then, he researched and applied for the MNE scholarship. Earning the scholarship, Emrullah signed a contract with MNE which involved receiving funds to cover Emrullah’s school expenses (the six-month EFL course in Turkey, a year-long ESL course in the USA, MS and PhD studies), as well as a monthly stipend (~$2,000). In return, Emrullah would complete his PhD degree and go back to Turkey to work at a state university for twice as many years as his study abroad. Otherwise, he would have to pay back the money MNE had spent on his education with interest in five years. Emrullah believed he ‘took so many risks’ and would have to ‘pay back $100.000’. However, he did not plan to move back to Turkey, which meant he would become non-compliant with the scholarship contract and would have to pay the compensation penalty. He had been thinking about this since the scholarship application, as he had decided to stay in the US ‘whatever the cost. I mean there are millions of opportunities here. It would be nice to go back to Turkey but it’s not gonna satisfy me. I wasn’t satisfied back then. It seems staying here is a better option’ (Int3). Because moving back to Turkey and working as an academic was an undesirable option for him, he believed he could fi nd a way to stay in the US and pay the compensation penalty to the MNE. Pre-sojourn preparations: Getting ready to ‘feel/fill in the blanks’

Emrullah spent six months studying an intensive English course at a state university in Turkey. As part of the scholarship contract, the course was designed to teach MNE grantees general English for the first four months and then to prepare them for TOEFL. If the grantees did not receive a minimum score (80/120) from TOEFL to apply directly for a graduate program abroad, but earned at least (50/120), they were given another year to study English in an ‘English-speaking country’. Taking this course, Emrullah performed well as a hardworking yet quiet student, who listened to his teachers attentively and did his homework regularly. As it was an intensive course starting from elementary level, Emrullah continuously felt under pressure. He said, ‘… rather than academic, the goal was to get a score. We prepared for TOEFL. We need the score’ (FG1). Receiving a cut score from TOEFL was the first challenge Emrullah needed to overcome. Uncertain of what the future held for him, each day he would go straight to the university’s library with his classmates to review what they had studied that day and to prepare for the next day. The teachers, including Ufuk, were also pressured because they had to ‘finish’ a coursebook each month. Towards the end of the six-month period, almost sure that he would receive the cut score to continue his language studies in the US, Emrullah started searching for language schools in the US. He researched the potential cities and ‘found [Firstville] is one of the biggest developed state and

70 Part 1: Transnational Practices and Identities of ELLs in the US

living expenses is accordingly cheap. [Firstville] has one of the lowest costs of living in the United States, so food and housing are all cheaper’ (JE2) than other big cities in the US. Looking back, Emrullah thinks the English course in Turkey did not prepare him for his stay in Firstville because it focused mostly on grammar and vocabulary. His assignments were usually based on ‘fi ll in the blanks’ worksheets. However, these highly decontextualized and mechanical drills did not help him ‘feel’ the blanks (the pragmatic aspects of the language) when communicating in English. While he was able to ‘fill’ in the blanks with an appropriate answer, these exercises did not help him understand (feel) the conveyed messages in the sentence. Therefore, Emrullah turned to YouTube and watched TED Talks to improve his cultural knowledge along with his listening skills. For example, he learned some tips from an Indian radio programmer to communicate in the US culture effectively: ‘The first thing is “Hi!” A smile. Keep away from pep talks as much as possible. Not extreme – questions with simple answers about their life. I mean – like “Why are you here?”, “Is it a tiring job?”’ (Int1). This advice proved to be a helpful strategy for Emrullah especially when socializing with people during his sojourn in the US. He also turned to Hollywood movies and TV shows to learn about the US culture towards the end of the intensive course in Turkey. ‘You watch American movies – all the time. Hollywood – you know. You expect, I mean, you think [American] people are smarter than you, and more intelli – it seems that way, but you understand after a while – that they are not smarter’ (Int1). However, after living in the US, he realized that such a monolithic representation of the US culture was misleading. An act of agency: Leaving the comfort zone

Emrullah knew that ‘starting out as a new student in a program abroad can feel intimidating and lonely, so trying to step out of your comfort zone … may not be as easy as you think’ (JE1). When he decided to apply for the MNE scholarship, he asserted a significant act of agency which required subsequent commitment and investment (Deters et al., 2015). Leaving his comfort zone was the beginning of an exciting journey; he ‘couldn’t fall asleep the night before [his] flight, … it was one of the critical step[s] for my future life’ (JE1). He boarded the plane with a mixture of sadness and hopefulness: ‘It was the time to say “GOOD BYE EVERYONE, GOOD BYE MY LOVELY COUNTRY” and please welcome me the holly molly city of Firstville’ (JE1; uppercase letters in original). Emrullah then described his border-crossing as a rebirth. He felt like he was ‘reborn in the US … a new kid is born but in his later ages. His age starts from 25. He has to learn the language immediately. He has to earn money immediately … but has no flexibility’ (Int2). This metaphor demonstrates Emrullah’s emotions as a newcomer in the US when he did not feel like he could ‘move around freely’ (Int2) after/despite crossing national borders.

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Experiencing problems: Unforeseen obstacles on the way

Emrullah encountered many initial issues with accommodation, transportation and communication with the locals. For the fi rst time in his life, he had to book a hotel room, rent a car, sign a house lease and use rideshare applications. He needed to learn how to do these in a new cultural environment speaking in his new language. However, he reframed these struggles as enforced learning opportunities and reflected: ‘When you struggle with them, you learn a lot from them. I mean, I learned the things in a week – that you would normally learn in a language course in three months. Having difficulties … put me back on track’ (Int1). Learning from these challenges, Emrullah started feeling confident when communicating with his teachers, classmates and the local people. Emrullah’s actual crossing of the US border was a painful one. At passport control, the customs officer asked him what the purpose of his visit was. Assuming the officer already knew the answer, Emrullah made a joke saying, ‘I came here only to say Hi! to you. Nothing else!’ (Int1). Not laughing at this joke, the customs officer sent him to a detention room where he spent ‘more than 5 hours in a huge room with many people from all around the world’ (JE1) and lost almost all hope. He subsequently realized how his border-crossing involved an acute process of racialization: You may be sent back to your country because of your name. It was one of the most awkward moments in my life. Inside – there is an Indian guy with no shoes – I mean, the air is freezing ice inside. Don’t you feel cold? There is a Mexican. There are people from different nations. And, err, they are all like – look like terrorists from the Middle East – like with a bomb in their hand. None of them is blonde. None of them is white. They all have darker skin. There is not even a single white man. (Int1)

This unfortunate event led Emrullah to question all his beliefs about being an immigrant in the US. He continued to reflect on this experience when he was racialized because of his looks and name. I look like a middle eastern guy, actually my ancestors is from middle east many years ago moved to Turkey, I could understand when someone say that I am from middle east but still couldn’t understand even if I have been telling them I am from turkey and I cannot speak Arabic but still been asked to talk Arabic, that’s sucks. (JE1)

Emrullah defied being positioned as a Middle Easterner and tended to use humor as a coping mechanism. He also chose to use his last name, which did not imply any religious orientation, instead of ‘Emrullah’, to alleviate the impact of that unwanted racial position. I have a short last name hopefully it helps me to get coffee from Starbucks without feeling [like] an normal person not like terrorist. If I was spelling my first name I was sure, surrounding would be scared by hearing ‘[Emru] AllAAHH’. ‘Oh, my gosh! what if he has a bomb?’ [laughs] I heard that one time but it wasn’t while my name was pronounced, hopefully. (JE1)

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He heard such discriminatory comments so many times that they became normalized to some extent in his everyday life. He stated that he learned in time not to worry about the things he could not change. For him, ‘life is too short to take people seriously’ especially when he ‘will see them only once’ (Int3). Interactions with(in) different communities

During his language learning in Firstville and master’s degree in Secondville, Emrullah interacted with many people from various ethnic, national and linguistic backgrounds. At school, he developed interpersonal relationships with his classmates from different nations. He also met immigrants from all over the world (in addition to Turkey), and US locals in off -campus communities. In time, his interpersonal relationships contributed to diff erent aspects of his transnational language socialization. Emrullah’s relationships with the local Turkish communities

Identifying as a devout Muslim, Emrullah made contact with the Turkish community for his fi rst Friday prayers in Firstville at a mosque frequented mostly by Turkish people. The mosque not only functioned as a place of worship, but also as a meeting venue for religion-based cultural events for the Turkish community. Emrullah met the congregation, mostly members of the Gulen movement.1 Among these were academicians, who shared with him their personal experiences about US universities. One of them even reviewed Emrullah’s CV and statements of purpose in his graduate program applications. However, due to the coup d’état attempt in Turkey in 2016, the Turkish government radically changed its view of Gulenists from like-minded Muslim people to treacherous terrorists who had betrayed their country. Emrullah stopped going to their mosque and broke bonds with the members of the Gulen movement. With the fear of losing his scholarship, Emrullah started approaching all Turkish people with caution. Before Emrullah moved to Secondville to pursue his master’s studies, he contacted two Turkish friends (Kerim and Efe) and stayed in their house while he looked for a place to live. Unlike Emrullah, Kerim and Efe came from Turkish families with a secular worldview. As old(er)-timers in Secondville, they invited Emrullah to stay with them for two weeks although their friendship was relatively new. They helped him settle in Secondville and introduced him to their social network, including the members of the small Turkish community. Receiving Kerim and Efe’s help, Emrullah ‘completely adjusted to [Secondville] in a few weeks’ (JE3). Emrullah hung out with them on Friday and Saturday nights. In time, they developed a close relationship and remained best friends even after Kerim and Efe went back to Turkey.

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Both in Firstville and Secondville, Emrullah observed people from the Turkish community who had lived in the US for many years and noticed their language practices were less than ‘perfect’. Paying attention to how Turkish people ‘still speak a broken English even ten years from now’, Emrullah thought that making mistakes and having a Turkish accent were ‘not a big deal’ (Int3). Noting these old(er)-timers speak English with a Turkish accent and make grammatical ‘errors’, yet express themselves well, Emrullah realized that ‘what matters is the ability to communicate with people, to express yourself’ (Int3). This realization helped him feel comfortable with his accent which he viewed as integral to his identity rather than a language deficit which he needed to ‘fi x’: I still have an accent. Stemming from Turkish. Other – it will never go away. I don’t care about it any longer – that I have an accent because it is not – I mean, err, I do not have to speak this language like an American. I can speak Turkish very well; plus, their language, right? but they can’t speak another language. When I learned this, I said – well, I started learning the language. (FG1)

This approach to accent influenced Emrullah’s language learning endeavors. His accent was no longer a sign of ‘broken’ English but rather a token of his multilingual background. He felt empowered by discarding his admiration of idealized ‘native’ English, and viewed his multilingual identity as being superior over monolingual English speakers. Emrullah’s relationships with multilingual English speakers

In the broader cosmopolitan city of Firstville, Emrullah’s fi rst conversations occurred mostly with multilingual speakers of English, who were either international students from different parts of the world or immigrants from other countries. For instance, he received help from the Venezuelan receptionist (Maria) at the hotel he stayed for the fi rst four days. Maria helped him fi nd a place to stay, explained how the public transportation worked, and gave him rides to school. Because of their shared experiences as immigrants in the US, Emrullah framed himself and Maria with the identity of ‘foreigners’: ‘You feel that you are not different from each other. They have been oppressed in this country, as well. They are foreigners, and you are a foreigner’ (Int1). At school, his classmates were from Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Italy, Russia and Taiwan. Emrullah felt comfortable among them and established close friendships. He stated, ‘You naturally become best friends with other international kids, no matter where they’re from’ (JE1). However, his interactions with them remained limited to recess and lunch times since he needed to take the bus home shortly after the day’s classes ended. In his third month, he bought a car, which provided him the flexibility to meet with his friends anytime. He drove them to restaurants, cafes and the movies. He tried different foods from around the world and

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watched movies from different countries. In time, his new friends became Emrullah’s new ‘family’: You feel homesick at times, right? In fact, whenever I missed my home, … there were the Japanese and the Korean friends. When you see them, they become part of your family. You stop yearning – that feeling of homesickness fl ies away. I mean – for some you say, I mean ‘she looks like my sister’. Well, things like that. (Int2)

Emrullah felt like he was reborn at the age of twenty-five as he moved to a new country and continued learning a new language through transnational participation. Emrullah’s multilingual, international friends became his ‘family’, and this family-like relationship helped him deal with his homesickness. Additionally, Emrullah noticed that his multilingual friends ‘speak a broken language’ like himself, which made him ‘feel comfortable’ (JE3) in transnational spaces communicating with other multilingual English speakers. He had less anxiety stemming from his fear of making mistakes, but he also believed his target language learning was delayed as he did not communicate with monolingual English speakers, i.e. the ‘ideal’ speakers. Emrullah’s relationships with monolingual English speakers

Emrullah developed close relationships in monolingual Englishspeaking communities much later than in multilingual communities. In Firstville, he was able to make only one close American friend, Sam, an elderly white US citizen, who had traveled to and lived in around 40 countries, including Turkey. Owing to Sam’s multicultural background and interest in different religions, Emrullah quickly became friends with him. They conversed about Islam and Christianity. Although he was a missionary, Sam never attempted to convert Emrullah to his religion. He helped Emrullah fi nd a valet parking job. This business was run by an Iranian immigrant. Sam and Emrullah went on local cultural tours to museums and art galleries. Unable to fi nd an apartment with a short-term lease, Emrullah stayed in Sam’s house in his last two months in Firstville. His interactions with Sam prepared Emrullah to communicate with other monolingual English speakers. Meanwhile, he downloaded the Meetup application on his smartphone to fi nd groups who welcomed everyone to join their gatherings. Reflecting on a church ESL group, Emrullah stated, ‘I participated in speaking classes. I liked it a lot’ (Int2). After a while, he joined other interest groups via Meetup, including photography, snowboarding and study abroad, but he could not befriend anyone since the members of each group did not invite him out after their gatherings. After moving to Secondville, Emrullah soon realized that the local population was made up of primarily monolingual English speakers both on- and off-campus. He found it difficult to make friends with the local English speakers, saying, ‘Only very few of your American friends will

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invite you to their house … There’s always small talks – only. I mean there is not a welcoming environment’ (FG2). Unlike his international classmates in Firstville, who were open to learning from and with each other, his monolingual English-speaking peers in his master’s program seemed hesitant to let him into their lives. Emrullah used internet resources to socialize with monolingual English speakers, to overcome his fear of speaking to ‘native’ English speakers, to acquire more cultural knowledge and improve his pronunciation skills. He took online courses on Coursera, followed YouTubers, listened to TEDx talks and studied MIT’s open-source materials. He also learned how to play snooker in local bars. Since college football was the most popular sport in Secondville, he went to football games and learned about its rules in a very short time. He started dating (and soon living with) a self-identified Black American student, Sandra, who was pursuing an MA degree in creative writing. Dating Sandra, ‘learning from a native speaker allows [him] to hear the language in its true form, begin to adjust to hearing the local accent’, which ‘can be an awesome, and free, way to continue learning while building relationships in your new community’ (JE4). He also participated in the reading circle meetings organized in Sandra’s house once a week. Emrullah benefited from co-hosting Sandra’s peers from her department, as he said: ‘Sandra’s friends come to our house – they frequently do. I like having long conversations with them. I actually learn a lot from them’ (Int1). For him, such events were eye-opening since they read and talked about literature, which was a completely unchartered territory for him as an engineering student. Although his knowledge of Turkish literature was rather limited, he introduced modern Turkish literature to Sandra and her friends by reading aloud both the original version and translations of short poems by Turkish poets. He also grew interested in literary works by contemporary writers from around the world. (Re)adjustment and (re)adoption: Streamlining the process

Emrullah’s transnational socialization was a complex process, in which he asserted agency when wrestling with many challenges. He made certain strategic decisions to engage in the linguistic and cultural practices of the communities of which he sought membership. For instance, he (re)adjusted and (re)adopted his studying habits along with his lifestyle and worldview. Changes in studying habits: From a quiet student to a sociable friend

Since the intensive course in Turkey was shaped by the students’ urgent need to receive a specific score in TOEFL, teachers adopted a ‘teach to the test’ strategy, and Emrullah and his friends studied English

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as if they were in a cram school. Remembering those days, he said, ‘We used to study [English] for eight or nine hours but we didn’t even talk to each other. We memorized grammar rules and new words’ (Int1). Emrullah maintained this study schedule in the fi rst months of the ESL program in Firstville, but soon realized that it was not an efficient way to learn a language: The fi rst three months – the library was very boring. I asked myself, ‘What progress have I made?’ Basic things in speaking – and that is what we learn in the class. I said, ‘if I keep on this, I can get the score but it will be difficult’. I decided to try a different program. I won’t go to the library. I will do the assignments for two or three hours. Then, I will take notes in the class. In the afternoon – until certain hours, I will hang out with my friends – international people. (Int1)

His former beliefs about speaking English took longer to change. Since the intensive course in Turkey primarily focused on fi nding the ‘correct’ answer for ‘fi ll in the blank’ exercises and multiple-choice questions, Emrullah associated language use with accuracy rather than fluency. He later realized that ‘this language is, in fact, a tool’ to communicate, ‘not a school subject’ (Int2). Therefore, he decided to use it rather than study it. Emrullah’s new perspective on language learning aligned with the ESL program’s objectives. His teachers assigned presentation tasks. Not familiar with this type of homework, he found it very demanding at fi rst but gained ‘confidence by giving presentations in the class’ to a level that he felt confident enough to ‘deliver a speech in front of hundred people’ (JE1). This confidence in speaking helped him in his graduate studies, where he had to present his work for fi nal grades, and defend his master’s thesis. Changes in lifestyle and worldview: Moving beyond the national borders

When he first moved to Firstville, Emrullah practiced Islam with other male MNE scholarship students. Emrullah later realized that he did not share similar aspirations with his peers as they ‘do not hang out with the locals’ due to ‘their conservative culture, their fear, their misinterpretation of [Koranic] verses’ which commanded them not to ‘make friends with the infidel, [and] shake hands with women’ (Int1). While his peers’ religious beliefs made it difficult for them to try different foods and drinks or have conversations with the opposite gender, Emrullah decided to meet new people and learn about their cultures, not believing that he would ‘go to hell for speaking to a girl’ (Int1). Eventually, Emrullah broke away from the Turkish peers who maintained their religious practices. Emrullah minimized the impact of his religious upbringing on his new life in the US. Unlike his Turkish friends, he participated in church ESL speaking classes; he went to cafes, restaurants and bars, even when they

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did not serve halal2 food and beverages; and he socialized with both male and female international friends. He reflected: I realized that I never spared any time for myself at all. None. I mean – for entertainment … But later, I learned how to enjoy the moment from them – my international friends. It was a different pleasure to talk to people, drinking – perhaps a beer or coffee – with them. (Int2)

Socializing with his international friends and English-speaking locals not only improved his English proficiency, but also led him to reconsider his former ways of living and being. Learning to spend quality time in public places and friends’ houses made him question his previous lifestyle and worldview. Engaging in this multicultural environment, he reflected on the cultural make-up of Turkey and reminisced about a critical moment: ‘as soon as the plane landed at the airport – Different people around me. A cacophony. Different languages. Different outfits. I have never seen such a diverse environment’ (Int2). Comparing the cultural diversity at home and in Firstville, Emrullah viewed the latter as more multicultural. He started questioning the dominant discourses in Turkey which describe Turkish society as a ‘cultural mosaic’. Although he heard ‘million of the times that [his] country is multicultural and open to taste and verywelcomed to new cultures’ (JE2), he problematized the validity of the ‘cultural mosaic’ discourse after he got to know somebody from Iran: The fi rst time in my life, I got to know an Iranian person closely in the US. In Turkey, I was raised to be an enemy to the Persian culture. All of the conservative sects [said] Iran is heretic. When I saw an Iranian in Turkey, I used to feel uncomfortable. Here [in the US], I transgressed that notion. (Int2)

Working for an Iranian boss, Emrullah had the opportunity to know an ‘enemy’ closely and his ‘hostile’ country better. Ironically, Iran is a neighboring country of Turkey. Although Emrullah never crossed Iran’s border physically, he did so mentally in the US – more than 7,500 miles away from the actual border. Through his lived experiences, he subverted one of the dominant political and religious discourses in Turkey. Moreover, Emrullah’s transformation into a transnational, multilingual individual from a monocultural one was visible in his CV. A close scrutiny of his résumé showed that his Turkish and US phone numbers are both active. In addition, he used the street address of his family in Turkey, while using the email account he received from Secondville University. Today, he identifies as a multilingual individual, who speaks English, Turkish and Kurdish proficiently. He avoids using labels such as ‘native’, ‘second’ or ‘foreign’ when he portrays the languages he speaks in his CV. Unlike many others from ethnic minorities in Turkey, he openly states that he is a proficient Kurdish speaker without the fear of revealing his ethnic identity. Now, he is also learning Spanish. He considers learning additional

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languages as both a hobby and a tool to interact with cultures and communities around the world. Discussion and Conclusion

In this chapter, we have narrated Emrullah’s three-year-long story of transnational socialization in the US. His story provides insights into the complexity of transnational individuals’ experiences of border-crossing and in-betweenness which involves ongoing, inevitable identity work. While crossing and defying the ideological borders that defi ne his life, thoughts, beliefs, actions and being, he negotiates and constructs his transnational identity, asserts agency for the contours of identity, and navigates the corresponding emotions of this transformation. Our analysis of his story leads us to make two main arguments that corroborate and contribute to the existing body of work on transnational socialization (see Duff, 2012, 2019). First, Emrullah’s story demonstrates how transnational individuals’ lives in borderlands may be fraught with challenges when responding to the pressures of dominant ideologies circulating in the society and maintaining the borders of being (Anzaldúa, 1987). Emrullah’s identity negotiation involved wrestling with, questioning and subverting the ideologies of language, language learning, language use, race, gender, class, religion and nationality (Block & Corona, 2016). It is also important to see how intertwined these prevailing ideologies are, and how Emrullah positions himself in relation to these ideologies as he socializes into a transnational space. For example, his community membership in Firstville is influenced by the shift in the dominant political ideology in Turkey. That is, to begin with, he befriends members of the Gulen movement by frequenting their mosque in Firstville. However, soon afterwards, he ceases this membership as a result of the political conflicts in Turkey. He starts distancing himself from Turkish people as much as possible; instead, maintaining relationships with those who clearly have no connection to Gulenists. In another example, his ideology about language learning meets his religious identity and membership in the Turkish community. Distinguishing himself from his Turkish peers, he chooses to join the church-based ESL classes and makes friends with Sam, a Christian missionary, who hosts Emrullah for two months. Since he believes that language learning requires continuous engagement in English-speaking communities, Emrullah reframes himself as a Muslim who does not avoid interacting with Christians or participating in activities organized by churches. These two examples indicate how Emrullah pushed and spanned boundaries to create liminal spaces for himself where he could be the transnational English language user he wanted to be. Therein also concomitantly lie the challenges of being a border crosser.

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Second, as Emrullah’s metaphor of border-crossing as ‘a painful rebirth’ suggests, negotiating a transnational identity is an emotional endeavor with inherent tensions, dilemmas, conflicts and contradictions. As in the two earlier examples, Emrullah’s act of agency is driven by or brings about intense emotions, such as fear of losing his scholarship, being denied entry into the country and potentially being distanced from his peers in the Turkish community. Additionally, his emotions are foregrounded when he positions his international peers as his new family with whom he alleviates his homesickness. All these examples point to the emotional labor involved in being and becoming a transnational individual who defies and crosses borders (De Costa et al., 2016; Yazan et al., 2021). This emotional labor becomes more intense when nation-state ideologies are stronger and impose certain ways of being, looking and acting on border crossers. Emrullah’s painful experience at customs is a salient example of how transnationals may be positioned and marginalized racially and linguistically the moment they cross the literal border of the nation (Kubota & Lin, 2009; Motha, 2014). That experience has been an important reference point for Emrullah for the rest of his life in the US, and he remembers it every time he feels he is positioned as ‘the other’. On the other hand, his positive experiences include interactions with community members who are interested in cultures, communities and languages beyond what is offered by the ‘mainstream’ US discourses. For example, Sam’s trips around the world and interest in learning about religions in general provide Emrullah with a vantage point to have transcultural conversations. Likewise, Sandra and her friends’ academic interest in Turkish literature as a part of world literature helps Emrullah build connections with them. For transnational spaces to emerge, both Emrullah and his interactants need to cross borders physically and ideologically, which points to the key role of old(er)-timers in the host communities. Emrullah’s story reveals that old(er)-timers’ welcoming attitude and willingness to learn from newcomers make transnational socialization easier for both sides. This resonates with Wenger’s (1998: 56) theorization of the roles that old-timers and newcomers play in the construction of membership and evolution of communities. These two main arguments echo previous studies that explored transnationals’ trajectories of identity negotiation involving agentive decisionmaking, (concomitant) emotional experiences, and tensions. For example, similar to Jain (2021), Emrullah frames himself as a transnational researcher and language user, which informs his practices and relationships with other members (old-timer or newcomer) in communities he is involved with. In addition, like Ajsic (2015), Emrullah asserts agency in shaping the contours of his language learning journey by making strategic choices as to where he channels and invests his energy and time. Additionally, similar to Lieb’s (2021) transcultural experiences, Emrullah negotiates and constructs a multi-layered cultural identity ‘involving, encompassing, or combining elements of two or more cultures’ (Pahor, 2018, cited in Lieb, 2021: 24). Moreover, like Hikari and Saoirse in Rudolph

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et al.’s (2019) study, Emrullah pushes back against the ideological borders that position him racially, linguistically, religiously and culturally, and he engages in emotionally-charged identity work as a border crosser. In sharing Emrullah’s story here, we hope that it will fi nd resonance with other transnational language learners as well as provide insights for the people working with transnationals in different contexts. Transnational individuals’ experiences and their responses to how they are positioned are unique and fraught with intricately intertwined negotiations of identities fi lled with extensive emotional labor. Through Emrullah’s story, our chapter has presented multiple examples of such emotionally-charged negotiations of identity which point to the intricacies of being a transnational and a border crosser. Future research could further study language learners’ experiences by following the argument that transnational socialization is intense identity work. Researchers could explore other transnationals’ L2 socialization trajectories in a longitudinal research design by framing such individuals as border crossers who grapple with ideologies of language, race, culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender and sexual orientation. We believe that the analysis of language learners’ narratives about their experiences learning and using languages could provide insights into their multifaceted and complex transnational socializations. More specifically, a future study could analyze the generative tensions in transnational language learners’ experience as part of a larger exploration of their identity negotiation in their search for legitimate membership in and across various communities. Notes (1) Originating in Turkey in the 1960s as a religious society, the Gulenist movement evolved into a non-profit international Islamic organization. In the 2000s, it became a large political entity in Turkey via its well-educated members, who worked as teachers, doctors, academics and high-ranking military and bureaucratic officials both in public and private sectors. In the 2010s, the ongoing tensions regarding confl icts around political authority and leadership between the Gulenist movement and AKP (Justice and Development Party) grew to a critical level. In 2016, members of the movement in high-ranking positions in the Turkish army attempted a coup d’état to overthrow the AKP government. When this failed, AKP denounced Fethullah Gülen (the leader of the Gulenist movement) and his followers as terrorists. Since then, Gulenists have been arrested and detained as enemies of the state. (2) Halal is an Arabic word that translates as ‘permissible or lawful’. Islam requires adhering to halal processing of food, along with not consuming food with porkrelated ingredients or alcoholic beverages.

References Ajsic, A. (2015) ‘Crossing’ into the L2 and back: Agency and native-like ultimate attainment by a post-critical period learner. In P. Deters, X. Gao, E.R. Miller and G. Vitanova (eds) Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches (pp. 154–172). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

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Anzaldúa, G. (1987) Borderlands / La frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute. Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P. and Chik, A. (2013) Narrative Inquiry in Language Teaching and Learning Research. New York, NY: Routledge. Bhabha, H. (1992) The world and the home. Social Text 31/32, 141–153. Block, D. and Corona, V. (2016) Intersectionality in language and identity research. In S. Preece (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity (pp. 507–522). Abingdon: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2016a) Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies: Attitudes and Strategies of African Skilled Migrants in Anglophone Workplaces. Cham: Springer. Canagarajah, S. (2016b) Crossing borders, addressing diversity. Language Teaching 49 (3), 438–454. Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language. London: Taylor & Francis. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Transnationalism and translingualism: How they are connected. In X. You (ed.) Transnational Writing Education: Theory, History, and Practice (pp. 41–60). New York: Routledge. De Costa, P.I., Tigchelaar, M. and Cui, Y. (2016) Reflexivity, emotions and transnational habitus: The case of a ‘poor’ cosmopolitan Chinese international student. AILA Review 29, 173–198. Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (2011) The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (4th edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Denzin, N.K. and Lincoln, Y.S. (2017) The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Deters, P., Gao, X., Miller, E.R. and Vitanova, G. (eds) (2015) Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Duff, P.A. (2007) Second language socialization as sociocultural theory: Insights and issues. Language Teaching 40 (4), 309–319. Duff, P. (2012) Second language socialization. In A. Duranti, E. Ochs and B. Schieffelin (eds) Handbook of Language Socialization (pp. 564–586). New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Duff , P.A. (2019) Social dimensions and processes in second language acquisition: Multilingual socialization in transnational contexts. Modern Language Journal 103 (1), 6–22. Francois, E.J., Avoseh, M.B. and Griswold, W. (eds) (2016) Perspectives in Transnational Higher Education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Huang, F. (2007) Internationalization of higher education in the developing and emerging countries: A focus on transnational higher education in Asia. Journal of Studies in International Education 11 (3–4), 421–432. Jain, R. (2021) (Re)Imagining myself as a translingual, a transnational, and a pracademic: A critical autoethnographic account. In B. Yazan, S. Canagarajah and R. Jain (eds) Autoethnographies in English Language Teaching: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices (pp. 109–127). New York: Routledge. Kubota, R. and Lin, A.M. (2009) Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education: Exploring Critically Engaged Practice. London: Routledge. Lieb, M.M. (2021) Challenges and successes in negotiating identity and asserting agency as an Irish, transcultural, boundary-spanning, ELT academic. In B. Yazan, S. Canagarajah and R. Jain (eds) Autoethnographies in English Language Teaching: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices (pp. 23–40). New York: Routledge. Motha, S. (2014) Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist Practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Naidoo, V. (2009) Transnational higher education: A stock take of current activity. Journal of Studies in International Education 13 (3), 310–330.

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Pahor, M.J. (2018) Transculturality. In Y.Y. Kim and K.L. McKay-Semmler (eds) The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication (pp. 1952–1956). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Phan, L.H. (2016) Transnational Education Crossing ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’: Adjusted Desire, Transformative Mediocrity and Neo-Colonial Disguise. London: Routledge. Rudolph, N., Yazan, B. and Rudolph, J. (2019) Negotiating ‘ares’, ‘cans’ and ‘shoulds’ of being and becoming in ELT: Two teacher accounts from one Japanese university. Asian Englishes 21 (1), 22–37. Vertovec, S. (2009) Transnationalism. London: Routledge. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yazan, B., Canagarajah, S. and Jain, R. (eds) (2021) Autoethnographies in English Language Teaching: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices. New York: Routledge.

Part 2 Transnational Practitioners and Participants in Global Contexts Beyond the US

6 ‘Started working as a global volunteer …’: Developing Professional Transnational Habitus through Erasmus+ Ozgehan Ustuk and Peter I. De Costa

Since the 1970s, Erasmus-related programs have evolved and gained momentum in the European Union’s (EU) integration policy within the educational context (Ceri Jones, 2017). These programs have three explicit objectives, which can be summarized as: (1) generating educational, linguistic and cultural beneficence for participants, (2) forging cooperation among European institutions, and (3) developing open-minded future professionals with international experience (Llurda et al., 2016: 323). In one of its current iterations called Erasmus+, the program provides mobility funds for both governmental and non-governmental organizations to plan and organize short-term international exchanges for disadvantaged youth, students, academics, youth workers and teaching practitioners (Klemenčič et al., 2017). Two other key objectives of the program are the promotion of a European identity (Jacobone & Moro, 2015; Llurda et al., 2016) and the cultivation of active citizenship (Golubeva et  al., 2018) within the European community and among professionals. In tandem with the program objectives of Erasmus+ (European Commission, 2020), the current study examines the impact of Erasmus+ mobilities on the transnational habitus (Darvin & Norton, 2015; De Costa et  al., 2016) and the development of a TESOL practitioner in Turkey. Although Turkey is not a member of the EU, it is a member of the Bologna Process; thus, the Erasmus program enables participants from Turkey to benefit from Erasmus+ mobilities. With 400,000 instances of mobility recorded in 2017 (Ceri Jones, 2017), this extensive program has impacted thousands of individuals by providing economic and organizational opportunities for its participants. However, no recorded effort has 85

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been made to understand how TESOL practitioners enact their translingual histories and identities (Canagarajah, 2013; De Costa et al., 2017) in this evolving and contemporary social landscape. Following Darvin and Norton (2015: 51), we maintain that in an era of transnationalism that is informed by a new world order ‘characterized by mobility, fluidity, and diversity’, the issue of transnational identity has become more complex and critical for defi ning the future of mobile TESOL practitioners who transcend cultural and national borders. Building on this earlier body of Erasmus+ program research, the current study is inspired by Norton and De Costa’s (2018) call for debate on how teacher identities evolve in the wake of globalization and neoliberal impulses. We also draw extensively on Simon-Maeda’s (2004) work on tracing EFL teachers’ professional identity enactment in their life histories. Accordingly, we examine the transnational habitus – a key aspect of identity development (see the next section) – of a focal participant in order to better understand the dynamic relationship between Erasmus+ as a fi eld (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) and the participant’s professional habitus as a transnational TESOL practitioner. Our focal TESOL practitioner, Kemal (a pseudonym), had participated in three Erasmus+ sponsored mobility experiences that subsequently transformed his identity as an invested transnational practitioner. We draw on the data gleaned from Kemal’s teaching philosophy, youthpasses (reflective and self-evaluative papers fi led after each sojourn), social media posts from the mobility experiences (in Erasmus+ projects) and semi-structured interviews to examine how Kemal developed his professional transnational habitus. Specifically, our study illustrates how Erasmus+ is an efficient field for participants like Kemal to develop their transnational habitus as TESOL practitioners. Transnational Habitus and Field

In this chapter, transnational habitus (i.e. disposition) is used as a heuristic to trace the trajectory of Kemal’s transnational identity development as a TESOL practitioner in the field of Erasmus+. Tracing Kemal’s trajectory enabled us to make sense of how his professional and social investment as an emerging and mobile practitioner was informed and reflected by his habitus. Specifically, the notion of transnational habitus helped us understand how Kemal negotiated two conflicting and intersecting identities, namely, that of (1) a mobile TESOL practitioner who transcended his national borders, and (2) an EFL teacher from Turkey who had a critical and ‘GLocal’ agenda (Selvi & Rudoph, 2018). An investigation of these two identities is critical given the large-scale impact of mobility programs such as Erasmus+ in the Turkey and EU contexts. As increasingly more youth gain the opportunity to become transnational practitioners in different fi elds of education through Erasmus-funded programs, their

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transnational professionalism has invariably become a norm in the European context (Ceri Jones, 2017; Llurda et al., 2016). Transnational habitus, a concept related to the Bourdieusian concept, habitus, has been discussed by Darvin and Norton (2015) and De Costa et al. (2016) as a key notion to understanding the dynamic linguistic identities of mobile individuals because, inevitably, an individual’s identity is inextricably linked with the habitus or disposition that he develops (see also De Costa, 2010). In alignment with this understanding, Lam and Warriner (2012) posit the concept of habitus to analyze how individuals’ sedimented dispositions are often structured, and how these dispositions are developed through transnational experiences. Their understanding can be gleaned from an examination of an individual’s portfolio of economic, cultural and social capital (Lam & Warriner, 2012) and the embodied historicity of individuals (De Costa et al., 2016). According to Grenfell (2011), economic capital refers to one’s wealth and material resources; cultural capital is composed of several sources including titles or designations, physical entities (such as books possessed) and discernible traits (such as accents, styles and expressive traits). Lastly, social capital is the sum of resources that one has in terms of social networks and relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition. These forms of capitals can be held (partially or predominantly) by individuals or whole groups, and they can serve as mediators for individuals to navigate habitus in the field. The entities constituting capital can be obtained through economic, cultural and/or social initiations, which may help one accumulate these entities as profits. Habitus is a term that is closely related to another Bourdieusian concept, field (Grenfell, 2011). According to Grenfell (2011), field is an identifiable and bounded concept, which is constituted by a specific logic of practice that is guided by certain principles and values. According to Darvin and Norton (2015), an individual’s habitus is structured by fields such as a family, school or workplace to which an individual belongs. This is in conjunction with Bourdieu and Wacquant’s (1992: 196) defi nition of field as a network or configuration of objective relations between positions which impose determinations upon their occupants, agents or institutions; as a consequence, individuals may structure these fields by acting according to their habitus. However, fields are also in constant flux; they can overlap with each other or be embedded within larger fields that contain smaller ones. In addition, fields are often characterized and inhabited by specific social groups. Fields have a regulatory impact on the members of social groups engaging in a given field. Engagement can occur among the members (e.g. Erasmus+ projects and all participants in a specific project) or between the members and existing capitals associated with a given field (e.g. Erasmus+ projects and their professional staff ), or as aptly explained by Grenfell (2011: 31), ‘fields form, socialize, reward, and punish those

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who pass through them’. This observation was underscored by Bourdieu (1990), who argued that habitus and field are inextricably linked; the field structures habitus, and habitus is constitutive of the field. In this sense, as the habitus refers to the set of dispositions and schemata of actions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), which is a construct in flux (Friedman, 2012), fields are the locus of this construction. However, even when individuals make sense of their doxa in fields of practice within its system of actions, their existing habitus continue to inform how they navigate the new fields (Soong et al., 2018). Therefore, there is a reflexive relationship between the field and one’s habitus. Erasmus+: A Brief Background

The EU has a number of programs, networks and initiatives that foster individuals’ mobility across countries as a result of and through the Bologna Process. These countries are not only composed of the member countries of the EU but also other countries such as Turkey. Within the Bologna Process, Erasmus+ is a flagship program that focuses on employability, social inclusion and active EU citizenship; and it provides shortterm mobility grants for individuals to participate in intensive programs and networks in alignment with EU policies and priorities (European Commission, 2020; Klemenčič et al., 2017). Often confused with Erasmus+ (formerly known as Youth-in-action Program, now officially known as Erasmus+ Youth Program), Erasmus (a widely accepted reference to Erasmus Higher Education Program) is a program specifically implemented in higher education contexts and creates study-abroad opportunities for (1) students as a part of their degree programs or (2) university staff as a part of their teaching practice. However, both programs are driven by the same EU agenda, policies and priorities. Like Erasmus+, Erasmus Higher Education Program is very popular among pre-service TESOL practitioners in Turkey. Accordingly, several studies have examined the Erasmus experiences of pre-service TESOL practitioners. Kizilaslan (2010), for example, investigated 10 preservice EFL teachers’ experiences within the Erasmus program. Kizilaslan’s participants faced some challenges such as preconceptions against their home country in the host country with respect to issues of gender and religion. In a way, it was challenging for sojourners when their identities clashed with the prejudicial views in the host country. Similarly, Aydin (2012) reported problems that emerged due to cultural, linguistic, logistic and personal issues. However, he concluded that the Erasmus experience brought about significant benefits for his 23 pre-service teacher participants. These TESOL practitioner participants benefited from their experience in terms of language skills and professional development. Aydin’s study also revealed that the participants’ teaching philosophies were positively influenced by linguistic, cultural, personal and

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professional contributions as a result of Erasmus-facilitated mobility. For instance, the participants mainly associated this positive influence to being in a situation where the language of instruction was predominantly English unlike their home institutions. In comparison to Erasmus, the focal program of this chapter, Erasmus+, is implemented in a wider context that includes various nonformal and shorter-term mobilities of lifelong learning (with a professional and/or personal focus) for the citizens of member countries through three Key Actions: Key Action 1 (mobility of individuals), Key Action 2 (cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices) and Key Action 3 (support for policy reform) (European Commission, 2020). In this way, it is more inclusive than Erasmus, which is practiced only in the formal higher education sector. Specifically, Key Action 1’s short-term projects include developing the mobilities of students, trainees, (affiliated or self-employed) teachers, trainers, scholars, any staff working in educational institutions, and youth workers from governmental and/or nongovernmental bodies. Key Action 2 supports strategic partnerships between educational institutions where the participant spectrum specified above may work to create a platform to exchange good practices. Lastly, Key Action 3 is designed to support international organizations involved in policymaking and is used to promote the European Commission’s educational policy and agenda (European Commission, 2020). Key Action 1 targets the inclusion of transnational individuals whereas Key Action 2 is implemented at a more institutional level. Key Action 3 is relevant to relatively larger, macro policymaking institutions rather than individuals (e.g. transnational TESOL practitioners) and institutions (e.g. schools, community centers). Notwithstanding its broader and more inclusive focus, there are few studies on the Erasmus+ program that have examined its impact on language education. In one example, Gunbayi and Vezne (2016) investigated high school teachers’ beliefs and investment regarding their participation in Erasmus+ Key Action 1 projects. Using a multiple case-study design involving eight teachers, Gunbayi and Vezne reported that teaching practitioners participated in Erasmus+ projects to develop professionally by experiencing teaching and learning contexts in other countries and by sharing good practices. Their findings also demonstrated that their participants’ intercultural awareness and linguistic skills improved because of their involvement in the Erasmus+ program. In sum, the Erasmus+ program provides mobility opportunities for TESOL practitioners across Europe. Relatedly, as observed by Motha et al. (2012), the transnational experiences of TESOL practitioners naturally influence their teaching practice. In the context of Erasmus+, the aforementioned studies provide useful insights into TESOL practitioners and their transnational experiences within the framework of the Erasmus+ program. However, to date, no one has investigated the capital development and investment of TESOL

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practitioners who participated in Key Action 1 Erasmus+ projects that focused on developing individuals’ transnational practices. Addressing this gap and extending Aydin’s (2012) and Gunbayi and Vezne’s (2016) fi ndings, this study explores the transnational habitus development of a TESOL practitioner through an identity lens (Darvin & Norton, 2015) by focusing on Kemal’s engagement in several Erasmus+ projects and tracing how his teacher identity and transnational habitus evolved. The Study

Our focal participant, Kemal, is an emerging TESOL practitioner who had previously worked for three years as a freelance EFL teacher. At the time of the study, he was a senior pre-service EFL teacher. He worked as a part-time TESOL practitioner and was doing his practicum at an urban school in the west of Turkey. In the administrative context of Turkey, cities with more than a million inhabitants including the peripheral neighborhoods are given metropolitan city status. To give a sense of the research context, Kemal’s university and practicum school are located in a metropolitan city’s central area whereas Kemal is from a suburban town in the city; he was born and grew up there until he went to university to study at a TESOL program. His family still lived in the town when this study was conducted. Kemal resided at a dormitory and visited his family on his days off to help them maintain their farmhouse. When he was a high school student in his town, Kemal participated in his first international mobility program, which was a youth exchange program funded by the EU. He described this program as a cultural exchange project that enabled him to experience different cultures and understand how important it was to learn English for communication. Kemal emphasized the importance of this youth exchange program because he could not have afforded to participate in such a cultural exchange program without EU sponsorship. This disclosure gave us insight into Kemal’s social class; given the passport tax, visa costs, travel and accommodation costs of such mobility programs, EU sponsorship was essential for Kemal’s transnational experience. Currently, Kemal is studying at a TESOL department at which Ozgehan (the first author) works as a research assistant. Ozgehan never taught Kemal as a student, but Kemal regularly consults Ozgehan about his courses, assignments, and participation in Erasmus+ projects. Due to Ozgehan’s experience as a project coordinator in non-governmental organizations, he has prior experience in applying for and participating in Erasmus+ projects. Ozgehan invited Kemal to this study to examine his transnational habitus and its influence on his identity as a transnational TESOL practitioner. In this study, Ozgehan was the field researcher and Peter (the second author), who is originally from Singapore and has had no direct contact with Kemal, supervised Ozgehan’s research during his year-long visit to the United

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States. Having experienced first-hand various professional mobilities themselves, both Ozgehan and Peter shared a common transnational background with Kemal and thus could relate to his mobility experiences. The current study focuses primarily on three Erasmus+ mobility projects in which Kemal participated over the course of an academic year (see Table 6.1). The first project was a communication training course held in Hungary. During this training, Kemal learnt about assertive communication and intercultural aspects of interpersonal communication. The second project was a training course in Lithuania, which included youth work with refugees across Europe. Kemal believed this experience turned out to be a significant professional development opportunity for an emerging TESOL practitioner due to its content and insights with respect to inclusive educational practices. Furthermore, he conducted mini-workshops with participants and assisted the trainers as a group leader. The first two mobility opportunities, funded by Erasmus+, were followed by a third professional mobility experience in Ukraine, where Kemal taught English to young learners during a summer camp. This project was not directly funded by the Erasmus+ program, and expenses were partially covered by the participant and the organizers. Nevertheless, Kemal maintained that this experience was inseparable from the fi rst two experiences because he would not have participated in the third program had he not participated in the fi rst two. Kemal used his Erasmus+ income – generated from the first two projects – to fund his third trip, which he would not have been able to fi nancially afford otherwise. However, this desire to go to Ukraine was also buoyed by his economic, social and cultural capital that were mobilized as a result of his time in Hungary and Lithuania. In sum, Kemal was able to participate in the third mobility opportunity thanks to (1) the small funds he collected in the fi rst two mobility arrangements, (2) the networks and organizers with whom he gained familiarity, and (3) his increasing perceived-value of such transnational experiences. The data were collected during and after these three mobility experiences. Youthpasses, which are reflective, self-evaluative documents, were collected. They allow participants to self-assess the transnational experience in a formative way. That is, these documents include self-evaluation Table 6.1 The mobility projects in which Kemal participated Venue

Date

Theme

Kemal’s role

Hungary

November–December 2017

Assertive and intercultural communication

Participant in the training, and trainer in dissemination activity

Lithuania

June–July 2018

Refugee issues and inclusive education

Group leader, assistant trainer

Ukraine

July–August 2018

TESOL Summer camp for young learners

Trainer and instructor

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questions about participants’ own responsibility and roles in the project, as well as reflective open-ended questions about key competencies and program priorities of projects funded by Erasmus+ such as communication in mother tongue and foreign language, learning to learn, social and civic competences, sense of initiative and entrepreneurship and cultural awareness and expression. To enrich our understanding of Kemal’s experiences, Ozgehan followed Kemal’s Facebook page throughout the research with his (IRBapproved) consent. Kemal’s postings between November 2017 to the end of 2018 were documented separately as screenshots, and we asked Kemal to select the ones that he thought were related to his Erasmus+ experiences. We extended the time-scale until the end of 2018 after the last mobility opportunity in order to include subsequent disseminative events. In short, our study utilized these two youthpasses and Facebook posts to gain insight into Kemal’s mobility experiences. Kemal wrote a teaching philosophy statement following his last mobility experience. In general, such a statement allows teachers to reflect on and improve their teaching practice; moreover, it provides information regarding ethical, moral and philosophical concerns of a teaching practitioner (Crookes, 2015; Supasiraprapa & De Costa, 2017). To assist Kemal in writing his teaching philosophy statement, Ozgehan conducted an online webinar. For this webinar, Ozgehan drew on Owens et al. (2014: 334), who asserted that a comprehensive teaching philosophy statement should cover these four areas: ‘(a) conceptualization of how learning occurs, (b) conceptualization of an effective teaching and learning environment, (c) expectations of the student-teacher relationship, and (d) student assessment and assessment of learning goals’. Ozgehan used these four areas to guide Kemal during the webinar, and Kemal was free to create his own statement as long as he described his experiences, opinions and beliefs about his teaching practice. Finally, Ozgehan conducted a semi-structured interview based on data that emerged during the data collection process. The interview was conducted in Turkish, which was the interviewer’s and interviewee’s mutual fi rst language and then translated into English. For member checking, Kemal verified all the transcribed data and he was allowed to make additions, deletions or changes as he pleased. Adopting an iterative approach, we analyzed the various data sets thematically to understand the relationship between Kemal’s transnational habitus as a TESOL practitioner and the Erasmus+ program as a field. First, we utilized inductive coding to avoid bias during the initial coding process. After generating the initial codes, we recursively reviewed the data. Later, we looked for themes in our data. The process of generating the themes was informed by our theoretical framework to conceptualize representations of code patterns in line with our theoretical stance. This thematic analytic approach enabled us to arrive at themes that designate the profits Kemal mobilized as the result(s) of his Erasmus+ experiences.

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Findings

An individual’s agency and growth in a particular field is motivated by his pursuit of capital (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992; Darvin & Norton, 2015; Grenfell, 2011). This argument is supported by Kemal’s pursuit of becoming a transnational TESOL practitioner, which was driven by his desire to enjoy and reap the rewards of certain profits that he associated with Erasmus+. According to our thematic analysis, Kemal positioned himself as an agent who sought and enjoyed the profits of being a participant in Erasmus+ projects; moreover, he acknowledged that the program afforded him a platform to grow into a transnational TESOL practitioner. Extending this metaphor of capital and profits, our analysis demonstrated that Kemal encountered three themes of the Erasmus+ program in terms of benefits for the emergent transnational practitioners – practical, professional and disseminative profits. Practical profits

Kemal benefited from Erasmus+ in that he was able to overcome an initial deficit of economic and social capital that impeded his transnational identity development – without Erasmus+ he lacked the social networks and financial means that are useful for acquiring a visa, for example an invitation from the hosting organization of the Erasmus+ project stating the affiliation to a certain mobility project and the economic endorsement. As a citizen of the Turkish Republic, Kemal needed to go through a bureaucratic process to travel abroad within the EU. He was also required to demonstrate he had enough funds in a bank account as proof that he would be able to cover his food and accommodation costs. Excerpt 1 ‘I feel more comfortable to apply for Erasmus+‘ (Interview excerpt)

Ozgehan: What was the reason you applied for these projects? Kemal: With Erasmus+, it is easier to get a visa, otherwise, it is much more difficult for me to get a visa and to go to such projects. It (Erasmus+) also reimburses almost everything. So I feel more comfortable to apply for Erasmus+ projects. I do not worry about not getting a visa as well as the funds. If it hadn’t been this fi nancial support, I wouldn’t have got in such experiences.

Having the fi nancial funds was not sufficient capital to obtain a Schengen visa for Hungary and Lithuania, however; Kemal also needed an institutional invitation letter and admission papers to participate in professional or personal development training in Schengen countries.1 In light of these fiscal expectations, Kemal’s lack of economic and social capital without Erasmus+ admission would have curtailed his

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transnational habitus development. Kemal lacked the fi nancial means to afford this travel on his own budget. Erasmus+ invitations provide an economic endorsement with certain projects being fi nanced by the European Commission, covering the cost of vital expenses such as food, accommodation and travel (profit for economic capital). In addition, these invitations provide the holder with an institutional affi liation to the host organization as indicated by its physical address and contact details which ensure the Erasmus+ participant’s status (social capital). Erasmus+ afforded Kemal this capital, but he also had to work hard to acquire this capital. In a way, these profits were not ‘served’ to the participant; rather, it required some degree of agency on Kemal’s part, which was evidenced in his teaching philosophy statement, where he described the challenges he had to negotiate. Excerpt 2 The visa issue (Teaching philosophy statement)

I had difficulties in terms of getting a visa or fi nancial problems etc. These were problems because my country is not in European area, so I have had to deal with visa issue. Even though most of my expenses have been reimbursed by European Union after the project, I have needed to spare or borrow some money before the projects started as well as gone through visa procedures. Even though these issues were hard to cope with, I did not lose my ambition to have an experience in teaching.

Kemal used his initial problems and lack of economic and social capital as a benchmark to highlight his trajectory and dedication to developing himself as a transnational TESOL practitioner. In sum, Kemal’s initial disadvantage in regard to his insufficient economic and social capital was converted into affordances to facilitate his transnational habitus development. Professional profits

Two forms of professional profit related to becoming a transnational TESOL practitioner also emerged in our analysis. First, his participation in Erasmus+ helped Kemal develop a professionally-situated application practice. That is, he fore-fronted his professional identity in order to be distinctive from other participant candidates. For Kemal, the beginning of this process was difficult because Kemal’s initial applications for the mobility projectswere all rejected. However, his perseverance in applying for many Erasmus+ projects demonstrated his investment in becoming a transnational TESOL practitioner. At fi rst, Kemal engaged in binge-applying, that is, applying to multiple organizations, but he later developed what we described as a professionally-driven Erasmus+ strategy.

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Excerpt 3 Binge-applying (Interview)

At fi rst, when I applied for many organizations to participate in their projects, I got rejected many times. It was so frustrating. When I was fi rst accepted to the project in Hungary, I got so happy. There was an application form that asked me why I wanted to come specifically to that project, what it can offer me professionally. Later, I started to apply for projects again. Then I went to Lithuania and others. But after Hungary, I started to apply for projects that are related to me professionally and I always explained why I wanted to participate as a foreign language teacher. This turned out to be a good strategy.

The strategy of explaining why he wanted to participate as a foreign language teacher resulted in Kemal terminating his practice of bingeapplying for projects that entailed applying for any project when a project call came out. This initial approach proved useless, which forced Kemal to reconsider his approach and to position himself in accordance with his professional self in this new context involving numerous Erasmus+ mobility opportunities. According to Grenfell (2011), individuals can be disposed to act and think in a certain way when they engage in a particular context. Similarly, Kemal developed a strategy to position himself as a mobile language teaching professional, which worked in his favor. In other words, he mobilized his existing cultural capital (his specialization and professional experience) to navigate himself in his target fi eld (Erasmus+) to obtain greater professional profit. Another form of professional profit from which Kemal benefited originated from the structure of Erasmus+. Unlike conventional study-abroad programs in which sojourns are pegged to a degree program with transferable academic credit, Erasmus+ provides practical professional experiences for mobile individuals. These experiences are organized by local governmental or non-governmental institutions and funded by the Erasmus+ program. Therefore, these institutions provide Erasmus+ participants with invaluable work-related opportunities. With Kemal’s carefully tailored applications, he strategically reached out to institutions that organized training courses specifi cally for educators. As a former sojourner previously enrolled in a student mobility program, Kemal could compare and contrast his experience as a study-abroad student and participant within and across multiple short Erasmus+ mobility opportunities. In the interview for this study, Kemal described how he capitalized on these Erasmus+ mobilities to develop himself professionally. Excerpt 4 Learning both as a learner and a teacher (Interview)

I would prefer six short E+ mobilities rather than a study abroad for six months. Because I learnt much more in E+ projects both as a learner and a teacher. Study abroad is not even a project. You experience it [study abroad], you learn how to survive, and you go on. But after Erasmus+,

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you invest in yourself not only personally. With my Erasmus+ experience, I am writing my own projects now. In the future, I will add my students as participants.

In Excerpt 4, we see that Kemal intended to acquire more capital in different forms as he participated in further Erasmus+ mobility opportunities. Specifically, we observed how he gained the knowledge and skills of project writing and project management. As a transnational TESOL practitioner, he intended to write his own projects. This plan underscores the potential of economic capital and social capital developed through social networks and associations required to manage such a project. More importantly, as someone who envisioned himself as a future project manager of Erasmus+ projects, Kemal appears to have developed the necessary disposition or transnational habitus that was needed for such a managerial position. Specifically, he sought to include the students affi liated with him, thereby illustrating how his transnational habitus development was the result of his becoming an agentic TESOL practitioner.

Disseminative profits

In the Erasmus+ program guide, the importance of dissemination and utilization of results is highlighted in the follow-up activities that the individual participant is encouraged to create in accordance with the scope of the mobility project. These follow-up activities are often organized by participants after the program activities are over and after the participants return back to their homelands/home institutions. Sharing the project results and outcomes in participants’ local contexts enables them to reflect on the organizer institutions’ aims and program objectives. This is an essential step of every mobility project that intends to align project outcomes with EU policies (European Commission, 2020). In line with this aim, the project organizers encouraged Kemal to engage in disseminative activities that included members of his local community back in his home country, Turkey. Dissemination events enable participants to sustain the profit they received as well as to put into practice the capital they obtained from the mobility project. In this way, Kemal was given the opportunity to share with his fellow colleagues various forms of capital constructing his transnational habitus. Accordingly, he was able to promote his transnational identity even after he returned to Turkey. Figure 6.1 presents details of the workshop on communication held by Kemal in his home institution. This image displays Kemal’s disseminative, follow-up activity following the communications training he attended in Hungary. Taking the initiative, he organized a mini-workshop to share, as a trainer, what he practiced in Hungary. In this way, he practiced the cultural capital he obtained during his transnational experience, upcycled it to enact his identity as a trainer with transnational experience, and

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Figure 6.1 Kemal’s workshop

extended this experience to his local context. In the interview, he disclosed that he elected to host this event and invite other TESOL teachercandidates because he thought the content he intended to share would be useful to his colleagues. Excerpt 5 Transcending one’s nation and culture (Interview)

Kemal: Ozgehan: Kemal:

I became more tolerant. I sort of transcended my nation and became open to other perspectives. It is not like what we learn at the university. Can you explain to me what it means for you? What I mean is not stopping being a part of your nation but transcending it and going beyond it while keeping it as well. It’s my observation: The ones who do not experience those kinds of projects are more strict in their way of teaching. They [his colleagues] are more closed to developments, new ideas. And they are closed to such projects. I want them to have the same experience.

Through the disseminative workshop, Kemal was able to enact his agency and promote the objectives of Erasmus+ and the mobility project he participated in, as well as augment the field of Erasmus+ at his home institution by sharing his transnational experiences. Acknowledging that

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he was making a generalization based on his observation as seen in Excerpt 5, Kemal’s perception of transcending one’s culture in a globalized world was very much in keeping with a transnational habitus or disposition. Put simply, Erasmus+ enabled Kemal to transcend his habitus. Within the culture of dissemination, which is a vital part of Erasmus+ project structures, Kemal mobilized his newly acquired profits by sharing the cultural and social capital he obtained in the field of Erasmus+ with his colleagues as a workshop organizer and leader. As noted, dissemination activities include all follow-up initiatives where participants share the results of their Erasmus+ experiences. Within the teacher education context, Motha et al.’s (2012) emphasis on the influence of individual’s professional histories and past experiences on one’s current teaching practices is relevant to Kemal’s Erasmus+ experience. Our findings revealed that Kemal did not stop disseminating the influence of the results. He positioned himself as a transnational TESOL practitioner who engaged in the field of Erasmus+. For example, he was able to complete his first teaching abroad experience due to the social capital he built during his earlier mobilities. Through a student organization with which he became familiar because of the Erasmus+ program, Kemal started teaching as a volunteer at an international summer school in Ukraine. He used his social media accounts to promote his new position as a ‘global volunteer’ who ‘teaches English to the youngsters’, as seen in Figures 6.2 and 6.3. Examining the content available in Figures 6.2 and 6.3, it is possible to see traces of self-identification/positioning. Positioning himself as a ‘global volunteer’ (Figure 6.2), Kemal had to use his own economic capital to be able to cover his travel expenses, which were not reimbursed by the

Figure 6.2 Started new job as a global volunteer

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Figure 6.3 Kemal teaching English in the international summer camp

organizers. It is important to remember that the summer camp experience was directly related to Kemal’s previous Erasmus+ experiences in terms of the social and cultural capital he had previously acquired; however, this camp was not funded by Erasmus+. Thus, he had to invest in this experience, which evidently required a willingness to fund himself. As a result, Kemal recycled his pre-existing capital and enacted himself as an EFL teacher teaching in an international summer camp. Elaborating on what these images mean for him, he elaborated on the postings as follows. Excerpt 6 Facebook is like a CV (Interview)

After all, it shows what kind of international activities I have been involved in … It gives an idea about what kind of teacher I am. So I put it on Facebook or LinkedIn accounts; they are like CVs.

When Kemal was talking to Ozgehan about his career goals, he mentioned his intention to work as a K-12 teacher at a public school affi liated with the Ministry of Education in Turkey. To be appointed as a public school teacher, one does not need to enact a transnational identity as a professional; rather, one needs to pass certain exams that mainly focus on content and pedagogical knowledge. When asked about his trajectory, Kemal explained that his wish to be a public school teacher did not seem relevant at fi rst glance. His view in Excerpt 7 is also supported by the following one, Excerpt 8. While the former is an excerpt from the interview

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conducted after all the mobility experiences were over, the latter is taken from his youthpass document from the Lithuanian project, which was created before the Lithuanian mobility project was completed. Excerpt 7 ‘I want to be a good teacher’ (Interview)

Ozgehan: Kemal:

But isn’t it possible to be appointed as a public school teacher without such experiences? I want to be a good teacher that suits to my perspective of being a good teacher. I need to facilitate my students to develop their visions. Some teachers may see themselves as a trainer. But I want my students to be responsible in developing themselves. Therefore, I want to draw a route for them. If I work in private institutions, abroad or in Turkey, I will generally work with kids from wealthy families. They have opportunity to see the world, to meet the other cultures, to develop their English. But in public schools, you work with student with lower status. It is not a must for me to have a transnational background. But such experiences transformed my ideas about teaching. I don’t think it is necessary to work abroad to be a transnational practitioner. With Erasmus+, I can share my experiences with them; I can write projects, I can include my students in rural areas, and I can transform them as well, so that they can practice their ideas as international people.

Excerpt 8 ‘I can partner with their organizations’ (Youthpass)

The project contributed to me culturally and socially. I learned a lot while working with people from different cultures. They represented different organizations. With them, we formed groups and organized some miniworkshops during the project. I took responsibilities for these miniworkshops. I was the vice leader of our group. In the future, I can partner with their organizations when I organize projects and workshops.

Here, we are privy to Kemal’s professional agentic development in the field of Erasmus+; specifically, we learn that his transnational identity is the cornerstone of his teaching philosophy. In other words, a good teacher is one who is connected to international fields of practice. Through Erasmus+, Kemal acquired economic, cultural and social capital that were accumulated from his transnational experiences in Europe. These experiences contributed to his transnational TESOL habitus. With his acquired capital, Kemal hoped to create a social space that would link and build on his background as a former middle-class public school student with his transnational connections and affiliations developed within Erasmus+. Discussion

In this chapter, we described how Erasmus+ can function as a field for transnational TESOL practitioners to enact their transnational identities

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and develop their transnational habitus. As noted, an individual’s identity is inexorably linked to his habitus, the set of his dispositions. More specifically, we problematized how various short-term training courses and mobility experiences influenced Kemal’s growth as a transnational TESOL practitioner. Accordingly, we aimed to investigate the development of transnational habitus through an identity lens during Kemal’s trajectory in the field of Erasmus+. Unlike study-abroad experiences, Kemal was professionally invested in Erasmus+; he believed these mobilities are more condensed and ‘to the point’ for him. Drawing on Bourdieusian concepts of habitus and field (Bourdieu, 1990; Grenfell, 2011) and the related concept of transnational habitus (Darvin & Norton, 2015; De Costa et al., 2016; Lam & Warriner, 2012), our fi ndings revealed that Kemal profited from Erasmus+ in three ways, that is, by accruing practical, professional and disseminative profits. Crucially, these profits are in congruence with Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of capital and Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment that brings together identity, ideology and capital. In terms of practical profits, Kemal’s case aligned with the program objectives that promoted social inclusion. The Erasmus+ program guide elaborates on the responsibilities of regional executive institutions to assist Erasmus+ participants throughout the visa application process (European Commission, 2020). Similarly, Klemenčič et al. (2017) noted that these shortterm mobility grants foster social inclusion for applicants who are socioeconomically disadvantaged. In Kemal’s case, it was clear that he enjoyed several forms of profit, which supported him to enact a transnational identity albeit to his self-proclaimed socioeconomic disadvantage. Admittedly, socioeconomic disadvantage is a relatively vague term; however, undisputedly as a non-EU partner country, Turkey and its citizens suffer from a long and exhausting (both economically and physically) process of securing a travel and work visa. This is a major challenge that Turkish professionals encounter when trying to enact their transnational identities; in Kemal’s case, however, being an Erasmus+ participant worked to his advantage. Therefore, Erasmus+ can be discussed as a potential field with mobilizable profits for eligible transnational practitioners from program countries. Second, Erasmus+ also yielded certain professional gains (profits) for Kemal. First, he developed a strategy to express himself with a professional focus. This reflective process also helped him to realize his professional goals through his Erasmus+ endeavors. According to Llurda et al. (2016), one key outcome of Erasmus programs (including Erasmus+) is that its mobility projects develop open-minded future professionals and provide them with valuable international experience that benefits them educationally, linguistically and culturally. Kemal’s ownership of acquired cultural capital corroborates their claim; however, Kemal was also able to acquire economic and social capital by honing his project development and management skills over the course of several experiences as a repeat Erasmus+ participant. In addition, he met with different partner organizations and representatives of other European institutions during his various

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sojourns. They assisted Kemal to obtain profits related to different forms of capital. They were also mobilized by him to create more profits by engaging in further mobilities (e.g. starting with Hungary and Lithuania, obtaining the economic and social capital required for Ukraine) or creating his own projects. Kemal invested in obtaining these capital forms and expanding the existing ones. For further investment, he mobilized the capital he had already accrued. Significantly, the professional profits Kemal secured were intertwined with the third type of profit he enjoyed: disseminative profits. As Kemal’s network expanded, he gained more social capital. And from a practical perspective, within the Erasmus+ field, his cultural (e.g. his project writing and management skills) and social capital (e.g. his network and ability to bring diverse partner organizations together) were closely linked. As Kemal noted, he saw himself evolving into a TESOL practitioner who was able to write a project proposal that involved partners across Bologna Process countries, apply for an Erasmus+ fund, and manage a project in which he could include his students and colleagues. Finally, our fi ndings demonstrated that Kemal’s transnational habitus enabled him to not only transcend but also take advantage of his repertoire of dispositions, in particular his background as a former public school student with extremely limited access to the European community. His teaching philosophy transformed into one with a GLocal agenda, which embodied critical and practical aims of the inclusion of more students with similar underprivileged backgrounds. Selvi and Rudolph (2018: 2) defi ned a GLocal approach as the interpenetration of the global and the local, which emphasizes ‘critical-practical emphasis on the notion of interaction as characterized by dynamic hybridity and contextual diversity’. Kemal’s adoption of a GLocal agenda as being of value to his teaching practice can be traced back to his transnationally expansive experience afforded by Erasmus+. This experience helped him to expand his existing capitals economically, culturally and socially with practical, professional and disseminative profits. According to Kemal, the ability to do this was a hallmark of being ‘a good teacher’. This also demonstrates that there is a close relationship between one’s set of dispositions and identity. Importantly, this fi nding corroborates those of De Costa et al.’s (2016) study; in this study, Aaron, who was a global elite with ample economic capital, indexed and displayed his affiliation with an elite community in his transnational experience. For Kemal, the same case was evident in terms of his ability to effectively put into use his acquired social capital. That is, his affiliation with the previous institutions and communities as a former socioeconomically disadvantaged public school student influenced the way he mobilized his transnational habitus. Our findings are in alignment with those of Gunbayi and Vezne (2016), who investigated teaching professionals’ beliefs about short-term Erasmus+ mobility projects, in that Kemal also thrived professionally as a result of

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focused, content-based professional enrichment and became familiar with different learning and teaching contexts. However, Kemal did not share experiences of problems such as cultural misconceptions (Kizilaslan, 2010) and cultural or linguistic issues (Aydin, 2012) experienced by sojourners in long-term study-abroad arrangements. This is not to suggest that Kemal did not experience any problems; however, we argue that the short-term professional development mobility projects helped him to concentrate on building up his capital and developing a transnational habitus rather than being weighed down by the complexities of living and studying abroad. Implications and Conclusion

Kemal’s case provides implications for various audiences. First, teachercandidates who are eligible to participate in the field of Erasmus+, or comparable programs, should know that having a critical and professional focus may help them orient to a strategic position that would allow them to optimize opportunities afforded by such an arrangement. Adopting a more professionally focused approach will increase their ability to acquire more capital and reap its attendant profits so that they can enact a transnational identity and habitus. Second, teacher-educators and mentors should acknowledge the professional impact of short-term mobility projects in terms of customizing professional trajectories of teacher-candidates. They need to familiarize themselves with such programs so that they can mentor teacher-candidates more efficiently. Last, program administrators need to promote Erasmus+ as a field for young professionals and support them with further professional guidance so that these individuals can utilize these mobility projects to support their professional identity and habitus development. Another significant implication for all stakeholders is the need to understand that a field such as Erasmus+ cannot be limited to a singular instance of participant mobility. These projects are not one-off, sit-and-get training experiences; instead, the Bourdieusian constructs of field and habitus enabled us to see Erasmus+ as a transcendent field of practice where every form of mobility is a connected activity with its related antecedents. In Kemal’s case, we saw this when he utilized his capital and profits from earlier Erasmus+ mobilities to venture into Ukraine. Accordingly, future research should focus more on the longitudinal impacts of various mobility projects to see if transnational TESOL practitioners like Kemal really do succeed in realizing their GLocal agendas.

Note (1) These countries comprise 26 countries situated in Europe; they are not necessarily all EU countries, and not all EU countries are in the Schengen zone. These countries abolished borders between themselves to promote free and unrestricted mobility of their citizens. For more information, see https://www.schengenvisainfo.com/.

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References Aydin, S. (2012) ‘I am not the same after my ERASMUS’: A qualitative research. The Qualitative Report 17 (28), 1–23. Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Refl exive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. Canagarajah, S. (2013) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge. Ceri Jones, H. (2017) Celebrating 30 years of the Erasmus programme. European Journal of Education 52 (4), 558–562. Crookes, G.V. (2015) Redrawing the boundaries on theory, research, and practice concerning language teachers’ philosophies and language teacher cognition: Toward a critical perspective. Modern Language Journal 99 (3), 485–499. Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2015) Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 36–56. De Costa, P.I. (2010) From refugee to transformer: A Bourdieusian take on a Hmong learner’s trajectory. TESOL Quarterly 44 (3), 517–541. De Costa, P.I., Tigchelaar, M. and Cui, Y. (2016) Reflexivity, emotions and transnational habitus: The case of a ‘poor’ cosmopolitan Chinese international student. AILA Review 29, 173–198. De Costa, P.I., Singh, J., Milu, E., Wang, X., Fraiberg, S. and Canagarajah, S. (2017) Pedagogizing translingual practice: Prospects and possibilities. Research in the Teaching of English 51 (4), 464–472. European Commission (2020) Erasmus+ Programme Guide 2020. See https://ec.europa.eu/ programmes/erasmus-plus/resources/documents/erasmus-programme-guide-2020_ en (accessed June 1, 2020). Friedman, S. (2012) Cultural omnivores or cultural homeless? Exploring the shifting cultural identities of the socially mobile. Poetics 40, 467–489. Golubeva, I., Gómez Parra, M.E. and Espejo Mohedano, R. (2018) What does ‘active citizenship’ mean for Erasmus students? Intercultural Education 29 (1), 40–58. Grenfell, M. (2011) Bourdieu, Language, and Linguistics. London: Continuum. Gunbayi, I. and Vezne, R. (2016) Opinions of teachers on Erasmus+ key action 1: A case study. International Journal on New Trends in Education and Their Implications 7 (1), 1–13. Jacobone, V. and Moro, G. (2015) Evaluating the impact of the Erasmus programme: Skills and European identity. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 40 (2), 309–328. Kizilaslan, I. (2010) International experiences of Turkish student teachers: A multiple case study. Journal of Ethnographic & Qualitative Research 4 (2), 108–114. Klemenčič, M., Žnidaršič, M., Vavpetič, A. and Martinc, M. (2017) Erasmus students’ involvement in quality enhancement of Erasmus+ mobility through digital ethnography and ErasmusShouts. Studies in Higher Education 42 (5), 925–932. Lam, W.S.E. and Warriner, D.S. (2012) Transnationalism and literacy: Investigating the mobility of people, languages, texts, and practices in contexts of migration. Reading Research Quarterly 47 (2), 191–215. Llurda, E., Gallego-Balsà, L., Barahona, C. and Martin-Rubió, X. (2016) Erasmus student mobility and the construction of European citizenship. The Language Learning Journal 44 (3), 323–346. Motha, S., Jain, R. and Tecle, T. (2012) Translinguistic identity-as-pedagogy: Implications for language teacher education. International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching and Research 1 (1), 13–28. Norton, B. and De Costa, P.I. (2018) Research tasks on identity in language learning and teaching. Language Teaching 51 (1), 90–112.

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Owens, L.W., Miller, J.J. and Grise-Owens, E. (2014) Activating a teaching philosophy in social work education: Articulation, implementation, and evaluation. Journal of Teaching in Social Work 34 (3), 332–345. Selvi, A.F. and Rudolph, N. (2018) Introduction: Conceptualizing and approaching ‘education for glocal interaction’. In A.F. Selvi and N. Rudolph (eds) Conceptual Shifts and Contextualized Practices in Education for Glocal Interaction (pp. 1–14). Singapore: Springer. Simon-Madea, A. (2004) The complex construction of professional identities: Female EFL educators in Japan speak out. TESOL Quarterly 38 (3), 405–436. Soong, H., Stahl, G. and Shan, H. (2018) Transnational mobility through education: A Bourdieusian insight on life as middle transnationals in Australia and Canada. Globalisation, Societies, and Education 16 (2), 241–253. Supasiraprapa, S. and De Costa, P.I. (2017) Metadiscourse and identity construction in a teaching philosophy: A critical case study of two MATESOL students. TESOL Quarterly 51 (4), 868–896.

7 Intercultural Experience and Transnational Culture Education: A Case Study of One Novice Teacher’s Personal and Professional Development Tabitha Kidwell

As globalization contributes to increased migration and opportunities for virtual communication, it is important that TESOL practitioners move beyond traditional understandings of ‘national cultures’ or ‘native speaker cultures’. Scholars have offered a transnational paradigm (Canagarajah, 2018; Risager, 2007) as a means of reducing the field’s dependence on nationality as a proxy for culture (Holliday, 1999) or linguistic norms (Kachru, 1986). In today’s global world, students do not need to acquire the cultural knowledge held by native speakers from a certain nation (Byram & Wagner, 2018); rather, they must develop adaptive skills to help them engage with people from diverse transnational backgrounds (Baker, 2011). These skills, as well as dispositions of open-mindedness, curiosity and respect, are elements of intercultural communicative competence (ICC) which consists of the knowledge, skills and attitudes (or dispositions) necessary to successfully engage across difference (Byram, 1997). Though it is important that language teachers be able to support the development of their students’ ICC, there is limited research on how novice TESOL practitioners develop their own ICC (Byram & Feng, 2004). Moreover, few research studies have examined how transnational experiences contribute to ICC. This study addresses the issues discussed above through a case study of Nita, an English teacher in Indonesia who displayed high levels of ICC and who drew on her ICC in her teaching. Indonesia is a particularly interesting context in which to examine novice teachers’ development of 106

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ICC. For one, it is an incredibly diverse nation, and many Indonesian people regularly encounter cultural differences within their own borders. It may be the case that some Indonesian people tend to have higher levels of ICC, and their experiences could act as a model for individuals in more monocultural settings. Additionally, Indonesia has been identified in the past (somewhat problematically) as a ‘periphery’ country (Canagarajah, 1999), and there is a great need for studies carried out in such settings, particularly given the prevailing Eurocentrism of the intercultural communication field (Kumaravadivelu, 2008). The research questions that guided this study were: What experiences contributed to Nita’s development of ICC? and How did her ICC influence the way she addressed culture in her classes? Theoretical Perspectives

This study is guided by an understanding of English as an international language (EIL), which acknowledges that English is used as a means of communication between multilingual speakers worldwide. Global users of English need not be expected to converge on a single normative variety of English; rather, they must be able to adapt their language use, make accommodations for others, and access forms that are widely used and intelligible across diverse groups of speakers (Jenkins, 2006; McKay, 2003). The term ‘native speaker’ and the use of this concept as a model for language learners have been critiqued by many scholars as inadequate, inappropriate and theoretically unsound (Cook, 1999; Davies, 2003), given that the communicative abilities required by EIL users will likely differ from those required of a first language speaker (Widdowson, 1994). Rather than striving to adopt idealized ‘native speaker’ norms, EIL users can widen their linguistic resources and develop adaptive, flexible skills that support transnational communication. Within the EIL paradigm, challenges to the ‘native’ English speaker as a model for language acquisition have developed in parallel with the definition of a new model for cultural acquisition, the intercultural speaker (Byram & Zarate, 1994). Intercultural speakers do not need deep knowledge of a specific culture, despite the widespread assumption among language teachers that ‘learners should know what native speakers know’ (Byram & Wagner, 2018: 145). Rather, they need to develop open-mindedness, respect and the ability to respond adaptively during interaction with speakers from varied cultural backgrounds (Kramsch, 1993; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013; McKay, 2018). Language users’ cultural proficiency contributes to their sociolinguistic competence (Bachman & Palmer, 1996; Canale & Swain, 1980) and their sociocultural competence (Celce-Murcia et al., 1995). The nexus of these competencies can be referred to as intercultural communicative competence (ICC), which Byram (1997) identified as consisting of five aspects: knowledge about the products and practices of

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various social groups, relational and interpretive competence, interactional competence, a critical cultural stance and intercultural attitudes and beliefs. The development of ICC requires both culture-specific learning and cultural-general learning (Paige et al., 2003). It is important that culturespecific learning does not privilege the national attributes of countries where the language is spoken as a first language, which minimizes cultural variation within nations and exoticizes unfamiliar cultures (Kubota, 1999; Kumaravadivelu, 2008). Given that EIL is not linked to any social or cultural context (McKay, 2018), when cultural-specific content from any culture is used in the classroom, the goal is to help students develop ICC rather than adopt the norms of that culture. By learning about the knowledge, skills and attitudes of other cultures, students can build knowledge of intercultural phenomena (like cultural adjustment and identity), develop intercultural skills (such as strategies for learning about other cultures and intercultural perspective-taking), and come to adopt positive attitudes towards different cultures and cultural differences (Paige et al., 2003). An additional important element of an intercultural perspective is the emphasis on students’ own cultures and the possibility of reflecting on their own cultural norms through exposure to those of other communities (Kramsch, 1993; Liddicoat & Scarino, 2013). To support students’ development of ICC, language teachers must attend to culture in addition to language. Just as linguistic instruction should not prioritize any one ‘native’ English speaker model, cultural instruction should not prioritize any one cultural model. Exposure to unfamiliar cultures can help students develop ICC and become more aware of their own cultures. As transnational trends bring diverse individuals in contact with each other, cultural awareness and adaptive linguistic and cultural abilities will be essential elements of meaningful exchanges. Literature Review

Previous empirical research regarding language teachers’ development of ICC has shown that language teachers’ transnational life experiences within specific cultures can help them develop deeper culture-general understandings, which in turn contribute to their ICC. Some teachers identify multiple cultural identities within themselves based on the experiences they have had within and across different settings over the course of their lives (Fichtner & Champan, 2011; Menard-Warwick, 2008). Duff and Uchida (1997) found that teachers’ personal histories, including past education, professional and cultural experiences, shaped the sociocultural identities that they display to their students. Similarly, Kohler (2015) found that teachers’ understandings of the nature of culture are influenced by their own personal experiences, knowledge and identities, and that

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those teachers with more international experiences had deeper selfawareness and more integrated understandings of culture. Transnational experience is not limited to in-person interactions – Lundgren (2017) found that pre-service teachers from different nations who engaged in an online exchange developed a heightened awareness of their own stereotypes and an increased sense of international identification, factors that could support the development of ICC. Regarding the influence of teachers’ ICC on their teaching practices, Menard-Warwick (2008) found that teachers’ approaches stem from their own unique experiences and the intercultural identities they might use as resources in the classroom. Peiser and Jones (2014) found that teachers’ pedagogical attention to intercultural content is influenced more by their own experiences than by other contextual factors, like school culture or curriculum content. Teachers report feeling more comfortable sharing about the national cultures of countries where they have lived or traveled (Byram & Risager, 1999), and teachers who have themselves experienced intercultural encounters often draw on their own life experiences as a context for teaching (Kohler, 2015; Menard-Warwick, 2008; Ryan, 1998). It should be noted, however, that Fichtner and Chapman (2011) found that some language teachers feel uncomfortable presenting themselves as experts on a given culture (even if they identify as members of that culture) and prefer that students see them as individuals with knowledge about certain cultural aspects. Some teachers express the belief that they should help students gain knowledge about the prestigious elements of other cultures (Peiser & Jones, 2014), while others address cultural issues in their classes to help students practice adopting divergent perspectives and begin to make comparisons between cultures (Menard-Warwick, 2008; Ryan, 1998). One possible goal of making comparisons across cultures is to help students become more aware of their own cultures. Language teachers at times encourage students to make connections to their own culture, reflect upon their own cultural values, and adopt an outsider stance as they do so (Kohler, 2015). In one study, a group of Turkish teachers of English felt that their status as ‘non-native’ speakers helped them teach about culture more effectively, because they had awareness of the norms of both the local culture and the target cultures (Bayyurt, 2006). Given that teachers hold a variety of sociocultural backgrounds, Luk (2012) calls for closer collaboration among language teachers to share their local and global cultural resources. Students can also share their cultural resources, and opportunities to co-construct cultural knowledge can arise if teachers are willing to explore unfamiliar cultural content with students (Lazaraton, 2003). In second language contexts, where teachers are teaching the language of the surrounding community to newcomers, many teachers try to build on students’ diverse cultural backgrounds to mediate their language instruction (Rowsell et al., 2007). Therefore, the students’ transnational

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experiences can offer resources for cultural learning within the language classroom, especially if teachers do not themselves have transnational resources to draw from. Few of the studies discussed above have approached their analysis with a transnational lens (with the notable exception of Menard-Warwick [2008]). More research is therefore needed to investigate how transnational experiences can contribute to teachers’ development of ICC, and how teachers draw on their ICC and transnational experiences within their teaching practices. This qualitative case study aims to address that gap by using a transnational lens to examine the intercultural communicative competence development of Nita, an Indonesian novice teacher with a particularly intercultural outlook. Methodology

This chapter is based on data that was collected in 2017–2018 within a larger case study of the English teacher preparation practices at Central Java Islamic University (CJIU), a mid-sized Muslim university in the town of Kota Tengah, Indonesia.1 Kota Tengah is a town of 180,000 people in Central Java, located on the main road between the two major cities in the region. I established a connection with CJIU when I was placed there from 2011–2013 through the English Language Fellow Program, a teacher exchange sponsored by the US State Department. During that time, I taught English and teaching methods courses. Nita had been a student at CJIU during this time, and we developed a relationship through CJIU’s Communicative English Club. By the time I returned to CJIU in 2017, Nita had completed her master’s degree in India and was in her second year of working at CJIU as an adjunct. She accepted my invitation to participate in the study, and her data was selected for this analysis because she displayed higher levels of ICC and greater willingness to integrate cultural content (both culture-specific and culture-general) in her classes than many of her peers. I believed her case might have the potential to act as a telling case (Mitchell, 1984) to show how novice teachers’ transnational experiences can support their development of ICC. Nita was one of 21 participants to take part in the larger comparative case study. For that study, I interviewed participants, observed them teaching, invited them to participate in monthly meetings of a professional learning community (PLC) group and asked them to keep a journal. For the analysis discussed in this chapter, I re-analyzed Nita’s data: 13 journal entries, transcripts from six interviews, field notes and recordings from five course observations, and field notes and transcripts from five meetings of the PLC (see Table 7.1 for a summary of data sources). Data collection for Nita’s case began with an initial interview, which followed a semi-structured protocol focused on prior learning experiences,

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Table 7.1 Data sources Data Source

Additional Information

Date

Duration

Method of Collection

9-25-2017

28 minutes

Audio-record, transcribe

Speaking III

9-25-2017

97 minutes

Video- and audio-record, field notes, transcribe selections, take photos of lesson activities and materials

Speaking III

10-4-2017

87 minutes

Speaking III

11-22-2017

65 minutes

Speaking II

2-28-2018

92 minutes

Speaking II

3-7-2018

93 minutes

9-25-2017

11 minutes

10-5-2017

35 minutes

11-22-2017

12 minutes

2-29-2018

11 minutes

3-8-2018

26 minutes

Session 2

10-14-2017

3 hours

Session 3

11-11-2017

3 hours

Session 5

1-20-2018

3 hours

Session 6

2-10-2018

3 hours

13 entries

9-2017 to 2-2018

n/a

Initial interview Lesson observations

Debriefing interviews

PLC sessions

Journals

Audio-record, transcribe

Video-record, audio-record, transcribe

Obtain copy

opinions about integrating culture within language classes, and previous opportunities to learn about culture and methods for teaching about culture. The interview lasted 28 minutes and was audio-recorded and transcribed. Over the course of the following six months, I observed five sessions of the speaking courses Nita taught. These lessons ranged from 65 to 97 minutes in length. During observations, I took detailed field notes, focusing in particular on moments when Nita addressed culture. Observations were video- and audio-recorded, and significant episodes were selectively transcribed. I also took photos of class activities and teaching materials. I interviewed Nita after each observation, either immediately after class or the next day. These interviews lasted between 11 and 35 minutes and were audio-recorded and transcribed. Each interview was semi-structured and followed a protocol focused on Nita’s thoughts about the lesson, the ways she had used ideas from professional learning community sessions, and her evolving practices and beliefs regarding the teaching of culture. Nita was also invited to participate in six monthly professional learning community (PLC) sessions, along with the other 21 novice teacher participants in the larger study. During each session, participants

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responded to a journal prompt I presented on a topic related to teaching, the group discussed the ideas I had shared, and participants responded to an additional journal prompt. Nita was unable to attend the fi rst and fourth PLC sessions, but the sessions that she did attend had the following themes: Scaffolding; Ways to teach about culture; Ideas for teaching about culture; and Ways to reduce stereotypes and prejudices. The PLC sessions were video- and audio-recorded and transcribed. Nita and her peers were asked to keep a journal for the duration of the six-month PLC program. If participants were absent during a PLC session, they did not complete the entries from that session. An additional prompt was sent to participants via WhatsApp between each PLC session. Nita completed journal entries in response to the themes shown in Table 7.2. I obtained copies of Nita’s journal after the fi nal PLC session. Data from these events was analyzed using the constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2014). During the open coding phase, I reviewed all the data sources involving Nita with a primary focus on her cultural and transnational learning experiences and her inclusion of cultural content in her lessons. At this stage, I used the following a priori Table 7.2 Journal entry prompts Date

Journal Prompt

10-3-2017

Why is learning English important for Indonesian students?

10-14-2017

Read the lesson scenario, then answer these questions: What went well in the lesson? What could be improved in the lesson?

10-14-2017

What new idea did you learn from the October PLC? How will you apply this idea in the next month?

10-30-2017

Please write a paragraph explaining what you think about ‘culture’. (For example: What other words do you think of when you hear the word ‘culture’? How would you define ‘culture’? How does culture influence your life?)

11-11-2017

Which ‘pedagogy’ do you use to teach about culture? Why?

11-11-2017

What new idea did you learn from the November PLC? How will you apply this idea in the next month?

11-29-2017

Who was your favorite English teacher, and why? What methods did he or she use to teach? Is the way you teach the same, or different?

1-10-2018

In your life, how have you learned about culture? How have you learned to teach students about culture?

1-20-2018

Should language teachers teach about culture? Why or why not?

1-20-2018

What new idea did you learn from the January PLC? How will you apply this idea in the next month?

2-1-2018

How would you describe a typical Indonesian person? How would you describe a typical American person? How are they similar, and how are they different?

2-10-2018

What is the connection between culture, character education and critical thinking?

2-10-2018

What new idea did you learn from the February PLC? How will you apply this idea in the next month?

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codes: ‘Cultural learning experiences’; ‘Transnational learning experiences’; and ‘Cultural teaching’. I also developed in vivo codes during the open coding phase based on themes and patterns that were present within the data. These codes classified Nita’s learning experiences (‘Moving around’; ‘International experiences’; ‘Coursework’; ‘Community organizations’) and her teaching practices (‘Focus on students’ cultures’; ‘Cultural comparisons’; ‘Sharing personal experiences’; ‘Using media’; ‘Avoiding misunderstanding’). I then conducted axial coding to compare codes across data sources and refi ne my code application, for instance by noting that the codes ‘Sharing personal experiences’ and ‘Using media’ were both associated with instruction focused on ‘avoiding misunderstanding’. Lastly, I conducted selective coding by reviewing the coding of the full data set to ensure consistency, and drew on selective codes to identify the fi ndings discussed below.

Findings Nita’s development of ICC

Nita displayed a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the nature of culture. She defi ned culture as ‘what makes people becomes so unique, and that uniqueness that has to be appreciated by others’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). This defi nition is built on the understanding that culture varies from person to person. She expanded on this idea in a journal entry, writing that culture was ‘the basic/fundamental foundation that might answer the questions of why people think or behave differently, how they perceive about [a] particular case, what they will do to deal with something, etc.’ (Journal, 10-30-2017). She also understood culture as a dynamic phenomenon that develops through social interaction, saying that people developed their culture ‘by learning from others … because culture is … social knowledge, [and] social knowledge means that you have to interact with people’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). Nita revealed a deep understanding that culture was more than just surface features – that it extended beyond dress, music and art, to also include beliefs and behaviors. She said, ‘dance, tradition, quotes, are, like, artifacts of culture. And what’s more fundamental is the concept of culture as belief, thought’ (Interview, 10-4-2017). In her journal, she used popular metaphors to describe culture as a complex and profound phenomenon: ‘To me, culture is just like an iceberg or an onion. What we see from other people is only the tip of something bigger and influencing far down below … It consists of multiple layers that uncover the reason of why a group of people differ from other group[s]’ (Journal, 10-30-2017). Overall, Nita understood culture as something that all people have – a complex and often invisible phenomenon, something developed through social interaction, and which varies across and within communities.

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Nita identified several experiences that had contributed to her cultural awareness. She had been born several hours south of Kota Tengah, then had moved to the island of Borneo for several years before moving to Kota Tengah with her family at the age of 10. This upbringing meant that she had been exposed to different cultures from a formative age. She explained, ‘I have experienced living in different settings of culture since my childhood’ (Journal, 1-10-2018). Because of these experiences, Nita actively reached out to people who may have been perceived as outsiders. Describing her university days, she said, ‘I extended my friendliness with people from different regions in Java even from different islands in Indonesia. I also have a nice friendship and [am] acquainted with foreigners’ (Journal, 1-10-2018). During her time at CJIU, Nita recalled learning about culture through a class titled Cross-cultural Understanding, but said the course was not very practically oriented: ‘I got … theoretical stuff about cross-cultural understanding’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). She said that she had learned more about culture through her involvement with diverse communities: ‘What taught me more is that my interaction with people in my communities … I met people from different background[s] without, like, planned setting, so it’s more natural. And that makes me learn more’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). Nita had many opportunities to engage in interactions with diverse individuals as an undergraduate. She had been an active participant in the university’s Communicative English Club, which planned events for students to practice speaking with ‘native’ speakers of English. She had also joined a monthlong homestay program hosted by one of the university lecturers, an American woman living in Kota Tengah with her family. She said that these involvements had helped her to learn about culture: ‘my involvement in, like, community organizations taught me many things about culture that, people are different and that we couldn’t judge … one country just from [one] person’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). Overall, Nita identified meeting people – both fellow Indonesians and individuals of various nationalities – as her primary source of cross-cultural learning during this period. After graduating from CJIU, Nita taught for one year in an Islamic senior high school, and then received a scholarship from the Indonesian government to earn her master’s degree in India. Regarding this experience, she said, ‘Continuing my study in India, I got more opportunities to learn about culture … such as to mingle with people from different community background[s], [and] to be the speaker in some events in Indian schools’ (Journal, 1-10-2018). During her time in India, a number of experiences helped her better understand cultural variation in a more concrete way. For example, during a PLC meeting, she offered the following anecdote as an example of the ways that ‘invisible’ culture can impact interactions between people: I once experienced that, when … [a friend and I] went to a park, and we kind of got lost, and asked a person for help. He used a loud voice, and seemed impolite. And as we lived there for more than a semester, we came

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to know that that’s all about their culture, and that’s how they talk, using loud voices. For Eastern culture … especially Indonesian culture, Javanese, when you talk with loud voice, it gives another person an impression that ‘you don’t like me’, or that I’ve done something wrong, or something like that. (PLC 3, 11-11-2017)

Nita noted that she had felt uneasy when this person shouted at her, because she had perceived the situation through her own Javanese culture, where politeness is essential in many interactions. As she came to better understand the culture of her host community, she came to see that the incident in the park represented a cultural way of communicating that differed from the understanding she had originally brought to the situation. Nita’s studies in India allowed her to deepen and expand her awareness of other cultures, as well as develop a deeper understanding of the nature of culture and cultural phenomena. Through her studies, she also came to realize how important it could be to draw on her intercultural competence as a teacher in the future. She said one specific course in her MA program had been particularly helpful: ‘I took a cultural base course … about cultural communication …, how communication would be challenging across culture[s]. It made me realize more about the importance of teaching culture for my students, because I’m a language teacher and they’re going to learn about foreign language – a language that is not in Indonesia’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). This course helped her to see that it was important to focus on culture in addition to language. She came to realize that it would be important to draw on her own cross-cultural understanding and awareness in the English lessons she would teach in the future. In the section that follows, I describe the practices she used to address culture as a university-level English teacher in Indonesia. Nita’s enactment of transnational culture instruction

Nita’s lessons offered opportunities to learn about cultural practices from a variety of cultures, not only the practices of so-called ‘native speaker’ cultures. Nita did not want to change her students’ cultural orientations; rather, she hoped to widen their perspectives and help them respect difference: ‘it doesn’t mean that language learners should become the person who (change their own cultural identity) into the culture when learning the language. Instead, by learning culture they can broaden their capacity of life, their insight, and of course, their tolerance against differences’ (Journal, 10-30-2017). Nita saw great value in learning from people of different backgrounds. Indeed, Nita saw a potential for danger if students did not have opportunities to encounter other cultures, as shown by this statement made during a PLC session: ‘if students are not introduced to foreign cultures, I think that will be dangerous. Because, you know,

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they only know their own culture, and they’re going to believe that “mine is the best” … So, to learn foreign culture, to make you more tolerant, that’s it’ (PLC 3, 11-11-2017). Nita felt it was important that students have opportunities to learn about cultures different from their own, and she made efforts to include a focus on diverse cultures within her English lessons. She was observed doing so in three ways: fi rst, by asking students to think critically about their own cultural practices; second, by encouraging students to make comparisons between cultures; and lastly, by sharing examples of cultural misunderstandings in order to help students avoid similar situations in the future. Critical examination of students’ cultures

Nita said that students seemed more interested and invested in the lesson when they could make personal connections to the material being discussed: ‘They reflect to theirselves. And it surrounds them so that’s why it’s easier for them to rationalize the concept’. In a speaking lesson, Nita initiated a focus on culture by prompting students to discuss what they liked and disliked about life in Indonesia, and what they would like to change about their society (Observation, 3-7-2018). Students shared their perceptions of Indonesia as a friendly culture, where people greeted strangers and were open to making personal connections. They critiqued the corrupt practices of some civil servants and elected officials, as well as the existence of prejudice between ethnic and religious groups. The discussion concluded with a student saying ‘don’t just change your country, you and me have to improve ourselves, our character and our actions’ before focusing on larger issues; the class applauded in response to this comment. Students were quite engaged in the discussion, and it seemed that they enjoyed the opportunity to think critically about life and culture in Indonesia and how they could change it for the better. Nevertheless, Nita and her students’ focus on ‘Indonesian culture’ did perpetuate the idea of culture as linked to nationality, which could be seen as overly simplistic in a nation as diverse as Indonesia. On other occasions, Nita was able to support her students’ examination of smaller cultures within their own communities. She felt it was important for students to practice sharing about their own cultures with others. To provide an opportunity to do so, for the midterm assignment in her speaking class, she asked students to create a video explaining a local tourist attraction or cultural tradition. She hoped that these videos would be of high enough quality to post on YouTube, and that this project would be motivating to students: ‘they’re going to get excited to know that, “Ok, my video is liked by people” … I just expect that the motivation to learn language will be higher’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). Nita encouraged students to consider how outsiders might understand their cultures, and thereby to be able to see their own cultural practices with fresh eyes. Nita

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also felt it was important for students to become aware of the cultural differences within their own communities: Even if it is in the same place, … it might be people with different thought, different believe, different perception … the concept of the culture is not about the person from one place or another place, it’s also people from the same place, but different thought. So I think [learning about culture is] beneficial for everyone. (Interview, 10-4-2017)

Nita valued students’ ability to look critically at their own cultures, discuss their own cultural practices, and identify the ways culture varied even within their own community. She also helped raise students’ awareness of their own cultures through encouraging them to make comparisons with other cultures, as is discussed the next section. Making comparisons among cultures

Nita said that she usually focused her instruction on multiple cultures, rather than one at a time. As future English teachers, she thought that her students needed to be able to make connections and comparisons across cultures: ‘Usually, I, like, mix between two cultures, two or more different culture so that they can compare, because it’s really important for them. It’s a skill that they have to own because they going to be English teacher[s]’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). She noted how animated students could be when discussing cultural concepts and differences across cultures: ‘the good thing about learning and teaching culture is that you can bring your students to the real situations. For example, … what I did in [a teaching methods] class, we talked about, um, how cultural differences, how culture can influence the ways students learn, and they were so excited about it … I was surprised when some students were used to be silent and they spoke up’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). She felt that it was the unfamiliar cultural information that was most interesting to students: ‘I take benefit from their curiosity and that’s the good thing about teaching culture. Because they’re so curious about new culture[s] [that] they are not familiar with’ (Interview, 9-25-2017). In her classes, I observed Nita encouraging students to make connections and comparisons between their own cultures and the unfamiliar cultures they were learning about. For example, in a speaking lesson focused on cultural differences, she began by playing songs from Japan and from Java, and asking students to guess where each song came from. She then showed a series of maps and asked students to call out their first thoughts about the place shown. For a map of Java, students offered: ‘calm’, ‘sweet’, ‘beautiful’, ‘wise’, ‘not arrogant’ and ‘polite’. In response to a map of Japan, students said, ‘beautiful’, ‘disciplined’ and ‘smart’. Connecting to the idea that Japanese people might be perceived as being more disciplined than Javanese people, Nita asked students to consider

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how cultural perspectives might influence an individual’s timeliness, and said that it is acceptable for Indonesian people to arrive late for appointments, but the same might not be true in other cultures (Observation, 10-4-2017). In a PLC meeting several months later, she explained that her rationale for activities like this was to encourage students to consider how their cultural practices compare to those of other communities: ‘we can encourage them to think about it, … to critically think about a specific phenomenon, like between discipline and jam karet [Indonesian people’s tendency to arrive late]’ (PLC 6, 2-10-2019). Nita also explained that she started with Javanese culture, then moved on to a more unfamiliar culture, to help students think about the existence of cultural differences within communities: I want them to reflect on their surroundings fi rst. Like, people closest to them, so Javanese … And then, I moved further … What they perceived about another country. And then, I invited them to reflect on the culture differences that exist … even like from one country to other countries, and one Indonesian person to another person. (Interview, 10-4-2017)

One of Nita’s goals for this lesson was for students to consider how their own practices are culturally bound, a culture-general concept. Though the lesson discussed Javanese and Japanese culture, Nita’s primary goal was not for students to gain new knowledge about either culture. Nevertheless, this lesson’s discussion of specific cultures could be seen as problematic. In asking students to name their perceptions about Japanese and Javanese cultures, Nita risked validating and perpetuating stereotypes. Though her intention had been for students to become more aware of cultural variation within communities, she did not explore this concept in depth with students. Like many novice teachers, Nita continues to grow as a teacher, and her representation of specific cultures in class is one potential area of improvement. Avoiding cultural misunderstandings

Nita saw discussions about cultural differences as a way to prepare students for cultural differences in future encounters. She said, ‘I want them to realize that cultural differences are there, and I also wanted them to think what should they do … dealing with that … Even if they don’t understand why, but at least they respect other people’s decision to do something’ (Interview, 10-4-2017). She hoped students would be able to avoid cultural misunderstandings and avoid seeming disrespectful because of ignorance when encountering different cultures in the future. One way that Nita helped prepare students for these experiences was by sharing her own experiences. For example, she shared with students how she had not initially understood the ‘head bobble’ used by many people in South Asia (neither nodding the head up and down, nor

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turning it from right to left, but alternately lowering each ear towards the shoulder). When I was in India … I had to deal with many administrative business for my entry permit … One day, … [a man] accepted my papers, my documents, and then I asked him, ‘what should I do next?’, and he just like [shakes head back and forth]. I asked, ‘Are the documents complete?’ and that man is like [shakes head back and forth]. ‘Okay, which one is not complete?’ I said … and then, [shakes head back and forth] … I didn’t have any idea about what was going on then … and then [he said], ‘yes, go!’ And I felt frustrated because I didn’t know what [the head shaking] meant, and later on, I figured out that THIS [shakes head back and forth] means ‘that’s okay’ and ‘you can go’. So that’s what happens when you come across a new culture. (Observation, 10-4-2017)

Though this experience had been confusing and frustrating to Nita at the time, she was able to draw from that experience to help students see that they might have trouble communicating across cultural barriers without sufficient knowledge about the other culture. Nita also told students how she had learned that she had better prepare for a long wait if someone in India told her to ‘wait five minutes!’ (Field notes, 10-4-2017). By sharing these personal experiences, Nita offered students the possibility of vicarious learning through reflection on her struggles. Another way Nita offered students examples of potential cultural misunderstanding was through the use of media, for instance by showing commercials for HSBC bank (Field notes, 10-4-2017). In one video, a white businessman sits down at a table with a group of Asian businessmen, and is offered a bowl of mysterious-looking noodles. Trying to be polite, he eats the dish as quickly as possible. Seeing that he enjoyed the food, his companions order another helping, and the process repeats itself again and again. In another, a foreign man in Mexico displays discomfort when the locals he encounters repeatedly encroach upon his personal space. After watching these videos, Nita explained: ‘we have to face [cultural difference]. And how to face it, by preparing yourself for uncertainty, and appreciate what you’re going to face, that’s really important’ (Observation, 10-4-2017). To conclude this lesson, two students offered closing summaries: Sometimes it’s confus[ing], but it’s interesting, and we have to appreciate and respect about the differences of culture. We have to be tolerant about many culture[s] in the world, in Indonesia, and [not] be shocked … when you get in another country, like in the video. (Observation, 10-4-2017)

By sharing her own experiences, and by using media to introduce the idea of cultural differences, Nita helped her students see that variation between cultures is something to be expected and appreciated. She hoped this insight could help students engage more successfully when they encountered potential cultural misunderstandings in the future.

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Discussion

Perhaps the most notable aspect of Nita’s understanding of the construct of culture, and of the way she taught about culture in her lessons, is what is not present in the data discussed above: any reference to ‘native English speakers’. Across all the data sources, Nita used the term ‘native speaker’ only once, to say that she had appreciated having me in class so that I could share my own cultural perspective (Interview, 10-4-2017). Nita’s statements and actions did not indicate that she perceived the cultures of ‘native English speakers’ as more valuable or important than the cultures of other communities. Rather, she appeared to believe that students needed to be exposed to other cultures and ways of being in the world, including but not limited to the cultures of places where English is used as a fi rst language. She was influenced not only by her transnational experiences, but also by her intranational experiences – her encounters with fellow Indonesians from differing cultural backgrounds. These experiences led her to develop a multifaceted cultural identity, as was found among language teachers in other settings (Duff & Uchida, 1997; Fichtner & Chapman, 2011; Menard-Warwick, 2008). This complex cultural identity contributed to the way Nita addressed culture in her classroom, as found in the work of Menard-Warwick (2008). When discussing unfamiliar cultural contexts, Nita did not focus on declarative knowledge about other cultures. She did not operate under the assumption that students ‘should know what native speakers know’ (Byram & Wagner, 2018: 145). Rather, she introduced unfamiliar cultural information to help students gain awareness of the differences they might encounter, and to foster such dispositions as tolerance and curiosity (rather than fear or disgust) when encountering unfamiliar cultural content. She also at times focused on the variation among individuals within the same community, by making efforts to help students see that they could not make assumptions about a community based on one individual they encounter – an approach in line with Holliday’s (1999) suggestion that teachers focus on ‘small cultures’ within communities, rather than on monolithic national cultures. Nita utilized many of the same practices that were identified by studies in other contexts. She drew on the cultural background she shared with her students by encouraging them to reflect upon their own cultures, and thereby develop a deeper understanding of their own cultural practices before examining unfamiliar cultures (as in Bayyurt, 2006; Kohler, 2015). Once unfamiliar cultural content had been introduced, she did not focus on declarative knowledge about the culture; rather, she encouraged students to compare new understandings about culture to their prior knowledge and practice while accepting divergent perspectives (as in Menard-Warwick, 2008; Ryan, 1998). She also drew on her own life experiences to offer students a context to learn from (as in Byram & Risager,

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1999; Kohler, 2015; Menard-Warwick, 2008; Ryan, 1998), but while doing so, she was careful to present personal encounters with the cultures she encountered, rather than offering a deterministic view of culture (as in Fichtner & Chapman, 2011). The similarities found across very different contexts suggest that Nita is not a unique or atypical case; rather, her experiences, learning, and teaching practices fit with what has been identified in prior research. These patterns suggest that the fi ndings of this study are likely not limited to this context or to this individual; rather, similar findings might arise in other contexts where novice language teachers have opportunities to engage in transnational learning experiences. Nita was quite successful in drawing on her own transnational experiences and ICC in her instruction to deepen students’ awareness of both culture-specific and culture-general phenomena (Paige et  al., 2003). Nevertheless, her practice could continue to improve, particularly by offering a more nuanced portrayal of specific cultures. In some of Nita’s lessons, she presented culture as somewhat static and monolithic, and did not problematize that portrayal. In doing so, she may have unwittingly perpetuated cultural stereotypes about other cultures and missed opportunities for deep critical thinking about their own cultures. Nita’s students’ identification of Javanese people as ‘sweet’ and ‘wise’ and Japanese people as ‘disciplined’ and ‘smart’ exemplifies the way cultures were essentialized at times in her classes. For instance, the discussion about likes and dislikes regarding life in Indonesia allows and even encourages students to assume that their personal cultural experiences represent those of their 264 million compatriots. The discussion about Javanese culture glossed over cultural difference and variation among the 141 million people living on that island. Additionally, though Nita was careful not to associate any one cultural approach with ownership of English (as discussed in Widdowson, 1994), the HSBC advertisements she showed in class were problematic in their portrayal of white males as ‘normal’ and the people of color as ‘different’ or ‘exotic’. The development of students’ ICC requires teachers to focus on both culture-specific and culture-general learning (Paige et al., 2003). In doing so, it is important that specific cultures be presented as dynamic and varied. Novice teachers, like Nita, may struggle to present culture in such a sophisticated manner during instruction, even if they themselves have high levels of ICC. Implications

This study shows that transnational experiences can contribute to the development of a novice teacher’s ICC, and her ability to employ teaching practices that engage her students in examination of cultural practices from a transnational perspective. Some novice teachers, like Nita, will naturally come into contact with people from varied and multiple cultural backgrounds over the course of their education and early careers. These

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teachers should be encouraged to reflect upon their transnational learning experiences and to draw upon those experiences to support their students’ development of ICC. Other novice teachers may have few opportunities to engage with people unlike themselves. Teachers who would be unlikely to have transnational experiences on their own should be encouraged and assisted to do so through their teacher education programs. These teachers should be supported to take advantage of opportunities for exchange and encounter through travel, community partnerships or digital connections. They should also be exposed to diverse perspectives on the world through texts and media. Transnational experiences can help novice teachers feel more comfortable when discussing culture with their students, but culture is nevertheless an incredibly complex construct. Even teachers with high levels of ICC may at times present culture in a way that perpetuates stereotypes and allows students to avoid thinking critically. In addition to having transnational culture experiences themselves, novice teachers need to see more models of nuanced and sophisticated instruction about culture. They would also benefit from targeted instruction about how to discuss culture with students and how to integrate culture into their language instruction. If teacher education programs more purposefully supported novice teachers’ transnational learning opportunities, as well as their ability to teach about culture in a careful and nuanced way, novice TESOL practitioners might enter their classrooms better prepared to help their students to engage across differences.

Note (1) ‘CJIU’, ‘Kota Tengah’ and ‘Nita’ are all pseudonyms.

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8 National Perspectives on Mexican Transnational EAL Teachers: Ideological and Professional Challenges David Martínez-Prieto and Kristen Lindahl

‘Los están aventando al ruedo’ ([The government] is making them enter the fray), she said just when I was about to leave. ‘Y no les están ayudando nada’ (and they are not helping at all), she concluded in a solidarizing way with her transnational fellows. David Martínez-Prieto, Field notes, 13 June 2018

For almost a century, Mexican migration to the United States increased steadily (Consejo Nacional de Población, 2018). From the Mexican revolution (1910–1923) to the first decade of the 21st century, many Mexicans migrated to the US seeking better living conditions (Ramos Martínez et al., 2017) due to the prevalent poverty and insecurity in some regions south of the Río Bravo (Durand, 2007). However, due to the current economic slowdown in the US economy and the sharp increase in antiimmigrant policies, some first and second-generation Mexican transnationals have settled (back) in Mexico in the last decade (Sánchez Moreno, 2016). While some Mexican transnationals are forced to involuntarily return to Mexico, US policies have accelerated the voluntary decision of many other Mexican-origin families to (re)settle in the communities they once left (Espinosa-Márquez & González-Ramírez, 2016). The phenomenon of return migration has multiple implications for education in Mexico, particularly regarding the English language teaching (ELT) field. Many transnationals enroll in ELT programs at Mexican universities because they score highly on English proficiency exams in comparison to their Mexican national counterparts due to time spent living in the US (Cortez Román & Hamann, 2014). In this regard, Mexican academia has analyzed the advantages that Mexican transnationals bring and the challenges they face when they enroll in English educator preparation programs because of their bicultural and bilingual skills (Christiansen et al., 2017; Mora et al., 2016; Mora Pablo et al., 2014). 125

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While the (re)incorporation of transnationals into English educator preparation programs has been previously explored, the present study contributes to the transnational discussion by highlighting the voices of Mexican national language teachers1 regarding Mexican transnational English teachers. We also examine the perspectives of Mexican teachers with respect to language policies that seek the (re)incorporation of transnationals as English language teachers in Mexican public schools. Specifically, we focus on the perspectives of in-service English teachers from the Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca, two of the regions with the largest rates of return migration in Mexico (Ramos Martínez et al., 2017). Review of Literature

We approached the perspectives of Mexican national English language teachers (MNELTs) on the (re)incorporation of transnationals as English language teachers through two key theoretical lenses: the concepts of institutional power and governmentality of Foucault (1998) and a critical approach to English teaching (Yazan & Rudolph, 2018) that problematizes rigid essentializations in this process. We saw these two frameworks as complementary in that our data illustrate how Mexican national teachers’ perspectives were influenced by institutional practices which were based on an a priori binary distinction between Mexican nationals (many of whom are ‘non-native’ speakers of English), and transnationals, (many of whom are ‘native’ speakers of English or who have ‘native-like’ proficiency in English due to time spent in the US). Disciplinary power and resistance

In Foucault’s (1998) study of power relationships between the state and its people, he examined the way the state exercised power over its people. By doing so, he distinguished three sources of state-based power: sovereign power, disciplinary power, and governmentality (1998). Sovereign power is the power enacted by a centralized and unquestionable agency (e.g. a king). Disciplinary power is the way in which power is exercised by institutions regulated by authorities (e.g. schools), in which people are expected to behave according to the institutional rules of those in power where, institutions recognize what counts as ‘valid’ knowledge and foster a predetermined way to think and communicate about reality or ‘discourse’ (Foucault, 1998). For Foucault (1998), discourses are not merely top-down exercises of power, but spaces for rejection and resistance. Finally, governmentality is the way in which discourses of those in power have already been unquestionably accepted and guide the conduct of people. In this chapter, we draw upon Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power to relate Mexican national English teachers and Mexican transnational English teachers with the circulating discourse around English language policies in Mexico.

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Critical approaches to English teachers’ identities

As in many other global contexts, ELT in Mexico has traditionally followed a binary distinction between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ English speakers which embeds colonized ideas of race in that it posits power in the former and relegates ‘non-native’ participants to inferior power positions (Kramsch, 2014; Sayer, 2012). Although the ‘native’ speaker concept has been problematized for the last few decades in academia (e.g. Davies, 2003; Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 2001), Mexican English language teacher preparation programs still appear to follow this categorical distinction even in English-language teaching programs (Martínez-Prieto & Lindahl, 2019). In an effort to move away from categorical dichotomies, we subscribe to the notion of critically-oriented English language teaching (see Canagarajah, 2007; Pennycook, 2001; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018) which encompasses the intersectional analysis of social variables, such as race or national origin, instead of rigid ‘native/non-native’ classification. In other words, in this chapter, we adopt the approach that prioritizes dynamic notions of English language teacher identity as situated and fluid – rather than fi xed and monolithic. This approach to identity-oriented English language teacher development exhibits criticality in that it questions the a priori and discriminatory distinction of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ language teachers and learners – which not only embeds notions of linguistic ‘nativeness’, but also operates in tandem with other discourses of race, nationality and former colonialism, which fosters the marginalization of the (so-called) ‘non-standard forms’ of language (Hawkins & Norton, 2009; Phillipson, 2016). By adopting critical notions of identity in language teaching in our discussion of Mexican national and transnational English language teachers, we analyze how Mexican national English language teachers (MNELTs) position themselves in spaces of acceptance, rejection and resistance towards the (re)incorporation of transnationals as language teachers in Mexico.

The (unheard) voices of Mexican national English teachers

While research about English teaching in Mexico is rather extensive, Mexican national teachers’ perspectives are still an area of opportunity for researchers (Sayer, 2012). Even though it is not extensive, much of the existing literature portrays the situation of Mexican national English teachers as challenging in terms of hegemonic ideologies related to race, social origin, ‘nativeness’ and power access prevalent in the field of ELT. For example, Sayer (2007, 2012) examined the contentions that novice English as a Foreign Language (EFL) educators faced because many of them were not considered ‘real’ English teachers based on colonial and racist ideologies of employers. That is, Sayer (2007, 2012) analyzed the struggle of EFL language teachers to be recognized as legitimate English

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language teachers by school administrators. In a similar manner, LópezGopar (2016) explained the difficulties that indigenous English language teachers faced in Oaxacan schools due to colonial ideas in which Spanish and English language-dominant cultures were seen as ‘developed’ in comparison to ‘underdeveloped’ indigenous-language dominant cultures. As in Sayer (2007, 2012), these difficulties related to the way in which indigenous teachers’ cultures and languages were not valued as effective in the language teaching process. Similarly, in Puebla, Martínez-Prieto and Lindahl (2019) discussed the educational legitimacy contentions of a Mexican national language teacher, Lety, who, because of the prevalent ideologies in her English language teacher preparation program, appeared to have internalized the notion of ‘native speaker fallacy’ (Phillipson, 1992) in her own teaching identity. Those included the ideological contentions that EFL teachers encounter when seeking to be recognized as competent EFL teachers by educational institutions. Lety’s internalization of this fallacy was manifested in contradictory ways, however. For example, while Lety believed that pedagogical preparation was essential for English language teachers’ success and development, she also acknowledged that as a program administrator, she would prefer to hire ‘native’ English language teachers, such as Mexican transnationals, whether they had undergone formal teacher preparation or not. The above examples suggest that the ELT field in Mexico is ideologically driven, and establish a need for critical perspectives on English language teacher development and learning. EFL policies in Mexico are permeated by ideological positions that constrain the participation of language teachers in the enactment of language policies. For example, Trejo-Guzmán (2010) reported that English language teachers were not consulted in top-down administrative decisions in terms of curriculum development in Mexican institutions, which led to disappointment and a discontinuation from improving their teaching practices. In this same regard, Avalos-Rivera (2016) examined how ELT in Mexico has been traditionally related to less effective teaching practices in which teachers’ voices from relevant institutional decisions are usually ignored. Transnationals and English language teaching in Mexico

Another arena in which MNELT’s voices have been underrepresented is the discussion of the impact of ‘transnational returnees’ on the ELT field. While prior research has tended to refer to Mexican-origin but US-raised individuals as ‘returnees’ (or retornados), we conceptualize these individuals in our research as ‘transnationals’. This is because our participants, during this and other simultaneous research, clarified that many transnationals did not return to Mexico from the US only once, but instead engaged in frequent back-and-forth transnational movement (as in Sánchez, 2007).

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As noted, from the early studies of transnational language teachers (Petron, 2003) to more recent analysis of Mexican transnationals pursuing English teaching degrees (i.e. Mora et al., 2016; Mora Pablo et al., 2014), much research about transnational pre- and in-service teachers centers on the perspectives of transnationals exclusively. With some exceptions (Martínez-Prieto & Lindahl, 2019; Sayer, 2012), most extant literature has not incorporated the viewpoint of EFL teachers who were educated in Mexican higher education institutions, and now teach in the Mexican context. To summarize, the literature suggests that Mexican English language teachers’ professional legitimacy may be jeopardized due to the general absence of their input into ELT and learning discussions, the most recent of which involves transnational educators of English. This absence may be perpetuated by nativespeakerism and deficit ideologies in ELT which have been internalized by society, institutions and teachers. Research Questions

This study includes the Mexican national teacher perspective in the discussion of how transnational educators are being incorporated into the ELT field in Mexico. It addresses the following questions: (1) How do MNELTs construct their own identity as language teachers relative to Mexican transnational English language teachers? (2) How do MNELTs view the (re)incorporation of Mexican transnationals as English language teachers in the Mexican education system?

Methodology

We adopted a qualitative approach (Merriam, 2009) incorporating 15 semi-structured interviews of five educators and conducted an in-depth analysis of participant responses about their perspectives and language teacher identities. Below, we provide our positionality, context, participants, procedures and data analysis. Positionality

Due to our qualitative approach, we consider it relevant to reveal the way our worldviews may have influenced our research decisions and interpretation (Sikes, 2004, 2010). David Martínez-Prieto is a Spanish/English bilingual who identifies as a Mexican national professor, but also considers himself transnational, owing to the extended time spent in the US. He attended Mexican and Australian universities to pursue a degree in ELT, and after graduation, he worked intermittently in Mexican universities as an English and German language teacher and professor of language

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pre-service teachers for almost five years. Martínez-Prieto also attended and worked at universities in the US to pursue doctoral-level education and has mainly lived in the US for a decade. Because of his academic experience in both countries, Martínez-Prieto positions himself as a Mexican (trans)national. Kristen Lindahl identifies as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher educator in the US, and resides in a state bordering Mexico, where she works with many transnational and Mexican American teacher-candidates. She is also a Spanish/English bilingual but is more of a heritage learner of Spanish due to the language loss experienced by her father and paternal grandparents as Mexican Americans living in the US. Lindahl has spent extended time in Latin America, including the countries of Mexico, Perú and Ecuador among others. Participants

As listed in Table 8.1, we interviewed five Mexican ELT educators who were working in public and private institutions in the Mexican states of Oaxaca (n = 4) and Puebla (n = 1). All our participants hold degrees in ELT from a Mexican university. While all participants self-identified as Mexican nationals, their identities were rather fluid. For example, Marcela (all names are pseudonyms) identified herself as Mixteco, an indigenous group in Southern Mexico, and has worked in public and private universities and language centers. Another participant, Yoalli, lived in the US for more than 18 years before moving to Mexico. While, according to our conceptualization, Yoalli was a transnational EFL teacher, she clarified that, due to the educational milieu of Mexican education, she was classified as a ‘Mexican national English language teacher’ because she ‘already attended higher education in Mexico’. For this reason, she did not qualify for most of the (re)incorporation opportunities granted to recent transnationals in the Mexican education system. Two of our participants had administrative positions, had taught for around 10 years, and had more institutional power compared to the others: Bety, in Puebla, who worked for a private school, and Lupita, in Oaxaca, who worked for a public university. Roberto, our only male participant, worked as a teacher in the Programa Nacional de Inglés (PRONI; National Program of English in Mexican public schools) which had been piloted for almost seven years at the time of the interviews. Bety, Lupita and Roberto considered themselves ‘Mexicanos’ or Mexican nationals. The age of our participants ranged from 24–32 years. Context

The xenophobic discourse prevalent during the 2016 US presidential election, coupled with continued negative focus on Mexican immigrants during the fi rst years of the Trump administration, continue to echo

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Table 8.1 Participants Participant Professional Position

Context

Marcela

English language Public and teacher private universities

Yoalli

State

Age

Oaxaca 24

Years in US Self- reported (if any) national identity –

Mixteco-Mexican

English language Public university Oaxaca 27 teacher (former PRONI)

18

Mexican

Bety

English language Private school teacher/ Coordinator

32

–

Mexican

Lupita

English language Public university Oaxaca 32 teacher/School administrator

–

Mexican

Roberto

English language Public school teacher (PRONI)

–

Mexican

Puebla

Oaxaca 35

throughout Mexican media down the Río Bravo, the river that constitutes much of the Mexico/US political border (Sayer et al., 2019). While transnational return migration of Mexican nationals to Mexico increased during Obama’s presidency, it was not until the election of Trump that the Mexican government focused on transnational communities. Following the Trump election, not only did the Mexican government analyze the locations and reasons for return Mexican migration, but also enacted policies to reincorporate Mexican transnationals into the country’s society. In this regard, Puebla and Oaxaca are among the states with the highest rates of transnational migration (Ramos Martínez et al., 2017). In accordance with national legislation, some Mexican states established policies to reincorporate migrants. For example, the state government of Puebla enacted a law to hire Mexican transnationals as English language teachers regardless of their previous academic background. The Governor of Puebla during 2015–2017, Antonio Gali, mandated that transnationals, due to their presumed bilingual skills in Spanish and English, should be given positions in the public-school system in order to accelerate their adaptation into the local economy (Gobierno del Estado de Puebla, 2017). Most English teaching degrees in the states of Puebla and Oaxaca require four to five years for completion. After graduation, English language teachers either work for private schools, where they receive low salaries and few social benefits, such as social security or healthcare access (Sayer, 2012), or they compete to obtain a position in the Mexican public education system, in which salaries are relatively higher, as are social benefits. To obtain a position, or plaza, teacher-candidates need to present competitive examination scores – in which they are tested in English proficiency and pedagogic knowledge – in hopes of fi nding an opening near

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their places of residency. This selection process has been criticized, as most applicants do not fi nd positions even if they score highly in the evaluation process due to corruption and poor education planning among Mexican educational authorities (Flores Andrade, 2014). In addition, in comparison to their monolingual counterparts in other content areas, English language teachers are periodically required to take certification exams to prove their linguistic skills. Procedures

David Martínez-Prieto interviewed the participants in Puebla and Oaxaca during 2017 and 2018. He interviewed each participant in a series of three interviews. He gained access to the Oaxacan teaching setting through a study-abroad experience in Oaxaca. He observed and modeled English classes in this state. Some of the educators he observed agreed to participate in the present study. In Puebla, Martínez-Prieto online interviewed a former classmate from an undergraduate English teaching degree program which he attended more than a decade ago in the main public university of this state. In-depth interviews best fit our research purpose, as they enabled participants to recreate their visions of reality through language during these kinds of oral interactions (Seidman, 2006). In our data collection, besides recording our interviews, we also utilized field notes to keep track of the researchers’ perspectives, especially in terms of non-verbal communication, which also provided meaning in terms of smiles, laughs and other gestures (McLellan et al., 2003). For a better understanding of our participants’ worldviews, we subscribed to the recommendations of Saldaña (2009) and Seidman (2006) in terms of interviewing participants in a series of three interviews. Interviews took place a week apart from one another. The time between interviews allowed for clarification, efficient contextualization and confirmation of participants’ previous responses. All the interviews took place in Spanish, which was the preferred language of the participants. The interviews lasted from 20–90 minutes. While David Martínez-Prieto asked the same questions to all participants during the fi rst and second interviews, which aimed to examine the backgrounds and teaching experience of participants, along with their perspectives towards the (re)incorporation of transnationals as English language teachers, the third interview was mainly used to clarify answers that participants provided previously. Data analysis

After transcribing all interviews, we initially coded each one independently, and then compared and discussed coding choices. This two-cycle intercoder practice aimed to provide reliability in terms of the coding scheme (Lavrakas, 2008), and consistency and consensus between authors

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(Saldaña, 2009). Later, in accordance with Seidman (2006), we used axialcoding to group themes into relevant categories based on the concepts we explained in our framework, such as teacher identity (which we related to pedagogical preparation), the (re)incorporation of transnationals into the Mexican educational system, and the impact of institutional power and the acceptance or rejection of institutional policies among MNELTs. When coding, we read the interviews in Spanish in an effort to maintain original meaning; however, the data excerpts included below were translated for an English-speaking audience. Findings and Discussion

In this section, we present fi ndings of the data analyses conducted on the responses of MNELTs working in Oaxaca and Puebla. To recall, our research questions aimed to examine how Mexican national teachers viewed the (re)incorporation of Mexican transnationals as language teachers, and how MNELTs constructed their identities in relation to transnational language teachers. Via our coding processes, we considered that the following themes answered the research questions: pedagogical preparation, ELT policies impacting transnationals, and the idea of sheltered (re)incorporation of transnational ELT educators. Pedagogical preparation in a nativist context

One of the most salient characteristics that MNELTs recognize as part of their identity was the relevance of pedagogical preparation. Before we coded our participants’ answers, it seemed that national educators were oriented negatively towards transnational ELT educators, especially in terms of the socioeconomic context in which transnationals, regardless of their preparation, were given priority over language teachers trained in Mexico. From the lens of the Foucauldian framework, Mexican nationals had internalized policies and hegemonic ideologies promoted by the Mexican government that presented a clear dichotomy between ‘native’ (or transnationals) and ‘non-native’ (Mexican nationals) users of English. That is, in terms of disciplinary power, Mexican language teachers adopted the official discourse of a clear-cut national/transnational classification. For example, when we asked Yoalli about the decision of some state governments to give English teaching plazas to recently arrived transnationals, she expressed concern that transnational educators would be educating Mexican children: Well, I honestly think that is a waste of positions [for transnationals]. I do believe that granting plazas to transnational returnees is kind of [pause] … but they [transnationals] will be in charge of educating the future of Mexico. I believe that just it is absurd that they receive plazas only because they come from the United States. (Yoalli, interview 1, 15 June 2018)

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For Yoalli, the fact that transnationals were being given plazas because they came from the US seemed absurd, especially as they were probably unfamiliar with the contextual situation of Mexican children. Similarly, Marcela focused more on teacher preparation with regard to the national/transnational distinction, when she noted: I studied four years to fi nish my degree. I have [a] university diploma. And for them [transnationals], they don’t need anything [to be hired in Mexico]. I don’t think this is right as others are [academically] more prepared. (Marcela, interview 1, 13 June 2018)

Marcela, like Yoalli, appeared to reject the incorporation of transnationals because they presumably did not have enough academic preparation. However, we noted that Mexican nationals’ apparent rejection of transnationals was not related to transnationals per se (or to the assimilation of governmentality, in Foucault’s [1998] terms), but more to the aspiration of Mexican language teachers to be recognized as pedagogically prepared educators and not just as the ones ‘who only speak the language’ (see Martínez-Prieto & Lindahl, 2019). Our participants expressed a need for the professionalization of language teachers to move away from lingualism (Block, 2013), in which language is mainly valued because of oral production. Lupita commented on how transnational educators may lack pedagogical content knowledge and how it can impact the EFL classroom: And for those who don’t have a degree, but they know English … They teach it in the way they learned it. Sometimes, the pronunciation is correct. But they [transnationals] the way they learned it, it is the way they teach it to students … I’ve seen people who have lived in the US for 15 to 20 years, and their English is very good. And they get classes because of it. But when they teach, when they need to prepare classes and include dynamic activities … then, it [the quality of instruction] goes down. (Lupita, interview 1, 19 June 2018)

For Lupita, English teaching should move beyond the notion of merely speaking English and should acknowledge the pedagogic preparation of educators. Roberto echoed the concern that including transnationals without pedagogical training could negatively impact the professionalization of EFL teachers in Mexico, when he said: I have a degree [in language teaching]. And anyone [with no degree or diploma] who can speak it [English] is considered to be a teacher. That’s the reason for which language teachers are looked down on. Even if we work hard, we are labeled like this. (Roberto, interview 1, 23 June 2018)

Roberto’s perspective about the incorporation of transnationals is related to the identity of English language educators in Mexico in the sense that they aim to be socially recognized as professionals. Sayer (2012), LópezGopar (2016) and Martínez-Prieto and Lindahl (2019) analyzed the

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difficulties that Mexican language teachers have in terms of social legitimization. In Mexico, language teaching ideologies may be embedded within colonial nativist perspectives of race and origin (May, 2013; Phillipson, 2017), which in turn impact the identities that teachers of English in this context develop over time. However, while partially accepting nativist ideologies, some participants contested these conceptions. To contrast these two different perspectives about nativism, we present the perspectives of Bety and Yoalli below: When I just started as coordinator, I needed a [English language] teacher. And she [a transnational] came. She didn’t have any degree, she lived in the US before. She had a good pronunciation. So I hired her. (Bety, interview 2, 10 July 2018)

Bety acknowledged her own participation in hiring practices based on oral language proficiency. Yoalli, in contrast, mentioned how she is treated in the ELT field due to her physical appearance, which resembles that of (what people assume is) a ‘native’ English speaker: I am fair-skinned [güerita]. So, when I apply for positions, the fi rst thing they notice is the color of my skin, my pronunciation. And only because of that, because I’m white and because of my pronunciation, they think I’m the perfect [English] teacher. Once, in a private school, the principal said to me: ‘I know what I see, I only need to see you to know you are a good teacher’. And I said, ‘You haven’t listened to me, seen my work, and you are already offering me an [English teaching] job’. This made me feel very uncomfortable. (Yoalli, interview 2, 30 July 2018)

Yoalli, who has achieved a diploma in English teaching after four years of training, found it uncomfortable that administrators would hire her only because she is white [güerita]. In other words, because English teaching is embedded in notions of racialization, nativism and colonialism in Mexico, administrators hire English language teachers because of their physical appearance. In her own acknowledgment as an English language educator, Yoalli rejected the idea that her own teaching identity is merely defi ned by the way she looks. Our participants’ answers, such as Bety’s, suggested Mexican national teachers have internalized traditional ideas of how institutions recognize ‘valid’ English language teachers. Nonetheless, our participants’ answers also rejected traditional nativist dichotomies – associated with larger social constructs of colonialism and race – and provided rather fluid examples of their identity as English language teachers (Canagarajah, 2007; Pennycook, 2001; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018). In other words, our participants constructed their teaching identities by (at times, simultaneously) accepting and rejecting institutional conceptions of what an English language teacher is. To go back to and answer our fi rst research question, ‘How do MNELTs construct their own identity as language teachers relative to

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Mexican transnational English language teachers?’, we suggest that the (re)incorporation of transnationals as English teachers may prompt MNELTs to challenge the institutional validation and identities that Mexican institutions have granted them. While the Mexican national teachers’ former training should, in theory, legitimize their knowledge and identities as English language teachers, the same institutional powers, influenced by nativist, racial and colonial conceptions, devalue their pedagogical and linguistic identities of Mexican national ELTs. English language policies and transnational (re)incorporation

To answer our second research question, we found that MNELTs understood that the (re)incorporation of English language teachers in the Mexican education system will be highly affected by national and state educational policies. That is, in addition to the cultural re-adaptation to Mexico, MNELTs believed that transnationals would face the same adverse political experiences that they themselves faced when they were novice language teachers in public schools. Instead of ‘othering’ transnational teachers or rejecting them because of their individual experiences in the US (Dervin, 2014), participants were explicit about the inefficacy of language policies in Mexico, and educational authorities’ poor analysis of and commitment to transnational (re)incorporation. For example, Roberto posited that the government was essentially making empty promises to transnational educators, saying: Well, [the government enacted language policies that] don’t really help transnational migrants. They [the educational authorities] say: ‘We are going to give them jobs’, but that is not true. It’s just for the news. They [the authorities] only say it to have people happy. But they [authorities] won’t make sure transnationals get re-adapted. The help is very limited. (Roberto, interview 2, 30 June 2018)

Roberto questioned the superficiality of governmental actions towards the (re)incorporation of transnationals, which do not really contribute to lessening the difficulties of transnational adaptation. When asked about the efficacy of the English language policies towards the (re)incorporation of transnationals into the Mexican education system, Yoalli confi rmed Roberto’s sentiment, by explaining that: Well, they do this [granting teaching positions to transnationals] because they [educational authorities] are ignorant. Let me tell you, they [authorities] have a mentality. They [authorities] say ‘Well, they [transnationals] know English, give them English classes, so they stop fucking bothering us’. They [educational authorities] want to look as if they were doing something for them, but not really. (Yoalli, interview 3, 8 July 2018)

Yoalli held the opinion that the granting of English teaching positions was a superficial way of addressing the larger issues that transnationals would

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ultimately face upon their return to Mexico. According to Yoalli and Roberto, most educational policies that aimed to provide teaching positions to Mexican transnationals were unreflective and would only complicate their adaptation in Mexico. Recent research about language policies in Mexico suggests that language teachers’ input has been ignored when educational policies are implemented, which has made some language teachers feel disappointed (Trejo-Guzmán, 2010) and voiceless (Avalos-Rivera, 2016). At the time of the present study, the Mexican government was trying to execute ambitious language policies that aimed to provide English instruction for K-12 students attending public schools (Sayer, 2015). In theory, transnationals’ cultural and linguistic expertise would have contributed to achieving governmental goals. Unfortunately, the (re)incorporation of transnationals is taking place in a context in which Mexican national language teachers consider governmental actions towards language teachers as mostly punitive, and in which transnationals would be facing a similar situation. To clarify why Mexican language teachers believe that the policies of the government were punitive for English language teachers, Yoalli noted: The Federal government does not support language teachers with funding. I don’t understand why. But my boss told me it is the way authorities punish teachers for rebelling [against their policies]. That’s why they don’t raise our salaries, so they keep teachers underdeveloped. (Yoalli, interview 3, 8 July 2018)

For Yoalli, educational administrations used funding as a means to ensure that teachers comply with federal policy, a phenomenon that impacted both national and transnational teachers. Roberto noted that federal policies do not account for differences between the Mexican states, an issue that would also influence national and transnational teachers alike. Here, they want to implement [an educational] system in which they think the educative process is the same everywhere. There are places in which people don’t even have basic services. I mean, the authorities cannot implement an educational reform without even knowing the people’s living conditions. Let’s say, for example, Monterrey is different to Oaxaca. It [education] cannot be the same. First, we need to analyze the situation of each place before implementing any policy. (Roberto, interview 3, 9 July 2018)

For Roberto, English language policies in Mexico were irreflectively implemented. In other words, for Roberto, the implementation of educational policies did not consider the regional socioeconomic differences of this country, ignoring the poverty of many disadvantaged students. As we conceptualized in the theoretical framework, Foucault (1998) explained how institutions are ruled by the dominant classes. For this reason, institutions control knowledge production and the perpetuation

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of ‘legitime’ discourses. Nonetheless, for Foucault (1998), ‘legitimate’ knowledge can be challenged and rejected by individuals. In the case of our participants, top-down policies provided little opportunities for language teachers to improve the learning conditions of their students and their own socioeconomic positions. This institutional failure most likely originated from Mexican teachers’ rejection of national intuitions and educational programs. Marcela expressed her belief about unequal distribution of funds, as she said: People in the leadership positions, at SEP [Ministry of Mexican Education], their families. They take all the money. They don’t distribute it to schools. And they don’t give it [the money] to the ones who should receive it. (Marcela, interview 2, 8 July 2018)

For Marcela, corruption in the Mexican Ministry of Education is in part responsible for her lack of belief in the efficacy of educational policies in the country. While this series of interviews originally aimed to understand the perspectives of Mexican national ELTs, conversations inevitably led to a deeper discussion of Mexican policies in terms of ELT. In this regard, Roberto encouraged policymakers to visit classrooms before making policy decisions, stating: To implement any policy, politicians, the ones who make the policies which are not related at all to reality, should come to our schools and talk to teachers. No one knows students better than us. They [authorities] should come and see. (Roberto, interview 3, 9 July 2018)

For Roberto, educational authorities are unaware of the real language teaching situation in Mexico. The case of Mexican transnational (re)incorporation is highly illustrative of the ways in which the state enacts power through institutions (Foucault, 1998). Yet, in order for institutional power to be accepted, power should promote the betterment of people; as expressed by the Mexican national teachers, individuals may reject institutional knowledge, policies and power if they feel it is not in their interest. To answer our second research question, we suggest that if Mexican nationals continue to see transnational (re)incorporation as part and parcel of their generally negative views on federal English language learning policy, they may continue to be reluctant to view their transnational colleagues as equals. In a way, Mexican national teachers would see the unreflective (re)incorporation of transnationals as part of such ineffective policies. Sheltered (re)incorporation for transnationals

The participants’ teaching trajectories demonstrate the challenging situation that MNELTs face. For example, during the interviews, Bety and Roberto expressed the stress they experienced every six months

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because language teachers are periodically evaluated (in comparison to teachers who teach other classes, who are not subject to evaluation). Marcela expressed her disappointment because, after investing time and money in English teaching degrees, most English teachers barely make twice the minimum wage in Mexico (which was roughly US$150 per month at the time of the interviews). More concerningly, Yoalli expressed how she experienced physical and verbal harassment by her co-workers who taught other subjects when she worked at PRONI. In this context, the Mexican national teachers in the present study expressed a belief that transnationals should be given a sheltered acculturation process into the Mexican education system for three main reasons: first, to take advantage of the cultural and linguistic skills transnationals acquired in the US; second, to provide transnationals with pedagogical tools to teach English; and third, to support their cultural re-adaptation to Mexico. Marcela, for example, commented: They [transnationals] bring another mentality about business. They come here [to Mexico] and they don’t want to be employees. They want to be entrepreneurs. We don’t learn it here [in Mexico, to be entrepreneurs]. They come here and want to create jobs, new jobs. (Marcela, interview 3, 27 June 2019)

For Marcela, the Mexican economy might benefit from the ways that transnationals seek to create new jobs and businesses because of their different entrepreneurial ideologies. For Lupita, transnationals are able to see other perspectives, and they feel empowered because of their bilingual skills: They [transnationals] are empowered when they come from the United States because they speak English very well … Also, transnationals are able to see another reality, because they have been to another reality, an alternate reality. So, they can understand different realities because they lived in a different one. (Lupita, interview 2, 26 June 2018)

Lupita is aware of some of the benefits of transnational migration in terms of transnationals experiencing a different reality while living in the United States. Indeed, most of our participants agreed with the notion that Mexican transnationals acquired skills in the US that provided them with some advantages over Mexican nationals. In terms of pedagogical development of transnationals as prospective language teachers, Marcela provided an example of how transnational teachers could increase their pedagogical content knowledge as in-service teachers: Well, they [transnationals] should have a preparation course. For example, in the morning, they could take some [language learning] classes. And they [transnationals] can teach in the afternoon. A language teacher should know strategies and theory. There is a coordinator I know, she

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studied biotechnology there [in the United States] and for some circumstances, she had to move back. Then she started teaching English, she liked it. So, right, she’s also studying the [English teaching] degree. (Marcela, interview 2, 20 June 2018)

Marcela acknowledges that Mexican transnationals might bring different academic and professional skills to Mexico; yet these skills might not be adequate to teach English, for which they require further pedagogical training. In this context, Lupita also recognized transnationals might need some sheltered (re)incorporation if they go (back) to Mexico: I think there are interesting life stories of people who are coming back to Mexico. They worked in different part of the world. I do think for them [transnationals] to go back to Mexico, there should be a program for them to have a sheltered (re)incorporation … so they know the cultural situation that we live in Mexico. (Lupita, interview 3, 3 July 2018)

For Lupita, Mexican transnationals need to be sheltered in their (re)incorporation into Mexican society. In this regard, literature suggests that a sheltered (re)incorporation of transnationals might vary regionally in Mexico. For example, in some cases, transnational teaching contexts may require less attention to acculturation, such as the ones described in Petron (2003), wherein she analyzed the teaching experiences of transnationals who taught in the Mexican state of Nuevo León, a border state with Texas, without any teaching credentials. Overall, Petron’s (2003) participants felt they did not need any cultural scaffolding to be successfully incorporated into Mexican education. However, the prospective (re)incorporation of transnationals into the central and southern regions of Mexico – where Puebla and Oaxaca are located – is different in terms of greater indigenous influence (Martínez-Prieto, 2022) and less transnational mobility of communities (Smith, 2006; Zúñiga et al., 2016). This is relevant for this study because transnational (re)adaptation might be more complicated as central and southern communities have values and perspectives that are not geographically, ideologically and culturally close to the US. Besides cultural differences, the Mexican economic system has become more specialized in terms of professional preparation, especially in terms of higher education, during the last decade. Roberto, in this sense, commented: Every state is different. People in each region are different … For example, in Puebla, I understand they [transnationals] can use their skills in the manufacturing industry, producing cars … In Oaxaca, we need more help in the [agricultural] field. They [transnationals] have seen different [crop] growing techniques … Transnationals have different skills and we should use the knowledge they bring from the US. I wanted to go to the other side [of the US-Mexican border] before enrolling in my degree … and wondered what I would bring to Mexico when I came back. (Roberto, interview 2, 30 June 2018)

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Roberto, like Lupita, was attentive to what transnationals could bring to Mexican society, and also remained aware of the differences among states and regions. For our participants, the US (im)migration process is not unfamiliar. Not only did Roberto consider migrating to the US before enrolling in his degree program, but Yoalli herself lived in the US for most of her life. Also, Lupita, Bety and Marcella reported they have friends, colleagues and family members who are transnationals. No doubt due to this closeness to transnationals, and because of the MNELTs’ opposition to ineffective implementation of language policies in Mexico, our participants’ perspectives in terms of transnationals’ (re)incorporation were rather positive. Overall, to extend the response to our second research question, MNELTs believed that the (re)incorporation of Mexican transnationals should acknowledge the trajectories and skills of both transnationals and Mexican national language teachers. However, they caution that Mexican institutions must provide pedagogical and cultural scaffolding for transnationals to re-adapt and improve the educational and social situation of Mexico. Conclusion

In this chapter, we have discussed the perspectives of Mexican national English language teachers with regard to the (re)incorporation of Mexican transnationals as English language teachers. While we initially thought Mexican nationals would entirely reject the (re)incorporation of transnationals because transnationals would represent professional competition for MNELTs in terms of the prevalent nativism in Mexican institutions, we realized that Mexican national teachers proposed a sheltered (re)incorporation of transnationals in terms of culture, skills and pedagogical knowledge. Our participants’ perspectives challenged institutional policies of Mexican institutions towards transnationals’ (re)incorporation. That is, MNELTs believed the execution of these policies would cause major problems to transnationals on top of their already difficult readaptation to Mexican society. In this regard, our participants’ identities were fluid and showed different – and, at times, contradictory – perspectives in terms of traditional native/non-native binary conceptions, the colonialism and racialization embedded in ELT, and national identification. Nonetheless, an essential common ground among all our Mexican national language teachers is the proposed alternatives to reincorporate transnationals in different ways compared to the policies carried out by the Mexican state. By doing so, Mexican language teachers used the knowledge they obtained from Mexican institutions during their training and professional development to contest the policies of these same institutions. Our fi ndings suggest that incorporating transnational language teachers without considering the knowledge and

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skills of both Mexican nationals and transnationals, would only make their adaptation process into the Mexican culture more difficult. This chapter thus contributes to current discussion about transnationalism in EFL by including the voices of Mexican national language teachers. While previous studies have examined the ELT transnational phenomenon in Mexico from the perspectives of Mexican transnational pre- and inservice teachers (i.e. Christiansen et al., 2017; Mora et al., 2016; Mora Pablo et al., 2014; Petron, 2003), this study shows that the expertise and perspectives of Mexican English language teachers should be pivotal in the implementation of language policies for transnational (re)incorporation. In terms of the frameworks we used for this chapter (Foucault’s notions of institutional discourse and critical approaches to language teaching), we found that, through the discussion of the Mexican transnationals’ (re)incorporation as English language teachers, MNELTs reaffirmed their aspiration to be acknowledged as competent and legitimate English language teachers. That is, our participants’ answers suggested that the traditional conception of an English language teacher, which devalues ‘non-native’ language teachers based on colonialist ideas about the origin, race and mother tongue of ELTs (Canagarajah, 2007; Pennycook, 2001; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018), impacts their teaching identities and professional development in Mexico. Contrary to current literature (i.e. Phillipson, 2017; Varghese, 2016) which suggests language learning should promote social justice among its participants, Mexican institutions seem to inhibit English language teachers’ empowerment from a policy standpoint. By excluding Mexican national teachers from decisions towards transnational (re)incorporation, which diminishes their power and social recognition as ESL professionals, the future of transnationals as language teachers in the Mexican education system may present a promise unlikely to be fulfilled. Note (1) In this study, we consider Mexican national language teachers as Mexican-origin individuals who received English-teaching training in Mexican institutions and who worked in schools and universities based in Mexico during the time of the study. For us, Mexican transnationals are those who came (back) to Mexico after living in the US for one year or more. However, as we explain later in the chapter, fi xed categories are insufficient because of the fluid characteristics of our participants, such as Yoalli, who lived in the US for 18 years, or Marcela, for whom her indigenous identity took priority instead of her Mexican one.

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Mora Pablo, I., Lengeling, M. and Crawford Lewis, T. (2014) Formación de identidad en migrantes de retorno y el impacto en su desarrollo profesional como docentes de inglés. Academia Journals 6 (5), 3199–3204. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Petron, M.A. (2003) I’m Bien Pocha: Transnational Teachers of English in Mexico (Publication No. 3118056). [Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin]. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2017) Myths and realities of ‘global’ English. Language Policy 16, 313–331. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-016-9409-z Ramos Martínez, L.F., Martínez de la Peña, M., Martínez Caballero, G., Caballero, G., Delgadillo Aguilar, N., Zamora Alarcón, M.S., Granados García, E., Chávez Cruz, R. and Angel Cruz, J. (2017) Prontuario sobre migración mexicana de retorno. Ciudad de Mexico: Centro de Estudios Migratorios/ Unidad de Política Migratoria/Subsecretaría de Población, Migración y Asuntos Religiosos/ Secretaría de Gobernación. Saldana, J. (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. New York: Sage. Sánchez, P. (2007) Cultural authenticity and transnational Latina youth: Constructing a metanarrative across borders. Linguistics and Education 18 (3-4), 258–282. Sánchez Moreno, C. (2016) Los migrantes poblanos en Estados Unidos. Puebla: Montiel & Soriano Editores. Sayer, P. (2007) Legitimate speakers? An ethnographic study of Oaxacan EFL teachers’ ideologies about English. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Arizona State University. Sayer, P. (2012) Ambiguities and Tensions in English Language Teaching: Portraits of EFL Teachers as Legitimate Speakers. New York: Routledge. Sayer, P. (2015) Expanding global language education in public primary schools: The national English program in Mexico. Language, Culture & Curriculum 28 (3), 257–275. https://doi.org/10.1080/07908318.2015.1102926 Sayer, P., Martínez-Prieto, D. and Carvajal, B. (2019) Discourses of white nationalism and xenophobia in the United States and their effect on TESOL professionals in Mexico. TESOL Quarterly 53 (3), 835–844. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.492 Sikes, P. (2010) The ethics of writing life histories and narratives in educational research. In A. Bathmaker and P. Harnett (eds) Exploring Learning, Identity and Power Through Life History and Narrative Research (pp. 11–24). London: Routledge. Seidman, I. (2006) Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences (3rd edn). New York: Teacher College Press. Smith, P. (2006) Transnacionalismo, bilingüísmo y planificación del lenguaje en contextos educativos mexicanos. In. R. Terborg and L. García Landa (eds) Los retos de la planificación del lenguaje en el siglo XXI (pp. 419–444). Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico. Trejo-Guzmán, N.P. (2010) The teacher self construction of language teachers. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Exeter. Varghese, M.M. (2016) Language teacher educator identity and language teacher identity: Towards a social justice perspective. In G. Barkhuizen (ed.) Refl ections on Language Teacher Identity Research (pp. 43–48). New York: Taylor & Francis. Yazan, B. and Rudolph, N. (2018) Introduction: Apprehending identity, experience, and (in)equity through and beyond binaries. In B. Yazan and N. Rudolph (eds) Criticality, Teacher Identity, and (In)equity in English Language Teaching (pp. 1–23). Dordrecht: Springer. Zúñiga, V., Hammann, E.T. and Sánchez García, J. (2016) Students we share are also in Puebla, Mexico: Preliminary fi ndings from a 2009–2010 survey. In H.D. Romo and O. Mogollon-Lopez (eds) Mexican Migration to the United States (pp. 248–265). Austin: University of Texas Press.

9 Syrian Immigrants as Transnational TESOL Practitioners in Turkey Emrah Cinkara

In 2012, a civil war broke out in Syria, and since then Gaziantep, located on the south-eastern border of Turkey, has welcomed around 400,000 immigrants fleeing from the civil war in Syria (Gaziantep City Council, 2014). In this new phase of their lives, the immigrants wait for the day when order will be restored in their home country and they can return, while safely continuing their lives in the host country for this temporary time period. Among this immense immigrant population are EFL teachers who suddenly had to leave their lives behind and start a new life in Gaziantep, where they still have a home community. As La Barbera (2015: 3) proposes, identity patterns among immigrants can ‘range from identification with one’s country of origin, religion or mother tongue to receiving country, or neither or both’. Like many fellow immigrants, the Syrian EFL teachers who settle in Turkey may adopt dual identities, in which they are both closely connected with their home country culture and develop ties with the host community. In recent years, increasing globalization and migration movements have been affecting classical conceptualizations of identity, as the interaction between classes, groups, communities and even countries not only explains the changing world conditions but also how individuals position themselves within their own contexts. Thus, a transnational understanding of concepts should go beyond the boundaries of a single nation, and emphasis should be placed on global citizenship that binds multinational and post-national characteristics, whereby communities, institutions and culture in a formerly single nation state present themselves to the foreign population. An example of this is the evaluation of the demands of immigrant Turks living in Germany to teach Islam in schools by public institutions (Soysal, 2000). Transnational social, educational and economic practices have been studied across different disciplines (Bauböck, 2003; Soysal, 2000). On the social side, specifically, social transnationalism coincides with the concept 145

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of integration and sociocultural harmony (Carling & Pettersen, 2014). Transnationalism also covers such dimensions as employment and education (Carling & Pettersen, 2014). Transnational education, in particular, is related to the internationalization of higher education (British Council & TEPAV, 2013), which is ‘the process of integrating an international dimension into the teaching/learning, research and service functions of a university or college’ (Knight, 1994, as cited in Knight, 2004: 9). Transnational educational movements have also, in turn, revolutionized one-way social structures and may lead transnationals to move up the economic ladder. Global higher education has been undergoing a transformation, and in the process transnational education is offering new perspectives on higher education. In this sense, transnational education can be defi ned as ‘cross-border higher education, which takes place in situations where the teacher, student, program, institution/provider or course materials cross national jurisdictional borders’ (Francois, 2013: 353). As a concept, transnational education therefore provides a global network of learning opportunities. Furthermore, as in the case of Syrian EFL teachers resettling in Turkey, the concept helps build a sense of community in a multinational society and minimizes the disadvantages created by sociopolitical crisis in the home country by participating in learning, teaching and researching activities in the host country. Transnational education values transnational individuals’ maintaining connections among academicians, students and teachers across the home and the host countries. For instance, in transnational contexts, spaces can be created to exchange ideas between the transnational individuals and the host community, which result in a better understanding of harmony (Dieckhoff & Jaffrelot, 2006), mutual perspectives as opposed to one-way perceptions in international migration studies (Bauböck, 2003; Lutz, 2016; Vertovec & Cohen, 1999), and the valuing of individuals and giving space to exchange of ideas. Further, learning a foreign language and the language of the host community has been reported to positively affect social integration among immigrant individuals (Capstick & Delaney, 2016; Cinkara, 2017). This research report focuses specifically on the identities of immigrant Syrian EFL teachers who teach English and undertake research as enrolled students in an MA TESOL program in Turkey. The immigrants play a variety of roles – EFL teachers, EFL researchers, and Turkish as a second language learners – to overcome integration challenges in the host community. Further, they mostly live in transnational communities which consist of immigrant populations that still hold strong connections with their country of origin (Tsakiri, 2005). These transnational individuals perform many functions in these communities, bringing a variety of perspectives to their roles, and they hold strong connections to both their country of origin and host country. Immigrant EFL teachers reflect these perspectives in their identity construction, which is in turn impacted by their culture, ethnicity, political views and religion.

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Transnationalism and Identity

Teacher identity has proven to be a challenging term to define and, for some researchers, ‘producing any single definition of language teacher identity is impossible, exclusionary, and possibly counterproductive’ (Barkhuizen, 2016: 3). Based on Barkhuizen’s (2016) detailed account, language teacher identity is seen as cognitive, social, emotional and ideological functioning inside the self and society. To define it in a broader sense, language teacher identity could be defined as teachers’ mental images or models of effective teaching that they create to guide their teaching practices, and it can be a significant agent in determining success in different education contexts (Varghese et al., 2005). The multiple, fragmented, dynamic, multifaceted, multidimensional and multi-layered historical, social, psychological and cultural aspects of teacher identity (Bukor, 2011) are inherently connected with teacher knowledge (Johnston et al., 2005), emotions (Day & Kington, 2008) and social contexts (Beijaard et al., 2004). Identity development is a continual process where identity can be conceived as an infinitely negotiable term (Barkhuizen, 2016). Transnationalism, which requires interacting with people from other cultures, contributes to shaping one’s identity. People migrate from one place to another for better job opportunities or for greater freedom. As a result of their transnational experiences, in some cases, they gain a sense of connection to different cultures. They may remain in touch with both cultures at the same time, and they may feel a sense of belonging to both (Zong & Batalova, 2018). Devos (2006: 383) states that ‘individuals reflect on their experiences, selfconsciously evaluate their attachment to different cultures, and introspect about what is important to them’. Along similar lines, interculturality can be defined as the link between the cultures, lifestyles and values that groups and individuals gain after being exposed to transnational experiences. These individuals create or re-shape their values and lifestyles as part of their transnational journeys. Language, being a key element in communicating and sharing norms, plays an important role in shaping the identity of an individual. Language, either the language of the host community or a shared foreign language in transnational contexts, provides opportunities for newcomers to transcend their national circles and integrate into the host community. Bucholtz and Hall (2004: 385) rightly point out that ‘language contributes to identity formation by providing a sense of cohesion and unity for its speakers’. Cultural and linguistic diversity help build a nation by promoting closer relations among different groups (Portera, 2010: 22). Individuals with intercultural learning experience may be successful in professional life, have a holistic perspective, develop complex thinking styles and have the capacity to think more creatively in both their education and professional lives. In foreign language education, pedagogical approaches can be applied and arranged accordingly in order to prepare students to work

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together in a different world. This living with diversity prepares learners for a world where there is a better understanding of differences. These perspectives have informed the intercultural education approach in many places in the world (Holm & Zilliacus, 2009). Research has reported the construction of identity in relation to language and behaviors of transnationals, and how EFL teachers build up their personal identity (VillegasTorres & Mora-Pablo, 2018). Transnationalism links people with their ethnic, religious, social and economic identity in both countries. Transnationals have a rich cultural background and substantial linguistic knowledge. Transnational teacher identities are shaped based on pedagogical, cultural and linguistic knowledge. Alsup (2006: 27) states that teachers incorporate ‘personal subjectivities into their professional identities’. Due to globalization, the term national identity may become invalid (Kumaravadivelu, 2008; Risager, 2007) and this term should not be considered equivalent to having a single cultural identity. It can be said that living in two different nation-states can actually increase the importance of national identities. According to the study conducted by Menard-Warwick (2008), which observed transnational teachers’ usage of cultural elements, education is intermingled with the multipurposes of teaching of culture, ranging from cultural awareness to integration into host society and being a global citizen . The transnational experiences of teachers play a major role in the acquisition of intercultural identities and helps them discover their own learning processes and styles. Multi-perspective approaches shape their knowledge about different learning mechanisms and communication styles. Transnational teachers can benefit from intercultural activities such as international projects or international exchange programs. These kinds of cross-cultural projects can help develop competencies for effective intercultural communication in the classroom. Thus, transnational teachers maintain activities effectively in multicultural environments; they gain a greater understanding of looking at subjects and events from different perspectives in order to think creatively, and, in this way, they understand not only international but also intercultural cultural diversity within the same country. More and more research has been trying to unearth the interplay between teachers’ identity development and its impact on teachers’ practice, motivation and burn-out (Hsieh, 2015); however, we are still in the early stages of understanding how teacher identity is constructed and continuously reformed (Schutz et  al., 2018: 3). Research in the field has revealed some common features of teachers’ professional identity. Teacher identity is formed in a liquid and continuous manner (Sutherland et al., 2010), which emerges through ongoing social negotiations and reflections on these experiences (Clarke, 2009). The social nature of the profession, including participation in professional activities and discourse communities, brings about changes in the teachers’ conceptions and understanding of their roles, goals and belief systems as teachers (Hsieh, 2015). Another common feature is agency, a sense of control and an active search for ways

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to reach their personal goals as teachers. While teachers experience some limitations and affordances in their classroom settings, those who act with agency seek ways to overcome problems and increase quality learning with intrinsic motivation. Agency in professional development requires deliberate actions towards personal development as well as development of peers as teachers. For instance, in the study reported here, transnational EFL teachers assumed the responsibility of their professional development and enrolled in an MA program in ELT. Research Methodology Research aim and question

The aim of the study was to investigate the ways in which Syrian refugees as transnational EFL practitioners operate and assume roles in their teaching and research contexts. More specifically, the study explores the ways that the transnational EFL teachers construct their teacher and researcher identities based on the roles they assume in professional, educational, social and cultural environments; and how they approach issues regarding their transnational environments. The following research question was constructed to guide this study: How do transnational participants defi ne their EFL practitioner identities? Data collection

In order to answer the research question, the study examined data from autobiographies and interviews (see Appendices). The data was collected in two stages through the 2018/2019 academic year (see Table 9.1). The first stage of the data collection procedure took place in the period from December 2018 to February 2019. In the fi rst stage, data was collected in the form of personal autobiographies, including participants’ personal narratives on their motivations as English language learners, teachers and researchers; the role of English in their new lives; and their teaching and research practices. When a participant handed in their autobiography, an initial analysis was conducted and the participant was invited for an interview. Of the six participants who took part in stage 1, four were able to successfully complete the interview sessions in stage 2. These participants were interviewed on their EFL teaching experience and early career researcher experiences as MA students. Table 9.1 Data collection stages in the study Stages

Participants

Types of data collected

Time

Stage 1

6

Autobiography

December 2018 to February 2019

Stage 2

4

Interview (one for each participant)

January 2019 to March 2019

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Table 9.2 Participants Name*

Current work experience

Teaching experience

Gender and age

Interview

Immigration

Hala

Primary education (Years 11–14), NGO

4 years

F/29

x

2014

Abdullah

Primary education (Years 6–10)

2 years

M/27



2015

Adnan

Primary education (Years 11–14), NGO

9 years

M/27



2012

Mouna

Tertiary education

8 years

F/35

x

2014

Omar

Primary education (Years 6–10)

3 years

M/25



2015

Aişe

Primary education (Years 11–14)

5 years

F/26



2013

*Pseudonyms are used.

Participants

The participants were selected based on convenience sampling. At the time of the study, participants were enrolled in an MA in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (MAEFL) program at a state university located in the southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. The MAEFL program is a two-year program; in the first year, students take eight courses (24 credits including a research skills course and a seminar study), and they have to write a thesis in the second year. Participants in this study completed their courses and seminar study successfully and were researching for their theses while also teaching English at different levels at the time of the study. The participants’ educational backgrounds and current status are summarized in Table 9.2. The participants all majored in English Language and Literature, which is one of the two English related BA degrees in Syrian universities (the other is English Translation). Two of the participants started teaching English at private institutions before they graduated, and they all started to teach English after graduation (all in the private sector, with two in primary and four in higher education). They had to leave Syria three to five years before the study. Three of the participants were female and three were male, and their ages ranged from 25 to 34 years. Findings

The content analysis of autobiographical entries and interview data revealed that the participants have very distinct forms of traditional and transnational responsibilities in/for their home and host communities when they teach English and do research. Their assumed roles and

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responsibilities regarding their present and future contexts and these roles and actions taken by individuals in their own community and host society influence how they perceive and guide their practice as an English teacher and researcher. Rich empirical evidence was available in the qualitative data to unearth the participants’ roles and classify them into two main themes, namely: (1) transnational EFL teacher roles and (2) transnational EFL researcher roles. The following presents MAEFL students’ perceptions of their transnational responsibilities underpinned by their positioning of their transnational roles as EFL teachers and researchers. Transnational EFL teacher roles

The MAEFL program in which the participants were enrolled offers research-related courses along with courses on EFL methodology. EFL methodology courses are important for the participants as, in their BA program in Syria, they were only taught literature courses and no methodology courses. All the participants stated that the MAEFL program supported their core language teaching skills in methodology, language assessment and applied linguistics. These skills form pedagogical knowledge in EFL which significantly affects teacher beliefs, values and attitudes (Hwang et al., 2018). Aişe emphasized this fact by stating: We only studied Shakespeare, short stories, novels, and only literature. But here, I, for the fi rst time, had an opportunity to read on and discuss teaching methodology. Before these courses, I didn’t hear any Communicative Language Teaching, this method and that method, you know, and I was trying to do my best in my teaching mostly by taking model of my former teachers. But now I have a lot of different language teaching models that I can successfully use in my classes. (Aişe, Interview, 21 November 2019)

In this extract Aişe stated the significance of the MAEFL program in supporting core language teaching skills. All six of the participants had only studied literature courses as undergraduate students in Syria. Therefore, they valued the support provided by the MAEFL program for developing their classroom teaching skills. Transnational teacher as a glue to stick kids together: Syrian Culture Day

As language teachers, the participants work with Turkish and Syrian students in different contexts, and they make use of the lessons gained from the MAEFL courses not only in building their core language teaching skills but also their intercultural skills in their classes. They also employ these skills in helping immigrant students integrate into the school community. Adnan, who worked at a school which has a mix of Turkish

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and Syrian students (as opposed to some separated schools for Syrians), got complaints from his students about being alienated: I am like glue, I do things for kids I mean I do activities for them … At the MAEFL Sociolinguistics course, we discussed intercultural sensitivity which suddenly gave me an idea to design a ‘Culture Day’ which I proposed to administration. It was accepted, and my students decorated a room with Syrian cultural objects, food, music, pictures, etc. and we invited Turkish classes to our room. It was one of the most amazing moments for me because my students tried to speak English and they were introducing their culture to Turkish students. (Adnan, Interview, 7 November 2019)

In his teaching practice, Adnan noticed an integration gap in the school context in which some parts of the school are allocated to Syrian students and he tried to bridge it by utilizing the skills and experiences he gained through his MAEFL classes. The readings and discussion around intercultural sensitivity in his sociolinguistics class helped Adnan to support his school and his students and he feels like he is ‘gluing kids together’. Ekiyor (2018) points out that language to maintain ties with the country of origin and in the transnational context plays an important role in the transfer of cultural patterns. Adnan is actually helping his students to connect with their Turkish peers by sharing their ethnic and cultural values. Transnational teachers as agents in integration

The participants saw themselves as significant agents in the integration of the immigrant Syrian population into the host community where they function as EFL teachers and researchers. As EFL teachers, the data revealed that they saw themselves as agents supporting the immigrant community in communicating with the host community in English. An important element of the process is successful communication between the two communities, and the data revealed that participants valued intercommunity contact: All I know is if you could speak a common language, you can get acquainted and get on well. I cannot say many people [in Turkey] speak English, but the ones who speak English will be glad if we understand them and express ourselves. Of course, they prefer Turkish in daily life, but English is also an alternative, so as an English teacher I can equip my students with this important skill. If you don’t communicate, most probably you will be isolated as a foreigner in any country. (Mahmoud, Interview, 18 October 2019)

As Mahmoud stated, building contacts, especially face to face, would facilitate integration of the Syrian community by fi rst helping them to properly function in their daily lives. In Turkey, as in most contexts, the

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host community language is a powerful tool for successfully achieving daily life tasks. Additionally, a common second language could also function as a communication tool between communities. Another significant aspect was the role of a common language – English – in creating trust and positive feelings. Contact between communities could eliminate prejudices and negative emotions and create positive feelings which would contribute to the social integration of immigrants (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2011). Mahmoud signified this: In addition to these [many advantages brought to the immigrants], it is the same for them [host community], if somehow we speak the same language, I believe, they will have positive feelings towards us. But, if we don’t communicate, negative feelings will emerge in both of them. (Mahmoud, Autobiography) Transnational EFL researcher roles

EFL teachers traditionally support their students in many ways including academic, social and psychological aspects. The more teachers improve themselves through their MAEFL program, the better they serve and help students in their transnational contexts. In comparison to the transnational EFL teacher roles, the data in this study yielded bilateral relationships between transnational contexts and being EFL researchers. To state simply, participants’ immigrant contexts affected their research practices, and in turn their research practices affected their immigrant contexts. This bilateral relationship was focused around two main subthemes that emerged from the data, related to integration into the host community and development of the home country. Transnational researcher as an agent in integration

The MAEFL participants saw themselves as important agents as researchers. The data yielded a two-way relationship in which participants see their contexts as a rich environment to study and therefore to support their research careers, and in turn the research they conduct will support the integration of immigrants into the host community. Two of the participants stated that they were studying immigrant contexts for their thesis research at the time of the study. Abdullah focused on this aspect: I am writing my proposal now on one of the important issues I noticed around my family and friends. You know some of us have been here for more than six, seven years now and there are kids who have never been to Syria in their lives. They were born here, raised here and going to school here. I am observing that new generation’s Arabic [native language] is affected. I would like to study this with regard to language loss in this generation. (Abdullah, Autobiography)

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There is a mutual relationship between the transnational background of Abdullah and his MAEFL studies. To begin with, Abdullah developed a linguistic awareness of immigrant children’s native and host country language use in his immediate immigrant context. Therefore, being a transnational EFL researcher, his research interest stemmed from his transnational background. The support from his community to Abdullah’s thesis study was available to him only because he was part of the immigrant community. Moreover, the results of his research would in return support his immigrant community in Turkey. There were other instances where the skills that participants were gaining in the MAEFL program impacted other aspects of their lives, and Omar gave a clear instance of this: You know I also work part time with an NGO, which funds education projects for Syrian immigrants and internally displaced. When I fi rst started, they assigned me to assist proposal evaluation team. I was just doing some errands for them. But one day when they were discussing reliability issue of a data collection tool in one of the proposals, I also involved in the conversation and made a few comments. This totally changed the way they see me and after two more months they promoted me to project evaluation team. (Omar, Interview, 21 November 2019)

Omar explained how the skills he gained in the MAEFL program helped him to improve his standing in his part-time job. Interestingly, data showed that participants assumed a responsibility to stand as role models for their immigrant community. Their positions as EFL teachers and MAEFL students were highly respected in the immigrant context: When I fi rst registered for masters here, I didn’t know this, I mean how it was an important thing for my family and friends. After successfully fi nishing my courses, mother and father bought me a gift and told me that they were proud of me because I have a teaching job, I am doing masters here, I am successful and I am a hero for my three siblings. Then I noticed that I am like a leader for my brothers and family, they are looking at me and saying ‘We could be successful in Turkey’. (Abdullah, Autobiography)

As Abdullah explained, his teaching career and success in the MAEFL program was being closely observed and, therefore, he took extra responsibility as a role model for his family, friends and the immigrant community. Thus, he included being a role model into his repertoire of roles as an EFL teacher and researcher. Transnational researcher as an agent in development of home country

Participants in the MAEFL program have their own personal goals regarding their studies. One main fi nding pertaining to their goals was that they wanted to complete their studies and obtain degrees to support

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the development of their home country, even if they planned to stay in Turkey. When I came here five years ago, I thought one day I will go back home. But now I got citizenship. And, then I got a job and doing my job and doing my masters. I am also planning to get a PhD, I don’t know if I could or not but … I am now helping people here and in Syria. I am sure I will help more in the future. If I go back, I will have all degrees and skills to work at a university and help my country to develop. (Mahmoud, Interview, 18 October 2019)

While explaining his MAEFL goals Mahmoud states a few personal motivations, including a wish to participate in the development of his home country at the time of the study and afterwards when he hopes to return to Syria. Transnational communities tend to hold strong ties with their home country depending on the geographical distance between the home country and country of origin. However, in this case, there has been fierce conflict in Syria for more than five years, and immigrants cannot easily travel to Syria. Naturally, participants in the current study had concerns over the situation, and they strongly felt their own share of the responsibility in contributing to the development of their home countries. For instance, Omar combined his MAEFL background with his part-time NGO work: For one of the calls, I along with another teacher here proposed a training for English language teachers. We will design an online teacher development program which will help English teachers improve their methodology. As I already mentioned before, English teachers do not have any idea on methodology, language assessment, and professional development and so on. I didn’t know them before masters. There is defi nitely a need for teacher development programs. (Omar, Interview, 17 October 2019)

In this extract, Omar is exemplifying the efforts put forth for supporting language teaching in his home country. He is assuming responsibility for contributing to the professional development of English language teachers in his home country and is attempting to write a proposal for a project call. Conclusion

In this chapter, I aimed to understand in-service EFL teachers’ identity construction as transnational EFL teachers and MAEFL researchers through autobiographies and interviews. More specifically, I wanted to gain insights into the ways transnational EFL teachers interact with their host and home communities. The nature of transnationalism involves various kinds of relations. People share different relations within social domains. They can establish both countries’ cultural, social, political and

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linguistic components at the same time (Villegas-Torres & Mora-Pablo, 2018). Language teacher identity construction is an ongoing process which brings together experiences from the past and present as well as those anticipated in the future (Barkhuizen, 2016). Keeping this perspective in mind, in the current research context, transnational EFL teachers’ identities as transnational teachers and researchers were investigated through their personal narratives. Figure 9.1 gives a visual representation of the transnational EFL practitioner context. As Figure 9.1 illustrates, the research fi ndings indicate that participants’ transnational contexts can have a major impact on the ways they position themselves as EFL teachers and researchers. They also associate these roles with their identities as Syrian immigrants in Turkey. In this respect, I found that MAEFL participants take responsibility for the integration of the members of their community into the host community. Transnational communities are close-knit communities where individuals share cultural, religious, political and ethnic backgrounds (Tsakiri, 2005); however, in our context with the conflict going on in Syria, initially closeknit communities started to loosen and make more connections with the host community. Living in these communities, participants are not unaware of the issues arising within the communities, and they carefully observe these issues and bring them up in their teaching contexts. Not surprisingly, on top of their traditional roles as English language teachers, the participants assume an additional facilitator role in the social integration of their immigrant community into the host context. Another important aspect of the role of transnational contexts in participants’ teaching and researching practice is the bilateral nature of the relationship between being a transnational individual and a MAEFL practitioner. The data revealed many instances of the bilateral relationships between transnational contexts and being MAEFL practitioners and suggested that the context in which participants live and work has a

Figure 9.1 The model for interrelated transnational TESOL practitioner roles

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significant impact on MAEFL participants’ practices as EFL researchers, and their research practice has an impact on the context in return. Participants commented on how their transnational context presents a rich environment to observe and detect problems that demand research. Similarly, the research they conduct is designed to support the immigrant community in various ways. As expected, participants carry their knowledge and skills into teaching and educational research. Surprisingly, the skills they gain through the MAEFL program also support their practices in non-educational contexts. Teachers, with their significant impact on learners, are among the most important agents in ensuring educational success. Twenty-fi rst century developments demand quality education, teacher resilience, persistence and accountability; and this puts more emphasis on the roles of teachers. The understanding and assumption of these roles by teachers are realized through pre-service teacher education programs, teaching practices and in-service professional programs. In conclusion, participants in the current study develop and re-shape their EFL teacher and researcher identity to fit the special characteristics and needs of their transnational context, where they operate as EFL teachers to immigrant students and MAEFL researchers. Transnationalism should be regarded as a multi-faceted concept which requires close investigation of nuances specific to transnational contexts. Non-native EFL teachers experience some inherent problems due to their non-native status, which is more complicated in transnational contexts. Further research might be conducted to investigate transnational TESOL practitioners with regard to aspects such as the structure of the MA program, research focus of the faculty and so on, to depict the identity construction process in detail. The immigrant context has significant effects on EFL teacher identity and researcher identity development. Therefore, along with identity construction, the different aspects of lives of transnational TESOL practitioners need more investigation to illustrate the different roles assumed by the practitioners and how these roles interact with each other and with their immigrant context. Identity research should emphasize the transformative and discursive nature of language teaching and research to discover and re-express topics and concepts of transnational identity in immigrant contexts, which has a bilateral relationship between the home and host communities and among learner, teacher and researcher roles. In terms of pedagogical implications, TESOL programs with international students, especially the ones outside the inner-circle countries with immigrant students (as in the current study context), might organize their teaching and research practices in alignment with ‘socioculturally sensitive pedagogy for teaching (and researching) English’ (Alsagoff et  al., 2012). Central to such an approach is the recognition of teacher and learner agency and identities to appropriate and shape teaching and

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researching English in ways that correspond to their roles and purposes, that embrace their agency and participation, and which consider their immigrant understandings and cultures. References Alsagoff , L., McKay, S.L., Hu, G. and Renandya, W.A. (eds) (2012) Principles and Practices for Teaching English as an International Language. New York: Routledge. Alsup, J. (2006) Teacher Identity Discourses: Negotiating Personal and Professional Spaces. New York: Routledge. Barkhuizen, G. (ed.) (2016) Refl ections on Language Teacher Identity Research. New York: Taylor & Francis. Bauböck, R. (2003) Towards a political theory of migrant transnationalism. International Migration Review 37 (3), 700–723. Beijaard, D., Meijer, P.M. and Verloop, N. (2004) Reconsidering research on teachers’ professional identity. Teaching and Teacher Education 20 (2), 107–128. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.tate.2003.07.001 British Council and TEPAV. (2013) Turkey National Needs Assessment of State School English Language Teaching. Ankara: British Council and TEPAV. See http://www. britishcouncil.org.tr/sites/default/fi les/turkey_national_needs_assessment_of_state_ school_english_language_teaching.pdf. Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2004) Language and identity. In A. Duranti (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 368–394). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bukor, E. (2011) Exploring teacher identity: Teachers’ transformative experiences of reconstructing and re-connecting personal and professional selves. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Capstick, T. and Delaney, M. (2016) Language for resilience. British Council: British Council London. See https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/fi les/language_ for_resilience_report.pdf. Carling, J. and Pettersen, S.V. (2014) Return migration intentions in the integration–transnationalism matrix. International Migration 52 (6), 13–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/ imig.12161 Cinkara, E. (2017) The role of L+ Turkish and English learning in resilience: A case of Syrian students at Gaziantep University. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies 13 (2), 190–203. Clarke, M. (2009) The ethico-politics of teacher identity. Educational Philosophy and Theory 41 (2), 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2008.00420.x Day, C. and Kington, A. (2008) Identity, well-being and effectiveness: The emotional contexts of teaching. Pedagogy, Culture, and Society 16 (1), 7–23. https://doi.org/10.10 80/ 14681360701877743 Devos, T. (2006) Implicit bicultural identity among Mexican American and Asian American college students. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 12 (3), 381–402. https://doi.org/10.1037/1099-9809.12.3.381. Dieckhoff, A. and Jaff relot, C. (2006) Revisiting Nationalism: Theories and Practice. London: Hurst. Ekiyor, E.Y. (2018) Transnational social network of Turks living in the USA, and Turkish associations in the USA. Journal of Scientifi c Research and Reports 19 (4), 1–9. Francois, E.J. (2013) Transcultural Blended Learning and Teaching in Postsecondary Education. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Gaziantep City Council (2014) Report on Syrian guests living in Gaziantep: Problems and solutions (Gaziantep’te Yaşayan Suriyeli Misafi rlere İlişkin Rapor Sorunlar ve Çözüm Önerileri). Gaziantep: Gaziantep Kent Konseyi Yürütme Kurulu.

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Portera, A. (2010) Intercultural and multicultural education epistemological and semantic aspects. In C.A. Grant and A. Portera (eds) Intercultural and Multicultural Education: Enhancing Global Interconnectedness (pp. 12–32). New York: Routledge. Holm, G. and Zilliacus, H. (2009) Multicultural education and intercultural education: Is there a difference. In M. Talib, J. Loima, H. Paavola and S. Patrikainen (eds) Dialogs on Diversity and Global Education (pp. 11–28). Berlin: Peter Lang. Hsieh, B. (2015) The importance of orientation: Implications of professional identity on classroom practice and for professional learning. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice 21 (2), 178–190. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2014.928133 Hwang, M.Y., Hong, J.C. and Hao, Y.W. (2018) The value of CK, PK, and PCK in professional development programs predicted by the progressive beliefs of elementary school teachers. European Journal of Teacher Education 41 (4), 448–462. https://doi.org/10 .1080/02619768.2018.1471463 Johnston, B., Pawan, F. and Mahan-Taylor, R. (2005) The professional development of working ESL/EFL teachers: A pilot study. In D.J. Tedick (ed.) Second Language Teacher Education: International Perspectives (pp. 53–73). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Knight, J. (2004) Internationalization remodeled: Defi nition, approaches, and rationales. Journal of Studies in International Education 8 (1), 5–31. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2008) Cultural Globalization and Language Education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. La Barbera, M.C. (2015) Identity and migration: An introduction. In M.C. La Barbera (ed.) International Perspectives on Migration (pp. 1–13). Berlin: Springer International. Lutz, H. (2016) Introduction: Migrant domestic workers in Europe. In H. Lutz (ed.) Migration and Domestic Work: A European Perspective on a Global Theme (pp. 1–12). Hampshire: Ashgate. Menard-Warwick, J. (2008) The cultural and intercultural identities of transnational English teachers: Two case studies from the Americas. TESOL Quarterly 42 (4), 617–640. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40264491 Pettigrew, T.F. and Tropp, L.R. (2011) When Groups Meet: The Dynamics of Intergroup Contact. New York: Psychology Press. Risager, K. (2007) Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to a Transnational Paradigm. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Schutz, P.A., Francis, D.S. and Hong, J. (2018) Research on teacher identity: Introduction to mapping challenges and innovations. In P.A. Schutz, J. Hong and D.S. Francis (eds) Research on Teacher Identity: Mapping Challenges and Innovations (pp. 3–12). Cham: Springer. Soysal, Y.N. (2000) Citizenship and identity: Living in diasporas in post-war Europe? Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (1), 1–15. Sutherland, L., Howard, S. and Markauskaite, L. (2010) Professional identity creation: Examining the development of beginning pre-service teachers’ understanding of their work as teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (3), 455–465. Tsakiri, E. (2005) Transnational communities and identity. Refugee Survey Quarterly 24 (4), 102–104. https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/hdi090 Varghese, M., Morgan, B., Johnston, B. and Johnson, K.A. (2005) Theorizing language teacher identity: Three perspectives and beyond. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 4 (1), 21–44. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327701jlie0401_2 Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (1999) Migration, Diasporas, and Transnationalism. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Villegas-Torres, P. and Mora-Pablo, I. (2018) The role of language in the identity formation of transnational EFL teachers. HOW 25 (2), 11–27. https://doi.org/10.19183/ how.25.2.418 Zong, J. and Batalova, J. (2018) Mexican immigrants in the United States. See https:// www.migrationpolicy.org/article/mexican-immigrants-united-states.

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Appendices Appendix A: Autobiographical narrative

Please write an autobiography of your teaching and researching career. When writing the autobiography, try to answer the following questions: (1) How/Why did you become an EFL teacher? (2) How/Why did you become an MAEFL student? (3) What is your outlook on the future of your teaching and researching career? Please include the following relating to your EFL: • • • • •

Your name, where you were born and family background Significant events in your life Your educational experiences Thoughts on the events that occurred in your teaching Hopes and goals for the future as EFL teacher and researcher Thank you for participating in the study.

Appendix B: Semi-structured interview protocol

(1) What is important in teaching English in your context? Please explain by giving classroom examples. (2) How do you see yourself as a Syrian EFL teacher in Turkey? Why? (3) In your teaching practice in Turkey, can you share some experiences of teaching that are important for you? Why do you think you remember these instances? (4) How does MAEFL relate to your context? Can you give some teaching examples? (5) How do you think your MA studies affect you as a teacher and researcher? (6) How does MAEFL relate to your context? Can you give some research examples? (7) How do you describe yourself as a researcher? Why? (8) In your researching practice in Turkey, can you share some experiences of teaching that are important for you? Why do you think you remember these instances? (9) What is your research philosophy?

Part 3 Transnational Practices and Identities of TESOL Practitioners in the US

10 A Korean-American Teacher’s Journey of Professionalization: A TESOL Teacher Educator’s Identity Formation across Transnational Contexts Kyung Min Kim

How does one become a transnational participant in TESOL? The field of TESOL is as diverse as it is widespread, and it is important to capture the stories that its diverse participants embody. Sae-Young (pseudonym), the focus of this chapter, is one such transnational member of the global TESOL community. A Korean American, she obtained a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and did not have a degree in teaching when she was in her twenties. Yet, almost 20 years later, she is now a professor of applied linguistics, a well-published senior scholar, and a TESOL teacher educator. This chapter was conceived when I, the researcher, and Sae-Young, the participant, began to examine her complex and multi-layered transnational journey. Consequently, this chapter narrates Sae-Young’s personalprofessional histories that span from her teaching in the US and South Korea to her graduate years, thus exploring her transnational experiences and the ways they shaped her identity as a TESOL professional. A growing body of research has recognized the importance of teacher identity in language education and, more specifically, the crucial need to incorporate it into TESOL teacher education (Morgan & Clarke, 2011; Park, 2013; Wolff & De Costa, 2017; Yazan, 2019). As such, this chapter explores the journey of professionalization of a Korean-American teacherscholar in TESOL by detailing the ways in which she navigated diverse educational contexts and, arguably and more ambitiously, offers a useful tool to integrate teachers’ life stories in TESOL teacher education (Park, 2012). To critically reflect on her perceptions and emotions, the data 163

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included autobiographical poems and the audio-recorded process of revising poems. This chapter aims to understand the participant’s evolving perceptions and feelings that she experienced, and purports to neither generalize nor claim to report on facts, considering that ‘even the memories and perspectives of the subject are socially constructed and ideologically mediated’ (Canagarajah, 2012: 261). Teacher Identity

Previous literature has established that teaching practices are closely tied to teacher identity (Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Motha, 2014; Song, 2016; Wolff & De Costa, 2017), which is often influenced by language, race and gender (Kubota & Lin, 2006; Motha, 2006, 2014; Park, 2012, 2015, 2017). Pennycook (2001: 148) has maintained that one’s identities ‘are not pregiven wholes but are rather conflictual and multiple’. In fact, this view of identity is particularly important since ‘we are seen to live in webs of multiple representations of class, race, gender, language and social relations; meanings vary even within one individual’ (Lather, 1992: 101). As Motha (2006: 496) has highlighted, English teachers’ racial identities are ‘inextricable’ from their professionalization process. Scholars (e.g. Curtis & Romney, 2006; Motha, 2006) have further noted that public discourses construct ‘native speakers of English’ and White teachers as more legitimate than teachers of other racialized identities. Motha’s recognition of this deep connection between teachers’ linguistic identities and their racialized identities becomes even more pivotal when considering the ‘multiple and fluid’ (Motha, 2006: 499) identities of a teacher of color, like Sae-Young, who speaks a privileged form of English. This understanding has led to critical reflection on teachers’ negotiation of their racialized identities. In addition to such fi xed social categories as race, it is vital to understand cultural and symbolic capital such as knowledge and education which are advantageous to achieving social mobility (Bourdieu, 1986) for a thorough exploration of teachers’ identity. For example, Park (2015: 109) examines how two English teachers – respectively from South Korea and China – ‘positioned themselves or were positioned as individuals living on the margin’ within English-speaking societies although they had various forms of educational and cultural privileges. Drawing on Bourdieu’s forms of capital, Park’s examination of educational biographies reveals how the two Asian teachers of English negotiated their identity by looking at the subtle ways in which their privileged experiences were weaved into marginalization in their educational lives. Specifically, transnational teachers, often identified as ‘non-native English-speaking teachers’, may experience diverse forms of marginalization (e.g. KamhiStein, 2004; Llurda, 2005; Park, 2012, 2015), ranging from the tendency to associate ‘more credibility and legitimacy’ with ‘whiteness identities’ to teachers’ racialized or gendered identities (Park, 2015: 110).

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Nonetheless, as Park (2015) acknowledges, there remains a compelling need for more research on English teachers of Asian descent who are likely to experience diversity within diversity, because the images and constructs ‘that essentialize a group of individuals need to be debunked’ (2015: 113). As Kumaravadivelu (2003: 710) has pointed out, cultural stereotypes of Asians in TESOL are largely contradictory to research fi ndings and ‘harmful’ to teaching, although his focus was on students. One example of the constructs that artificially homogenizes diverse peoples’ cultures is ‘the model minority’ stereotype about Asian Americans, which works against other racial groups such as African Americans (Lee, 2009: 7). As Lee (2009: 7) critiques, this stereotype describes Asian Americans as ‘shining examples of hard work and good citizenship’. This normative discourse is increasingly problematic because it ‘erases significant differences related to ethnicity, social class, language, generation, history, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, immigration status, and region’ (Lee & Kumashiro, 2005: xi–xii). Along with the investigation of teachers’ racial, linguistic and cultural identities, teachers’ emotions have garnered increasing attention in more recent research on language teacher identity (Benesch, 2012; Khong & Saito, 2014; Song, 2016; Wolff & De Costa, 2017). Building upon the view that language learning is an emotional process in second language acquisition research (De Costa, 2015; Douglas Fir Group, 2016; Lewis & Tierney, 2013; Pavlenko, 2013; Prior, 2016), Wolff and De Costa (2017) have highlighted that an exploration of the social nature of emotions, not simply cognitive differences, can enhance our understanding of teacher identity. Using a narrative method, they examined how a Bangladeshi student’s emotional challenges in a US MA TESOL program facilitated her reflexivity as a teacher, thereby positively influencing her teacher identity. Relatedly, based on interviews with English teachers in South Korea, Song (2016) has demonstrated that the teachers experienced a wide range of emotions, such as a sense of shame, vulnerability, pressure and discomfort, which came from social and cultural contexts, and some participants eventually experienced a positive transformation in their self-conceptualization as teachers. As Song claimed, ‘a moment of transformation’ can take place ‘not directly through [teachers’] external experiences, but through their reflection – the recognition of their emotions, identification of the sources, and understanding of their effect on teaching’ (2016: 651). In brief, teacher emotion research has revealed the significance of teachers’ emotional realities and their subsequent negotiations and reflection in developing professional identities. However, emotional descriptions of how transnational educators articulate identities remain close to invisible in the literature, resulting in a compelling need to diversify methodological tools to explore the memories of such individuals. In response to the importance of teachers’ subject positioning and identity construction, scholars have employed forms of personal writing such as

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teacher narratives (e.g. Barkhuizen, 2016; Park, 2012, 2015, 2017) and autoethnographies (e.g. Canagarajah, 2012). Poetry as Critical Reflection

The scholarship of arts-based research suggests that a poetic representation of data is a legitimate tool to explore personal experiences (e.g. Brady, 2009; Richardson, 2003; Hanauer, 2014, 2015). Poetry writing is a powerful methodological tool because it stimulates critical reflection for a nuanced understanding of experiences that public narratives might not capture (Hanauer, 2010, 2015; Kim, 2018b; Kim & Kim, 2018). This conscious reflection is made possible through poetry’s capacity for ‘emotive interaction and imagistic response to events allowing engagement and understanding to develop’ (Hanauer, 2015: 83). An increasing body of research has established that autobiographical poetry could provide individualized representations of experiences and identity construction (Hanauer, 2010; Iida, 2016; Kim, 2018b; Kim & Kim, 2018; Kim & Park, 2020; Park, 2013, 2017). For instance, Park (2013) has explored her lived experience as a Korean-American teacherscholar in higher education in the US by using poetry as data. She described how her life featured a sense of powerlessness and renewed appreciation of her ‘racial, linguistic, gendered, classed, and professional identity’ (Park: 8). Thus, poetry was used in this study because it is a powerful vehicle to raise individuals’ meta-cognitive awareness of their experience through in-depth reflection. Translingual Orientation

Transnationalism, one of the outcomes of globalization, undoubtedly entails ‘critical reflection on the relationship between language and identity’ (De Fina & Perrino, 2013: 510). Active engagement with an organic understanding of languages allows for this level of reflection, which is required to explore teachers’ identity construction. To examine the movement across different languages and cultures as a second language teacher, it is crucial to recognize the dynamic nature of multilingual competence, as opposed to the concept of languages as separated systems (Canagarajah, 2013, 2017; Horner, Lu et al., 2011; Young, 2004). Accordingly, this chapter follows translingual orientation, which Canagarajah (2016: 266) characterizes as ‘a perspective on languages as always in contact and generating new grammars and meanings out of their synergy’. While some scholars adopt the term multilingual to refer to similar perspectives to translingual practice (e.g. Kubota, 2014; May, 2014), multilingual may imply that individuals have separate linguistic systems, as if it were a valid assumption that someone ‘is essentially two monolinguals residing in one person’ (Horner, NeCamp et al., 2011: 285). For precisely this reason, Horner,

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Lu et al. (2011) criticize monolingual ideology. This view of language and language differences has a direct implication for identity (Cushman, 2016). Highly relevant to the current study, Canagarajah (2017: 7) is emphatic about not only the intricacy of communicative modes across languages but also ‘the way language works in tandem with diverse semiotic resources, social networks, and material conditions to produce meaning’ in translingual practices. As such, this qualitative study involved creating a translingual space where the participant freely moved across the two languages to make meaning with various semiotic resources. When the participant produced poems in Korean, her heritage language,1 she spoke both English and Korean to revise those poems. The participant used semiotic resources – Korean poetry, her heritage language, narrative memo, among other resources – and translingual interactions with a human resource (Jenks, 2017), the facilitator, to articulate her teacher identity. Therefore, reconstructing participant experience through this range of semiotic resources is employed as an analytic tool in this research. The Study

Part of a larger study, this chapter focuses on a Korean-American teacher-scholar’s professionalization, thus covering the period from her teaching in the US and South Korea to her graduate studies. The goal of the writing workshops in the larger study was for the participant, SaeYoung, to learn Korean, her heritage language. Poetry writing in this research, though, was used not only to raise awareness of the participant’s Korean as a meaningful literacy task (Hanauer, 2012) to foster her engagement with Korean, but also, more importantly, as a methodological tool to access her experience as an English language teaching (ELT) professional. Because I treated our sessions as dialogic space for exploration instead of a one-directional lesson, it is necessary to understand the two interlocutors: the poet-participant and the facilitator-researcher. The poet-participant and the facilitator-researcher

The poet-participant of this study was a Korean-American in her early fi fties and a tenured professor of English at a public university in the US. A TESOL professional, applied linguist and English language teacher specialist, she is currently a well-published senior researcher; her recent research has focused on English teachers’ identity construction and critical pedagogy. She came to the US when she was eight years old and received all her education in America. After she earned her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and worked briefly as a teaching intern in the US, she started her teaching journey in South Korea, where she worked as an English teacher in three institutions, including a university, for three years. After she returned to the US, she obtained her PhD in Curriculum

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and Instruction. While her primary language is English, when the participant is with her parents, she often speaks Korean. Her speaking proficiency in Korean is far higher than her writing proficiency in Korean. In the workshops, she constantly engaged in translingual practices by switching and meshing her linguistic repertoires – modalities and languages – across contexts. At the time of data collection, she was not familiar with sijo, a Korean poetic form, since she had not received any formal schooling in South Korea. In contrast, I (the facilitator-researcher) completed my K-16 and master’s education in South Korea, followed by post-graduate and doctoral studies in applied linguistics, TESOL, and rhetoric and composition in the US. Korean is my fi rst language, while English is my second language, which I use primarily for teaching, professional duties and writing. As a visiting assistant professor at a US university, I teach English composition and English for Academic Purposes to English language learners. Although both Sae-Young and I speak Korean, my linguistic profi le is qualitatively different from hers partly because I learned Korean literature, including sijo, as part of the national curriculum in South Korea. For this reason, Sae-Young considered me as an active participant in the literacy event of the writing workshops although she was the poet. From her perspective, I was better versed in sijo poetry, the Korean language and Korean culture than she was. In other words, her trust in me as a facilitator made her more willing to seek out my feedback on her poems in the revision process – an essential element in the writing workshop as well as a vital component of the data analysis process. The revision involved countless conversations in both languages encompassing Korean vocabulary and linguistic issues to express Sae-Young’s messages and emotions. Data collection and analysis

Sae-Young composed autobiographical poetry in four one-on-one workshops over 10 months. All the drafts of her fi nal 11 poems and brainstorming memos were collected, and our discussions (approximately six hours in total) were audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis, as indicated in Table 10.1. First, I provided explicit instruction about the genre characteristics of sijo, followed by an analysis of sample poems because Sae-Young was reading and writing sijo for the first time. Sijo is a structured Korean verse Table 10.1 Data collected Workshop 1

September 26th

82 minutes

Composed and revised 2 poems

Workshop 2

May 6th

163 minutes

Composed and revised 5 poems

Workshop 3

June 24th

71 minutes

Composed and revised 2 poems

Workshop 4

June 25th

54 minutes

Composed and revised 2 poems

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Figure 10.1 A template for sijo writing

form with a long history that dates back to the 14th century. As indicated in the worksheet for the workshop (Figure 10.1), sijo consists of three lines, which in turn contains four groups. Each line averages 14 to 16 syllables, with some variations. Sae-Young composed sijo about her career trajectory during the subsequent workshops, where she was asked to reflect on significant memories regarding her teaching and learning experiences. She wrote about memorable events in a narrative form and chose meaningful sections to create the poems’ first drafts. Then, she went through a recursive process of revision, with the facilitator’s guidance and feedback. The feedback ranged from Korean words, grammar and orthography to writing styles and the sijo format regarding syllabic regulation. We used two languages – Korean and English – freely during the revision process to negotiate linguistic features, such as wording, and to make meaning out of her experiences. More significantly, most of the linguistic negotiations started with her elaboration on the memory described and its meaning to her, in order to express her ideas in poems as accurately as possible. The data analysis process was divided into two phases: (1) the analysis of poetic identity (Hanauer, 2010) and (2) the thematic analysis of the translingual interactions during the workshops. First, in order to analyze Sae-Young’s subject positioning in each poem, I drew on Hanauer’s (2010) analytical framework. Hanauer defi nes poetic identity as ‘a [p]articipant’s subject position on autobiographical events and experiences expressed through the focusing potential of literary language resulting from a specific physical and discursive context of writing’ (2010: 62). This framework led me to analyze the contexts where a memory happened, create the message that the writer wanted to convey, and evaluate the linguistic choices that my participant made to deliver that message. The underpinning assumption of this framework is the idea that ‘in poetic writing, the linguistic system is not a transparent medium that merely transfers the author’s message; nor is it a mere adornment to the poet’s message: the unique expression of the poem is the message and experience’ (Hanauer, 2003: 77). Thus, analyzing poetic identity offered a sophisticated

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understanding of how Sae-Young interpreted her own experience: it was about the poet’s interpretive articulation of what happened, rather than merely what happened. Further, this research analyzes the revision process and all the written artifacts from the workshops: brainstorming memos and earlier drafts of poems. Accordingly, the second phase of analysis involved thematic analysis of this qualitative data through a constant comparative method (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to specifically identify the concepts that affect the construction of Sae-Young’s identity as an ELT practitioner: language issues, teaching, race and gender. In this sense, poetry was employed mainly as a ‘stimulus item for response’ (Hanauer, 2003: 84) because the act of writing poetry enriched the conversations about her experience during the revision process. In what follows, I present selected sijo and accompanying excerpts from translingual memos and dialogues to create a nuanced understanding of Sae-Young’s experience, illustrating her identity construction and negotiation in three transnational contexts: (1) teaching in the US after she graduated from college (primary education setting), (2) teaching in South Korea (secondary and tertiary education setting), and (3) graduate years in the US. Bilingual as Social Construction: Shifting Perceptions of Bilinguality

Sae-Young found her vocation for teaching after she earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology in 1994, when she landed a teaching internship at a private elementary school in the US. The sijo below recalls her memory of the tour to the school campus and captures how this experience enabled her to ponder the affordance of her bilingual identity in the context of instruction. Sijo 1

이중언어도 동양 외모도 그들에게는 능력이라. 금발 머리, 빨간 머리, 파란 눈, 초록 눈. 십구 년 미국생활, 그날따라 낯선 느낌: ‘Whiteness’. Both my bilinguality and Asian appearance are abilities to them. Blond hair, red hair, blue eyes, green eyes. After nineteen years in America, a distinctly unfamiliar feeling swept through me: ‘Whiteness’. 2

The first line frames both her being bilingual and outward appearance as qualifications in the elementary school setting, in general, and in the campus tour for the internship position, in specific. In the second line, Sae-Young

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provides some descriptive characteristics of the people around her in terms of their appearance; she could not find anyone who looked like her, and thus she positions herself away from them. Placing ‘Whiteness’ with quotation marks at the end of the third line indicates emphasis on her renewed feeling of difference. Thus, it depicts how ‘whiteness predominated the campus’ (First draft: sijo 1) at that moment. An acute sense of difference seems to result in a sense of isolation that emanates from her bilingual identity and Asian appearance, as hinted at in the first line. Together, sijo 1 describes how she ‘felt uncomfortable [and] out of place’ (Workshop 2). As Sae-Young had a different subject position from ‘그들 (them)’, those who recruited her, she also distanced herself from the other teachers hired by the school who were predominantly white, as indicated in her brainstorming notes. This sense of radical difference grows stronger when moving toward the third line to a point where she declares, ‘딴 나라라는 느낌이었다 (I felt as if I had stood in an unfamiliar country)’ (First Draft, sijo 1) although she was in the country where she had lived for 19 years, the majority of her life. In the mental representation of the country during the campus tour that day, racial differences appeared to be tied to abilities. Regarding language and identity, Pennycook (2001: 147) has recognized that it is necessary to ‘see the social and cultural as interlinked and the formation of our identities as produced in a dynamic relation between fi xed pregiven categories of identity and the different positions we take up in discourses’. Thus, understanding Sae-Young’s identity, in this case, entails the interaction between race as a fi xed category and the way in which she perceived herself, and, more importantly, the resulting negotiation as she moved across these somewhat conflicting discourses. Although this sijo itself does not articulate the reason for her emotion, she recalled that her exotic ‘appearance’ (Brainstorming memo) might have been ‘a sign for diversity at that school’ (Workshop 2), in addition to her bilingual identity. She remembered how ‘surprised’ she was to be hired as she had assumed a teaching position like this internship would require qualifications related to education that she did not possess at the time (Workshop 2). She speculated that she was hired primarily because of her ‘diversity characteristic’ (Workshop 2). Her elaboration on this memory offers a revealing glimpse of her feeling of ‘surprise’; she secured the teaching internship position through an organization whose mission was to recruit minority candidates interested in private school education or companies that wanted to promote diversity. She ‘didn’t think that there was an organization where they recruit minority teacher-candidates for places like this’ (Workshop 2). She believed that diversity for them meant African Americans because most of the candidates were African American. She continued, ‘For them, it was more of an added bonus because now they have two layers of diverse candidates’ (Workshop 2) because she was the only Korean-American in the group during the campus tour. A pervasive theme in sijo 1, mentioned explicitly in the third line, is ‘Whiteness’.

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Sae-Young sought to put this idea of not just white people but also a representation of something abstract, in Korean. Despite an extended dialogue with me for this linguistic negotiation, she finally decided to incorporate ‘Whiteness’ in English in the sijo since it best captured her understanding of the memory; as she said, ‘that [the Korean translation] doesn’t carry the same meaning as when [she] used “Whiteness”’ (Workshop 2). Furthermore, she restructured the sentence very carefully to make ‘Whiteness’ stand out and not be ‘connected to a word’ (Workshop 2). This revision process is illustrative of how a translingual space created by poetry writing helped her utilize the dynamic nature of her multiple languages with the aid of semiotic resources – for example, the Korean sentence structure with the English word and the brainstorming memo in English. In this way, employing all the linguistic resources in the translingual space helped Sae-Young to critically reflect on her ‘identities and differences’ that are ‘multiple, diverse, and interrelated’ (Pennycook, 2001: 146). In addition to the newly established perception of her linguistic identity, Sae-Young also began to problematize the discourse of diversity that she considered prevalent at that time. She said: Sometimes even though the person may not be qualified, just because of that added diversity characteristic, that could be a feature, whether it’s positive or negative. 근데, 지금 생각하면 그런 것이 좀 많이 있었던 거 같아요 [Looking back, though, I think that happened a lot]. So, for me, it was a positive experience because I didn’t know that I wanted to be a teacher. This was a good stepping stone, right? But then, there are a lot of people who get hired just because they’re Asian or they’re non-white. I think that sometimes does more harm than good in some cases. (Workshop 2)

With lingering doubts and uncertainty in the nascent conception of her privilege, albeit anecdotally and elusively, Sae-Young negotiated her identity in the reconfiguring of her linguistic and racial identity which was discursively constructed as diversity and an asset. Overall, the internship experience allowed Sae-Young to realize that she liked teaching (as the excerpt below shows), although she realized simultaneously that working with children did not suit her personality because ‘the nature of working with little kids’ involved ‘a lot of creativity and patience’ (Workshop 2): Researcher: 이거는 어떤 부분에 초점을 맞춰서 시조를 써볼까요? [What aspect of this (the memory described in the brainstorming memo) would you focus on for sijo?] Sae-Young: This. I felt like I found my calling of teaching. Researcher: 여기에서 깨달으신 거죠? [Did you realize it here (during the internship)?] Sae-Young: Hmm, well, I wouldn’t say 깨달어 [realize]. I would say that led me to it. But, 그게 진짜 내 career 라고 깨달은 거는 한국이었어요. [It was in Korea when I realized that it is my career.] (Workshop 2)

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This excerpt shows that the vision Sae-Young developed during the internship at the elementary school led her to fi nd ‘[her] calling of teaching’ in South Korea (Workshop 2).

Identity as Fluid: ‘The Assigned Identity’

After Sae-Young quit the internship, she went to South Korea, where she crystalized a more egalitarian vision for education. Sijo 2 depicts how Sae-Young reconstructed her perceived linguistic ‘privilege’ further. Sijo 2

한국어도 영어도 교포라면 당연한 것 당연한 줄 알았더니 남들에겐 능력 일세 비전을 여기서 찾을 줄 그 전엔 몰랐었네 Being fluent both in Korean and English is part of Korean-American identity. While I take it for granted, others see it as an ability. I did not expect to fi nd a vision here.

In the fi rst line, Sae-Young describes being fluent both in Korean and English as part of ‘Korean-Americans’ identity’ (Workshop 1). The second line indicates how Sae-Young distances her perception of her bilinguality, ‘part of who [she is]’ (Workshop 2), from others’ perceptions, as she understood that in Korean culture, ‘It’s something that people usually strive for a long time to get’ (Workshop 1). While brainstorming her sijo (Figure 10.2), she wrote about her meeting with a principal at an EFL institute in South Korea: My teaching journey began in the fall of 1995. While I doubted whether someone who did not study teaching could teach English, I was assured that my bilingual ability was sufficient for the job. And I trusted what I heard. (Brainstorming memo 1)

Figure 10.2 Brainstorming memo

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Figure 10.3 Earlier drafts of sijo 2

When she revised sijo 2 (Figure 10.3), she explained how being bilingual affected her career path in a very positive and, more notably, unexpected way: ‘because of other people, I was able to think more about my bilingual ability’ (Workshop 1). Whereas the internship experience enabled her to see her bilinguality as linguistic capital to represent diversity, the meeting with the Korean employer led her to become a teacher of English. Sae-Young said that the reconstruction of her bilingual identity happened at the two important turning points in her career, when she was hired as an intern in the US, as discussed earlier, and when she was hired as an ELT professional in South Korea. She recalled: I’m Korean and speaking Korean is logical, right? And, I came to this country [the US] very early at the age of eight. And because I’ve been going to school, speaking English is logical. At home, because I speak English at school all the time, for me to speak Korean at home was also logical because it’s their [her parents’] fi rst language. So, I didn’t really think that it was a big deal because for me it’s the norm. (Workshop 1)

What she used to consider a ‘norm’ and something ‘that was given to [her]’ (Workshop 2) challenged her to critically view herself from a fresh angle. She referred to this view as ‘the assigned identity’ (Workshop 1). Her use of the term ‘assigned’ indicates how others’ perceptions of the power of the English language were ‘totally different’ (Workshop 1) from her perception. Notably, ‘because of these people who actually perceived [her] in a certain way, [she] realized that being bilingual is very important’ (Workshop 1).

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Collectively therefore, sijo 1 and 2 demonstrate how ‘the assigned identity’ (Workshop 1), which was shaped by the perceptions that other people have of her as a bilingual and of the English language influenced her identity formation meaningfully. Before she changed ‘정체성 (identity)’ to ‘당연한 것 (something taken for granted)’ to revise the first line of sijo 2, she asked if the Korean word 정체성 (identity) had ‘a meaning that identities are fluid’ (Workshop 1). Our translingual communication to revise sijo 2 enabled her to ponder over different aspects of her identity – some aspects taken for granted and other aspects shaped by others’ perceptions of her. Interestingly, her translingual practice of using both languages dynamically captured the nuanced meanings that she wanted to express. While she perceived her ‘bilinguality’ as a ‘norm’ (Workshop 1), she realized that others viewed it as ‘strength or affordance’ (Workshop 2), what Bourdieu (1986) would call a form of cultural capital that is advantageous in society. This is the process in which one’s identity is socially constructed, given that hiring practices operate in highly dynamic ways that often reinforce dominant ideologies in the society and its inherent power relations. Therefore, this memory demonstrates how a form of cultural capital – a linguistic ‘privilege’, in this case – is appreciated differently in the context of English language teaching (Pennycook, 2001). Articulating Professional Identity: ‘An Affordance and Constraint’

In South Korea, Sae-Young taught English to secondary-level students at a foreign language institute and then at a university for a total of three years. First, she worked as an educational director and teacher trainer in an EFL program for a year and a half, which she described in two poems. Particularly due to her bilingual identity and her use of standard English which was viewed as legitimate (Motha, 2006), her privileged background was well received in Korean EFL contexts. Interestingly, however, she felt that people were surprised, not because she spoke both languages, but because she ‘looked Korean, but [her] English was fluent’ (Workshop 2). According to her perception, people must have thought that ‘[they] could be like that’, which ‘gave them a sense of hope’ (Workshop 2). In other words, she felt that ‘they perceived [her] as a linguistic role model for their children’ (Workshop 2). At the language institute, she became a spokesperson for the program and was highlighted in the advertisements. Even though she thought that ‘[her] Korean was not that good’, she spoke Korean, yet that Korean had ‘more English than Korean’ (Workshop 2). This experience was another opportunity for her to become more sensitive to her linguistic ability as an asset, yet in an entirely different sense: from ‘a sign for diversity’ in the US to ‘a linguistic model’ in South Korea (Workshop 2). Sae-Young assumed that many parents valued her highly because they could communicate with her, which would be impossible

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with native English-speaking teachers who were presumably monolingual. Thus, her Korean racial identity factored into others’ perception of her and, in turn, her negotiation of identity once again. As Park (2015: 118) argues, ‘the value of the capital is not constant for it changes from one context to another’. With her ethnic identity, Sae-Young’s linguistic asset became a symbolic capital (Bourdieu, 1986) in the educational discourses in South Korea. Sae-Young’s next job in South Korea was teaching English at a university, which provided an illustration of how a bilingual teacher could be both privileged and marginalized simultaneously (Park, 2017). Unlike her experience on the EFL program, this experience – resulting in two poems – was not entirely positive. The negative emotion partly came from her sense of not being considered fully legitimate by her Korean colleagues. One poem describes how there were separate meetings for Korean and bilingual faculty, a form of educational practice that a multilingual ELT professional experienced in Japan as well (see Rudolph et al., 2019). In the poem, Sae-Young wondered why they had to have a different meeting when they taught different sections of the same course. This practice also highlighted the potential tension between Korean faculty with doctoral degrees from the US and bilingual faculty without educational degrees in such settings. Specifically, Sae-Young was not recognized as a full member – a legitimate participant – in that academic community; her participation was peripheral (Lave & Wenger, 1991) despite her successful teaching experience. Taken together, the college teaching and her desire for a more egalitarian culture ‘woke [her] up to something more powerful than [she] had ever imagined in terms of [her] gender’ and education (Workshop 2). The following excerpt describes her perception of what could have happened: It was just different from my 학원 [the language institute] experience … I felt like my ideas were not valued … My major was not English teaching. I just happened to be bilingual. And I knew what I was talking about, but I didn’t know how theory connected with the practice. So, whenever I opened my mouth, they would like, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea, but what do you know?’ It’s like they don’t say it to me, but you can feel it. And I think that it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t have a PhD. They, a lot of them, got their PhD from the US. So, they were also competing with people who had a PhD in Korea. I think that’s when I woke up to gender issues, social status, and how education, certain means of education in Korea, is much more awarded and prestigious than being a native speaker or being bilingual. (Workshop 2)

It is particularly noteworthy that her bilingual identity which had been seen as an ability in other contexts was constructed ‘as a threat and something negative for that particular context’ in this narrative (Workshop 2). Thus, her linguistic asset was depreciated as she moved to the Korean higher educational system. This observation is similar to Rudolph et al.’s

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(2019) fi ndings from a narrative inquiry of two ELT professionals’ experiences at a Japanese university where one participant, Saoirse, observed the segregation of Japanese and international faculty members. The researchers also demonstrated how Hikari – a bilingual participant who was born in Japan yet completed high school and undergraduate studies in Canada – experienced tensions when she went back to Japan both as a graduate student and later as a tenure-track faculty member at a university because people perceived that she did not ‘fit into the ideal Japaneseness’ (Rudolph et al., 2019: 29). Furthermore, these years presented an additional layer of consciousness because Sae-Young became aware that she was a single woman without a PhD at that time. Although she could not pinpoint a specific memory about gender issues, Sae-Young’s self-identity as a single woman was an essential dimension of her teacher identity, particularly in the Korean educational context. Her feelings of disempowerment might have been due to normative discourses about English teachers in the Korean higher educational system. Park (2015: 123) demonstrates how normative discourses regarding ‘who is and can become legitimate in the academy’ can cause an individual even with economic, social and educational privileges to feel marginalized. In Park’s narrative study, a Chinese graduate student at a TESOL program in the US, a ‘non-native’ English speaker, felt marginalized in her collaboration with her professor and a doctoral student who were ‘native’ English speakers. The student expressed that they ‘did not trust [her] capability since [she] cannot even speak English very well’ (2015: 123). In this case, the student’s linguistic identity as a ‘non-native’ English speaker and her racial identity resulted in marginalization. Similarly, the normative attitude about English teachers that was prevalent in higher education generated Sae-Young’s feelings of marginalization. However, Sae-Young perceived that her educational and gender identity were the primary reasons for the marginalization in her case, unlike the Chinese teacher of English in Park (2015). The fact that SaeYoung ‘did not have a PhD in a society where that is valued’ (Workshop 2) led her to return to the US to pursue a PhD in education because further study ‘would provide [her] with legitimacy and credibility’ (Workshop 3). Moving transnationally and across the levels of education presented an opportunity for Sae-Young to reconstruct her capital accumulated over the years and to position herself in relation to her linguistic, gendered, racialized and academic identities (Park, 2015). The Pursuit of Educational Equity in TESOL

Immediately after her master’s degree in TESOL in the US, Sae-Young entered a doctoral program in Curriculum and Instruction. Although she included her master’s years briefly in the brainstorming sessions, she did not compose any poems about this period because it was merely ‘a

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stepping stone’ for her, and thus, not ‘memorable’ enough to write about (Workshop 3). Her perception of her studies for the master’s degree stood in contrast to that of her doctoral study when she became socialized into the field of TESOL. This socialization process entailed beliefs, values and behaviors as well as disciplinary content knowledge, thereby constructing her professional identity as a researcher and teacher-educator (Duff, 2019; Kim, 2016, 2018a). She had started the doctoral program with the mindset that ‘[she] would do a quantitative study’ because it had seemed compatible with her personality traits such as ‘structured’, ‘organized’ and ‘better at numbers’ (Workshop 3), as indicated in Figure 10.4. Sae-Young explained: Understanding and learning about the field for me came from the need to figure out where I aligned with either the quantitative or qualitative. And that was more of my understanding and learning and not so much different courses.

After detailing the earlier years of her graduate studies (as partially shown in Figure 10.4), she composed two poems based on a two-page narrative. Sijo 3 is one of them. Sijo 3

여성학, 영어교육 어떻게 연결하지? Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy 인간의 책임, 희망, 사랑, 자유 How can I connect women’s studies and English education? Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy It’s our duty, hope, love, freedom.

With her increased egalitarian stance on education, Sae-Young became more interested in women’s life histories and how women teachers of English from Asia construct their identities. In the second line of sijo 3, she wanted to express that, as she read more, ‘[her] responsibility and

Figure 10.4 Brainstorming memo

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goals became clear’ (Workshop 3). She mentioned specifically one of the most influential works in her identity construction as an ELT professional – critical pedagogy advocated by Paulo Freire, an educator and philosopher. The third line ‘인간의 책임 (responsibility as a human being)’ declares that ‘it is something that we must do and that’s what I got to know’ (Workshop 3). For this reason, the third line was inspired by Freire’s books: Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Pedagogy of Hope, Pedagogy of the Heart and Pedagogy of Freedom. The fact that she used ‘인간의 (humans)’ in the third line where she could have used ‘educators’ implies that the focus of her egalitarian concern expanded outward to include humans, not merely educators and students. Exposure to critical pedagogy in Sae-Young’s doctoral education resulted in a fundamental change in her viewpoint on the field of ELT and herself as an ELT professional. Sijo 3 particularly signifies a consequential change in her professional identity as a teacher-scholar with her inspiring curiosity about ‘lived experiences’ and the ‘humanistic nature’ of education through ‘women’s life history’ (Workshop 3) and about equity and access issues in English teacher education. This process of reconstructing her identity involved ways of connecting her English language education to a feminist perspective, as seen in the fi rst line of sijo 3. She also expressed doubts over her initial penchant for quantitative research; to her, examining lived experiences and women’s life histories seemed incompatible with quantitative research. This change was momentous because it led to her becoming a qualitative researcher dedicated to integrating the issues of diversity and social justice into her teaching and research. Conclusion

This chapter traces the reconstruction of a Korean-American ELT professional’s stories through her autobiographical poems and translingual revision workshops, revealing that her bilingual identity brought about discourses of ‘affordances and constraints’ (Workshop 1) along with changing perceptions of her linguistic, racial and academic identities. The snapshots of her life, thus, illustrate how diverse discourses – some privileged, others marginalized – of ‘teacher-hood’ operate in South Korea and the United States which profoundly shaped her identity and career trajectory. In addition, there has been a recent shift in focus on the connections between multiple languages spoken by one person, thus creating spaces for engaging in and examining translingual practices in education (Horner, NeCamp et al., 2011; Canagarajah, 2013). Although Sae-Young’s unique engagement with poetry in her heritage language is not representative of all translinguals, this chapter exemplifies how translingualism can be promoted through poetry instruction with a particular focus on the revision process, thereby constituting knowledge through empathic experience. The culturally-engaging literacy event – sijo writing – allowed us

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to explore Sae-Young’s subtle ways of negotiating her professional identities, which also informed her teaching practices as an ELT professional. Thus, in addition to unpacking identity construction, the outcomes of the translingual poetry workshops show promise for the use of poetry as a task to explore teacher identity, which, as Yazan (2019) has argued, should be an integral part of TESOL teacher education. Notes (1) According to Valdés (2001: 38), a heritage language speaker is characterized as ‘someone who is raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken and who speaks or at least understands the language and is to some degree bilingual in the home language and in English’ – such as Korean ethnic speakers learning Korean. (2) Sae-Young’s memos and poems were translated from Korean into English by the researcher.

References Barkhuizen, G. (2016) A short story approach to analyzing teacher (imagined) identities over time. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 655–683. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.311 Benesch, S. (2012) Considering Emotions in Critical English Language Teaching: Theories and Praxis. New York: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1986) The forms of capital. In J.G. Richardson (ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241–58). New York: Greenwood Press. Brady, I. (2009) Foreword in Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. Canagarajah, A.S. (2012) Teacher development in a global profession: An autoethnography. TESOL Quarterly 46 (2), 258–279. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.18 Canagarajah, A.S. (2013) Negotiating translingual literacy: An enactment. Research in the Teaching of English 48 (1), 40–67. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24398646 Canagarajah, S. (2016) Translingual writing and teacher development in composition. College English 78 (3), 265–273. Canagarajah, S. (2017) Introduction: The nexus of migration and language: The emergence of a disciplinary space. In S. Canagarajah (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language (pp. 1–28). New York: Routledge. Corbin, J. and Strauss, A. (2008) Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory (3rd edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781452230153 Curtis, A. and Romney, M. (2006) Color, Race, and English Language Teaching: Shades of Meaning. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Cushman, E. (2016) Translingual and decolonial approaches to meaning making. College English 78 (3), 234–242. De Costa, P.I. (2015) Re-envisioning language anxiety in the globalized classroom through a social imaginary lens. Language Learning 65 (3), 504–532. De Fina, A. and Perrino, S. (2013) Transnational identities. Applied Linguistics 34 (5), 509–515. Douglas Fir Group (2016) A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. Modern Language Journal 100 (Supplement 2016), 19–47. Duff, P. (2019) Social dimensions and processes in second language education: Multilingual socialization in transnational contexts. Modern Language Journal 103 (1), 7–22.

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Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin. Freire, P. (1998) Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic Courage. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Freire, P. and Freire, A.M.A. (1997) Pedagogy of the Heart. London: Continuum. Freire, P., Freire, A.M.A. and Freire, P. (2004) Pedagogy of Hope: Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum. Hanauer, D.I. (2003) Multicultural moments in poetry: The importance of the unique. The Canadian Modern Language Review 60 (1), 69–87. Hanauer, D.I. (2010) Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hanauer, D.I. (2012) Meaningful literacy: Writing poetry in the language classroom. Language Teaching 45 (1), 105–115. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444810000522 Hanauer, D.I. (2014) Experiencing the Blitz: A poetic representation of a childhood in wartime London. Qualitative Inquiry 20 (5), 584–599. Hanauer, D.I. (2015) Being in the second Iraq war: A poetic ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry 21 (1), 83–106. Horner, B., NeCamp, S. and Donahue, C. (2011) Toward a multilingual composition scholarship: From English only to a translingual norm. College Composition and Communication 63 (2), 269–300. Horner, B., Lu, M., Royster, J.J. and Trimbur, J. (2011) Opinion: Language difference in writing: Toward a translingual approach. College English 73 (3), 303–321. Iida, A. (2016) Exploring earthquake experiences: A study of second language learners’ ability to express and communicate deeply traumatic events in poetic form. System 57, 120–133. Jenks, C. (2017) The semiotics of learning Korean at home: An ecological autoethnographic perspective. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 20 (6), 688–703. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2015.1070788 Kamhi-Stein, L.D. (2004) Learning and Teaching from Experience: Perspectives on NonNative English-Speaking Professionals. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Kanno, Y. and Stuart, C. (2011) Learning to become a second language teacher: Identitiesin practice. Modern Language Journal 95 (2), 236–252. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1540-4781. 2011.01178.x Khong, T.D.H. and Saito, E. (2014) Challenges confronting teachers of English language learners. Educational Review 66 (2), 210–225. Kim, K.M. (2016) Post/graduate feedback in second language writing: The feedback network on the dissertation proposal. In C. Badenhorst and C. Geurin (eds) Research Literacies and Writing Pedagogies for Masters and Doctoral Writers (pp. 238–256). Amsterdam: Brill/Emerald Publishing. Kim, K.M. (2018a) Academic socialization of doctoral students through feedback networks: A qualitative understanding of the graduate feedback landscape. Teaching in Higher Education 23 (8), 963–980. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2018.1449741 Kim, K.M. (2018b) A humanized view of second language learning through creative writing: A Korean graduate student in the United States. Journal of Creative Writing Studies 3 (1), Article 7. https://scholarworks.rit.edu/jcws/vol3/iss1/7. Kim, K.M. and Kim, S. (2018) A poetic inquiry into learning English as an additional language: Korean learners’ perceptions through sijo, Korean poetry. Language Awareness 27 (4), 295–311. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658416.2018.1527344 Kim, K.M. and Park, G. (2020) ‘It is more expressive for me’: A translingual approach to meaningful literacy instruction through sijo poetry. TESOL Quarterly 54 (2), 281– 309. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.545 Kubota, R. (2014) The multi/plural turn, postcolonial theory, and neoliberal multiculturalism. Applied Linguistics 37 (4), 474–494.

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Kubota, R. and Lin, A. (2006) Race and TESOL: Introduction to concepts and theories. TESOL Quarterly 40 (3), 471–493. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003) Problematizing cultural stereotypes in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 37 (4), 709–719. Lather, P. (1992) Postmodernism and the human sciences. In S. Kvale (ed.) Psychology and Postmodernism (pp. 88–109). London: Sage. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, S.J. (2009) Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. New York: Teachers College Press. Lee, S.J. and Kumashiro, K.K. (2005) A Report on the Status of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Education: Beyond the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype. Washington, DC: National Education Association, Human and Civil Rights. Lewis, C. and Tierney, J.D. (2013) Mobilizing emotion in an urban classroom: Producing identities and transforming signs in a race-related discussion. Linguistics and Education 24, 289–304. Llurda, E. (2005) Non-native Language Teachers: Perceptions, Challenges, and Contributions to the Profession. New York: Springer Science and Business Media. May, S. (ed.) (2014) The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and Bilingual Education. New York: Routledge. Morgan, B. and Clarke, M. (2011) Identity in second language teaching and learning. In E. Hinkel (ed.) Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, Vol. 2 (pp. 817–836). New York: Routledge. Motha, S. (2006) Racializing ESOL teacher identities in U.S. K-12 public schools. TESOL Quarterly 40 (3), 495–518. Motha, S. (2014) Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching. New York: Teachers College Press. Park, G. (2012) ‘I am never afraid of being recognized as an NNES’: One woman teacher’s journey in claiming and embracing the NNES identity. TESOL Quarterly 46 (1), 127–151. Park, G. (2013) My autobiographical-poetic rendition: An inquiry into humanizing our teacher scholarship. L2 Journal 5 (1), 6–18. Park, G. (2015) Situating the discourses of privilege and marginalization in the lives of two East Asian women teachers of English. Race, Ethnicity and Education 18 (1), 108–133. Park, G. (2017) Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English: Where Privilege Meets Marginalization. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Prior, M.T. (2016) Emotion and Discourse in L2 Narrative Research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Richardson, L. (2003) Poetic representation of interviews. In J.F. Gubrium and J.A. Holstein (eds) Postmodern Interviewing (pp. 187–202). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rudolph, N., Yazan, B. and Rudolph, J. (2019) Negotiating ‘ares’, ‘cans’, and ‘shoulds’ of being and becoming in English language teaching: Two teacher accounts from one Japanese university. Asian Englishes 21 (1), 22–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/13488678 .2018.1471639 Song, J. (2016) Emotions and language teacher identity: Confl icts, vulnerability, and transformation. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 631–654. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.312 Valdés, G. (2001) Heritage language students: Profi les and possibilities. In J.K. Peyton, D.A. Ranard and S. McGinnis (eds) Heritages Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource (pp. 37–77). McHenry, IL: Center for Applied Linguistics and Delta Systems.

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Wolff, D. and De Costa, P.I. (2017) Expanding the language teacher identity landscape: An investigation of the emotions and strategies of a NNEST. Modern Language Journal 101 (1), 76–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12370 Yazan, B. (2019) Toward identity-oriented teacher education: Critical autoethnographic narrative. TESOL Journal 10 (1), e388. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.388 Young, V. (2004) Your average nigga. College Composition and Communication 55, 693–715.

11 Two Transnational and Translingual TESOL Practitioners in the United States: Their Capital and Agency Pei-Chia (Wanda) Liao

Teacher identity has gained attention in the past two decades in the TESOL field because it plays an important role in shaping teachers’ professional practices in the classroom (Motha et al., 2012; Varghese, 2007). The construction or conceptualization of teacher identities of TESOL practitioners, including English-language teachers or TESOL educators, is worth exploring since English is never culturally or politically neutral (Duff & Uchida, 1997; Norton, 2013). The number of international students earning degrees from institutions in English-speaking countries has grown dramatically, and some of those who hold TESOL degrees stay and serve as TESOL educators or English teaching professionals in those countries. In addition to demonstrating their strong global mobility, these transnational teachers1 serve as agents who strategically negotiate and employ their own resources in varying contexts (as I show in this study). However, they are often perceived as ‘non-native’ English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) and tend to face particular challenges when self-positioning as legitimate TESOL practitioners. The term NNESTs overlooks the fact that teachers are equipped with their own linguistic resources or skills. Furthermore, it falsely delineates who a ‘native’ English speaker is and therefore implies that only some may legitimately teach English. The perceptions of legitimate English language teachers or TESOL educators are ultimately issues of identity, which are still deeply impacted by such ideologies as nativespeakerism or the native speaker fallacy (Phillipson, 1992). Furthermore, only a few empirical studies have explored transnational teachers’ translingual identity as pedagogy, and TESOL literature centering on this topic is also scarce (Jain, 2014; Zheng, 2017). 184

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The present study sheds light on two teachers who migrated to the US as adults and pursued graduate coursework in TESOL at US universities after completing their K-16 education in their countries of origin, and who subsequently embodied their cultural and linguistic capital in settings of US higher education classrooms. The ideas regarding these forms of capital in relation to the teachers’ transnational and translingual backgrounds are discussed. This study also illustrates how the teachers’ capital carried power in ways that enabled their agency. Finally, it explores how the teachers transformed their cultural and linguistic capital into teaching practices to reinforce their pedagogical strengths and how this approach further helped the teachers claim their professional legitimacy as TESOL practitioners in the United States. Of the following two questions, the first mainly guided this study and the second emerged as significant in the data analysis, and both questions have collectively shaped the writing of this research report: (1) How do the teachers conceptualize their own identities as TESOL practitioners in the context of US higher education? (2) From the teachers’ perspectives, what are the resources they have that may help them lay claim to being legitimate teachers in the US context? Literature Review

In this section, I first look at ideas of capital and specifically shed light on cultural capital and linguistic capital. I also discuss the connection between linguistic capital and translingualism. Then I focus on theorizations of agency. Thereafter, I review previous work on teacher identities as pedagogy. Capital

Bourdieu’s (1977, 1986) concepts of capital are useful for understanding one’s resources and the varying meanings or ideologies that are attached to them. Capital means material and immaterial resources that grant power to the people who have access to them (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986; Chang & Kanno, 2010). In other words, capital equals one’s resources and therefore is often associated with power (Darvin & Norton, 2015). Furthermore, the value of capital is shifting and is negotiated across time and space, and the value is also shaped by ‘the dominant ideologies of specific groups or fields’ (Darvin & Norton, 2015: 45). This present study particularly sheds light on cultural capital and linguistic capital. Cultural capital refers to formal knowledge, previous life or academic experiences, educational qualifications and appreciation of specific cultural forms (Chang & Kanno, 2010; Darvin & Norton, 2015; Lamont & Lareau, 1988). Many research studies have examined the cultural capital

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of learners and explored the interrelationship between the learners’ cultural capital and the contexts in which the learners are situated. For example, McKay and Wong (1996) investigated how some English language learners not only put effort into English language learning to meet academic requirements, but also invested in cultural capital, such as music and sports, for this cultural capital was highly valued among their peers and thus helped them win peer recognition. Norton and Vanderheyden (2004) illustrated that despite the fact that the value of the cultural capital – comic book readers, in their study – differed between English language learners in Canada and their teacher, such cultural capital actually enhanced the learners’ language learning. Chang’s (2011) study on international students in the US illustrated how the students’ selections of learning investment and cultural capital in their academic communities were shaped by their past and envisioned future. In considering the above studies, even though issues of learners’ cultural capital and its interaction with a particular context have gained attention in the field of TESOL, studies focusing on teachers’ cultural capital, especially those of teachers with transnational backgrounds, are still underrepresented in the field. Linguistic capital, broadly speaking, refers to one’s competence in a language (Bourdieu, 1977). In translingual practice, according to Canagarajah (2013: 8), languages are viewed as resources, and language users employ or negotiate these resources for specific purposes or to meet ‘the contextual expectations’. From this perspective, one language can be shaped by the other and thus can be creative and empowering because it ‘offer[s] possibilities for voice’ (Canagarajah, 2013: 6). In addition, some products are valued more highly than others in some linguistic contexts, and part of the linguistic competence of speakers is to know how and when to be able to produce expressions that are highly valued in the contexts concerned (Bourdieu, 1977). Research has shown that linguistic capital serves as an essential resource for English language teachers because in many cases, people (including students, parents, colleagues and administrators) judge teachers’ legitimacy predominantly based on the English competence of the teachers (see Liao, 2017; Sayer, 2012). In light of the ideas that one’s linguistic capital can be highly valued in certain contexts and one’s linguistic capital value is also shaped by groups with certain ideologies (Bourdieu, 1977; Darvin & Norton, 2015), the concept of ‘Standard English’ and its power are therefore worth highlighting. Sociolinguist Trudgill (2002) and scholars such as Jenkins (2006) and Motha (2014) have contended that ‘Standard English’ does not refer to specific geographical contexts or belong to specific groups of people. However, Trudgill (2005: 87) asserted that there exists a connection between native speakers and English and stated that ‘even if native speakers do not “own” English, there is an important sense in which it stems

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from them, especially historically, and resides in them’. Furthermore, Motha (2014: 113) articulated: English is English because of its connection to a place, England, but also to other places that have moved in and become representative of the English-speaking ‘West’, what Kachru calls ‘inner circle’ countries or what Holliday (2005) refers to as BANA (Britain, Australasia, and North America) … although no global form of English exists in practice, one does operate in a theoretical sense – that is, ‘Standard English’. Although the notion of Standard English occurs only in the hypothetical, it is understood and constructed as an objective fact in everyday interactions, the popular media, academia, and schools.

Motha thus explained that even though ‘Standard English’ is a socially constructed idea, its impact is ubiquitous and deeply seated. It is also important to emphasize that since ‘Standard English’ is socially constructed, it can be ‘adopted by diverse communities for their own purposes’ (Canagarajah, 2013: 8). In other words, ‘Standard English’ accommodates and indexes hybridity (Canagarajah, 2013) and there can be more than one variety. Many scholars have also stressed that the ownership of English, due to the diversified usage in various regions and alterations for specific purposes, belongs to whoever uses it (Higgins, 2003; Holliday, 2005; Widdowson, 1994). However, with reference to the above statements of Trudgill (2005) and Motha (2014), it can be argued that the English language may still be perceived as belonging to traditionally native English-speaking contexts, and if one learns, acquires or is exposed to the English language from the native English-speaking contexts, their English is perceived as being more ‘authentic’. More importantly, the representativeness of English is often associated with the English-speaking ‘West’, and therefore a certain degree of unquestioned legitimacy is attributed to teachers who speak mainstream Englishes (Motha, 2014). This issue is particularly pertinent to transnational teachers who may have had exposure to varieties of English throughout their learning and teaching trajectories. The aforementioned assumption may influence the ways these teachers perceive their linguistic capital, or it can be costly to these teachers’ sense of English-teaching legitimacy. Agency

Scholars have advocated that agency is an action-oriented endeavor. For instance, according to Inden (1990: 23), agency is people’s realized capacity that helps them ‘act purposively and reflectively’ upon their world. Lewis et al. (2007) theorized agency as the strategic making and remaking of selves, while van Lier (2008) indicated that agency is something people do, rather than something people possess. Giddens’s (1979, 1984) and Sewell’s (1992) ideas of agency are particularly helpful in conceptualizing the interrelationships between one’s

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capital and agency. Drawing on Giddens, Sewell explained that people’s actions are shaped by the structures, defi ned as sets of resources or capital, available to a person, and people’s actions also (re)produce resources. In other words, resources or capital can empower or constrain human actions (Giddens, 1979; Sewell, 1992). Further studies have looked at the close connection between agency and social relations. For example, Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001: 148) determined that agency ‘is renegotiated with those around the individual and with the society at large’. Pushing the action theory of agency forward, Lewis et al. (2007) indicated that agency is a way of positioning oneself which allows for new ways of being within contexts of power. I fi nd Sewell’s (1992: 20) idea of agency is particularly insightful: To be an agent means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social relations to some degree.

Sewell not only emphasized the component of action in agency, but also implied that through the exercise of agency, social relations can be transformative and (re)negotiated to some degree. In light of what has been presented, teachers’ agency could thus be conceptualized as action(s) they take that help them transform social relations, including the positions they take in the presence of others, in contexts in which relations are socially co-constructed. Teacher identities as pedagogy

Recent studies have used teacher identities as an analytical lens and advocated the approach of teacher identities as pedagogy. Morgan (2004) explored his own identities in the context of a second language education program and demonstrated how his identities became classroom resources. Morgan (2004) argued that in order to better capture the complexities of teaching, language teacher education could move from viewing identity and pedagogy as separable knowledge bases to a more interweaving view of ‘teacher identity as pedagogy’. Extending Morgan’s (2004) idea of identity-as-pedagogy, Motha et al. (2012) narrativized their experiences as translinguistic teachers and analyzed how their own translinguistic identities and life histories shaped their teaching practices. Motha et al. (2012) also suggested that the content of language teacher education programs could be intertwined organically with teacher-candidates’ identities and histories. Further, teacher education could be the first place to help teacher-candidates establish their identities as pedagogical strengths. In line with translingualism (Canagarajah, 2013) and the identity-as-pedagogy approach, Jain (2014) illustrated how the researcher herself strategically utilized her translingual identity facilitating diverse ESL classrooms, not only to meet her

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students’ learning needs within the local context but also to advocate global Englishes. Zheng (2017) further demonstrated how two translingual teachers moved between languages effectively to boost international students’ learning in college composition classrooms. As mentioned earlier, teachers’ translingual identities as pedagogy in empirical classroom settings remains largely understudied (Jain, 2014; Zheng, 2017). Meanwhile, previous studies (Motha et al., 2012; Zheng, 2017) advocating teachers’ translingual identities as pedagogy briefly touched upon the idea of agency. Furthermore, existing TESOL literature has predominantly depicted how teachers strategically utilize their linguistic resources to facilitate diverse classrooms; however, there has been little research on teachers’ cultural capital as resources in educational settings, especially those of transnational teachers with global mobility. The present study extends this new line of inquiry on teachers’ translingual identities as pedagogy by examining how two teachers’ agency was enhanced by their capital. Methodology

During the 2014–2015 academic year, I conducted fieldwork at a public university in the US and collected data from five transnational and translingual TESOL professionals, who volunteered by responding to a participant recruitment email. I subsequently narrowed my focus to two of the five participants. Focusing on only two teachers in this case-study research was intentional: first, purposeful sampling was done in order to select representative cases to fit the focus of the study (Merriam, 2009); second, due to the space limitations, focusing specifically on two teachers has allowed me to present the teachers’ stories and narratives within particular contexts in greater detail. Participants and settings

Jia (pseudonym) is from South Korea and started learning English at the age of 13. English was her favorite subject in school, and studying abroad had always been her dream when she was young. She chose English language and literature for her undergraduate study and, after graduating, became an English teacher in a high school. With 10 years of teaching experience under her belt, Jia decided to pursue her dream of studying abroad. She studied TESOL at Riverside University (a pseudonym) in the US for her master’s degree, and subsequently continued her studies to pursue a PhD degree in education at another US institution. While pursuing the doctorate, Jia served as a lecturer in the TESOL program at Riverside. The majority of her TESOL students were either domestic or international master’s students, including some who were inservice college lecturers pursuing TESOL degrees for job advancement.

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At the time when the study was conducted, Jia had been teaching in the TESOL program for five years. Steven (pseudonym) is from Hungary. Growing up in a rural area where there was a huge shortage of English teachers, Steven did not have attend any English classes before college, although English was on the school curriculum. Even though Steven did not learn English until he graduated from high school, he chose foreign languages and literature as his college major because he thought ‘it was cool to speak a language other than Hungarian’. Striving to catch up with his college peers, Steven studied hard and, in his junior year, Steven was able to outperform some of his peers. He also tutored a child in English in his senior year, and this experience ignited his passion for teaching. After college, Steven and his family immigrated to the US, and he pursued his MA TESOL degree at Lake University (pseudonym). Steven taught at the English Language Center (ELC), where international college students take non-credit classes to learn English, affiliated with Lake University. Steven started teaching at the ELC for his practicum course during his study in TESOL. After graduating, Steven became a full-time teacher at the ELC. At the time when the study was conducted, Steven had three years of teaching experience there. Data collection

I conducted eight semi-structured interviews with the teachers, with the questions centering on their educational backgrounds as well as professional experiences. I also obtained the teachers’ consent to audio-record all the interviews. Additionally, in order to have a better understanding of the participants’ teaching contexts, I conducted non-participant observations in Jia’s course, called TESOL, and in Steven’s class, called English II. I conducted the observations in each teacher’s class once a week, 10 weeks in a row. I kept detailed field notes for every observation undertaken. Since both teachers themselves wrote the syllabus and designed the course handouts for the courses that I observed, the course syllabi and handouts were also reviewed. Data analysis

I mainly utilized narrative analysis and collected the data of this study as stories and used them for learning about the teachers’ experiences in various educational settings. This is in keeping with the research approaches used in the field for such studies. A number of researchers have looked at teacher identities and their agency through narrative inquiry. For instance, Beijaard et al. (2004: 121) examined teachers’ professional identity and stressed that ‘through storytelling, teachers engage in narrative “theorizing” and, based on that, teachers may further discover and shape

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their professional identity resulting in new or different stories’. Johnson and Golombek (2016: 14) stated that second language teachers can use narrative activities to ‘ignite cognitive process’. Motha et al. (2012) argued that the process of narrativizing teachers’ experiences helped second language teachers understand the complex interactions in teaching and further cultivated teachers’ agency. The interviews were fully transcribed and all transcripts were sent to the participants for member checks, which helped to establish the validity of the researcher’s interpretations of data collected (Merriam, 2009). I first examined the transcripts as a whole and administered open coding (Merriam, 2009), which allowed me to then explore themes that arose within the conversations. I also developed a set of focused codes, which helped me analyze the collected data categorically. Findings Jia

Having 10 years of English-teaching experience in a Korean high school, Jia indicated that she considered herself a competent English teacher. However, Jia’s fi rst few years of teaching experience in the US made her question her own professional identity as a TESOL educator. Jia indicated that although she had been teaching in the TESOL program for five years at the time the study was conducted, her self-positioning as a legitimate TESOL educator was constantly being challenged due to her ‘non-nativeness’, a word that Jia used several times during the interviews. She recalled her earlier US teaching experience as a novice TESOL teacher: I always remember how I felt as I walked into the classroom in the fi rst day. From some students’ facial expressions, I could feel they questioned: ‘Why are you here teaching us?’ … I spoke English with an accent and I did not have beautiful intonation … To be honest, to some extent I thought I’d better change my accent otherwise I could not teach here.

Note that Jia predominantly referred her ‘non-nativeness’ to her spoken English. From her perspective, she had ‘accented’ English and lacked American intonation, and this thinking made Jia question her teaching legitimacy in the US. Jia received mentorship from a teacher who was originally from China during her doctoral program, and this mentorship was significant and transformative. First, she observed the teacher being an active figure in her TESOL program. Also, she started to embrace her own ‘accented’ English: Even though the teacher had a heavy accent, he was very articulated. Besides, his lectures were very well organized … Seeing him as a role model, I gradually started to teach myself that, ‘Well, accent can be beautiful too’.

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From the teacher, Jia realized that instead of focusing on her accent, she could put effort into delivering good quality content in her spoken as well as written messages. Further, Jia advocated this perspective in class. A Korean student in her TESOL class expressed frustration regarding her own spoken English because it ‘had an accent and did not sound beautiful’, as Jia recalled the student’s comment. Jia remembered she encouraged the student by saying: You are Korean and it is okay to speak with an accent. I used to think I needed to change my accent. However, gradually [I think] it doesn’t matter that much. Let’s focus on delivering messages with good and clear content.

Later on, in the student’s assignment, Jia paid particular attention to the student’s statements, making sure they were thorough and presented logically. After the semester had fi nished, Jia received a thank-you card from the student. Jia felt rewarded because the student acknowledged her teaching: If I just told my students to pay more attention to the content they delivered and not to focus on their intonation or pronunciation, students would not buy it. But as a NNEST who had gone through US master’s and doctoral trainings and received the credentials, I tell them my own English learning stories and how I shifted my attitudes in term of my own English, students would listen.

Jia also noted that now she would often receive students’ positive feedback on her instructional content and easy-to-follow instructions. (Jia’s perspectives on accent in relation to her translingual practices are further analyzed in the Discussion section.) Not only did Jia more fully embrace her spoken English, but she also found value in her first language, Korean, in her institutional community: Korean has helped me examine how people in this community frame their language. As I deliver my messages to my native English-speaking colleagues, I can be very direct … In my Korean repertoire, I may sound too straightforward to them … Sometimes when I am in a meeting or read [academic] papers, I reshape my thinking or writing to fit in this community, but for me it is like a contestation … I am still learning to maintain my Korean way of delivering messages.

Delivering messages in her Korean way did not mean that Jia spoke English unintelligibly or irrelevantly in her institutional community in any way; she meant to maintain her linguistic style and ways of thinking. She gave an example that, after a committee meeting, a staff member came to her and thanked her for speaking straightforwardly and expressing her concerns directly during the meeting, without which the staff member thought the discussions would have been prolonged without reaching a conclusion.

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Contemplating her self-positioning, Jia said she was ‘in-between the dichotomy of native English speakers and non-native English speakers’ and she served more ‘like a bridge between these two groups’. Jia further stressed that, ‘The bottom line is that we can all communicate regardless [of] people’s fi rst languages or levels of their English’. In light of this thinking, Jia actively encouraged her students to express their perspectives in class. For instance, in her TESOL class, knowing that there was a diversity in terms of student nationalities, Jia often mentioned South Korea in instructional examples to elicit classroom discussions. In my observation of her TESOL class during the first week of the semester, Jia told her students that she is from Korea and gave the meaning of her name as an icebreaker activity. Later, without Jia’s explicit instruction, students from China, Japan, Korea and Thailand followed and took turns mentioning their nationalities first and then introducing the meanings of their names respectively. Moreover, in every course syllabus that Jia developed, she explicitly issued the following statement: It is my goal to create a safe place for differing voices and perspectives in our class discussion. Each of us enters this classroom community with unique sets of experiences that will inform our readings of and reactions to these texts. Because of this wide variety of perspectives, I insist that you each agree to respect the validity of everyone’s experiences in this community. At the same time, I also expect each of you to listen to others’ experiences and be willing to reconsider your own perspectives in light of such new information.

The above statement indicated Jia’s encouragement to her students to draw on their experiences to speak up in class and to respect each other’s opinions and values. Steven

Steven felt grateful that he had a full-time job teaching English at the ELC. Steven recalled that as a beginning teacher, he was consciously trying not to make English language mistakes: I knew that not every non-native English-speaking student got the chance to teach at the ELC. I felt I didn’t have room to make mistakes and I had to do everything perfectly.

Furthermore, Steven mentioned that he would not reveal his status of being a ‘NNEST’ to his students: I would tell them only if they asked me. Or I told them only after I knew they liked me already.

At that time, Steven’s practicum course was led by a Japanese professor, who served as an inspiration for Steven. ‘I remember thinking “Oh, she

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was not Caucasian, but she could teach us here”’, Steven noted. He further added: The practicum course and the readings made an impact on me in ways I imagined who can teach English. I also realized many TESOL professionals are NNESTs. Later [during the program] I got rid of thinking that being a non-native speaker is [a] deficiency. I felt more confident being a NNEST.

Having said that, as a novice teacher at the ELC, Steven was still hesitant about telling his students upfront that he was a ‘NNEST’. Steven explained: Previously I had this notion that ‘you are not a native speaker and you cannot teach us here’ and people may have the same thinking about me … So I decided not to let my students know I am not a native speaker.

In my observation of Steven’s fi rst class, he asked his students to guess his nationality and then shared his English learning experiences as a warm-up activity. Later in the interview, Steven explained that after teaching at the ELC for three years, he chose to tell students at the beginning of each class that he is not a native speaker and this approach became a part of Steven’s pedagogical success: Every time when I share that, students are impressed … I notice if I don’t do it in the beginning of the semester, they don’t click right away. I take 20 minutes to tell my story in the first class. Tell them about myself: where I am from, how I got into college and how I started studying English … I tell them, ‘Hey, listen, I am here teaching English. It is a myth that you cannot reach native-like fluency in English even though you start learning English as an adult. Now I show you how to get better in English’.

Steven explained further: I am an English teacher but at the same time an English learner. I know if my students want to accomplish mastering English as a L2, what the challenges are and what they have to do … I reflect [on] my position as a learner and I teach those things in my class. Whatever I do as a teacher connects to the fact that I am an English learner.

Indeed, Steven actively incorporated his English learning experience into his teaching. One time in my observation of Steven’s class, he instructed the students to use online English dictionaries. He looked up the vocabulary word insatiable as an example. Then he demonstrated Googling this word and showed that the translation of definitions in Hungarian from the web page provides merely a negative connotation, whereas the phrase insatiable curiosity in the textbook implied a positive personal trait. Steven used this example, engaging the students in conversation in which they examined whether the definitions from the web page fully reflected the meaning of the target vocabulary. After the short discussion, Steven encouraged his

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students to utilize their learning tools, English dictionaries in this case, more critically and strategically. Later, Steven also recommended several online English dictionaries, including one English learner’s dictionary. As Steven showed the information on the computer-projected screen, some students took notes and several took photos from their phones. While Steven’s English helped him land the English-teaching position at the ELC, he noted that he had to adapt in order to meet people’s expectations in the US learning and teaching contexts. For instance, as a master’s student, he realized that he needed to be more proactive in ways such as asking for help or searching for funding opportunities. Later, when Steven started teaching, he was stricter and more reserved because that was the way he was taught and how he had learned. Steven then realized that he could be more flexible and less rigid in his teaching methods. He even tried to be more humorous in class, a trait that was highly appreciated among his students. In my observations of Steven’s class, in the grammar-teaching sessions in particular, he used the students’ names, especially those who were late, in example sentences. Every time he did that, some students chuckled. Once a student raised his hand, asking Steven to use his name, and hearing that request, Steven and the whole class laughed. Furthermore, Steven also tried to catch up on American pop culture and sports news, for he knew this information served well as instructional examples as ‘this is what my students are really into’, Steven noted. Discussion

The fi ndings of this study indicate how the cultural and linguistic capital carried power enabling Jia’s and Steven’s actions. That is, the teachers’ agency was enhanced by the various forms of capital they had access to. Furthermore, knowing that their capital had value in their teaching contexts, the teachers exercised deep agency to reinforce their pedagogical strengths by integrating their cultural and linguistic capital into their teaching practices, and this approach, in turn, helped the teachers claim their professional legitimacy. In this section, I first draw attention to the teachers’ linguistic capital of English and present an analysis of how, at the beginning of the teachers’ teaching careers in particular, linguistic capital played a key role in shaping the teachers’ professional legitimacy in the US context. Then I discuss the teachers’ agency and explain how getting access to the cultural and linguistic capital allowed the teachers to perform new ways of being. Next, I examine how the teachers integrated their cultural and linguistic capital into their teaching practices to reinforce their pedagogical strengths. Lastly, this section offers an analysis of how the value of the teachers’ linguistic and cultural capital varied across time and space and was impacted by the certain assumptions or ideologies of students or colleagues (Darvin & Norton, 2015).

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The linguistic capital of English played an important role in shaping the teachers’ professional legitimacy

The fi ndings of this study reveal how the linguistic capital of English shaped the teachers’ legitimacy of teaching, especially during the time they started teaching in the US. In the case of Jia, while working as a TESOL educator, and not an English language teacher per se in the US context, her linguistic capital of English (including linguistic performances, and her utterances in particular) was constantly evaluated. In Jia’s perspective, her ‘accented’ English and lack of ‘beautiful intonation’ initially made her question her teaching legitimacy: she thought she needed to change her accent, otherwise she could not teach in the US. In order to achieve legitimacy, Jia thought she must demonstrate speaking ‘accent-free’ English with American intonation, for her students might judge her professional legitimacy based on their perceptions of her accent. Additionally, the perspectives of Jia on her spoken English indicate that accent is a salient feature of ‘otherness’ (Lippi-Green, 1997) and if she spoke mainstream English, she would own a certain degree of unquestioned legitimacy (Shuck, 2006; Motha, 2014). For Steven, serving as a novice English language teacher at the English-learning institute, his linguistic capital of English played an even more vital role in affi rming his professional legitimacy. This explains why Steven as a beginning teacher was self-conscious and tried not to make English language mistakes, for he knew his English competencies would be judged by his students or colleagues, and might cast doubt on his Englishteaching legitimacy. Furthermore, both Jia’s and Steven’s cases echo Sayer (2012) who suggests, somewhat problematically, that in order to gain students’ recognition, transnational and translingual teachers need to perform in ways that are associated with a ‘real English teacher’ (2012: 169). This affected their beliefs of how the language is ‘supposed to’ be used or performed. It is also important to underscore that Jia used to consider that her spoken English was negatively influenced by her Korean. Later she realized that she did not need to change the way she spoke and her version of spoken English was actually ‘beautiful’. It was a significant insight for Jia because not only did she decide to embrace her English more fully, but she also took it a step further by enacting this insight pedagogically. Jia encouraged her students to embrace their own Englishes and to aim for a more attainable and meaningful goal – delivering messages with highquality content. Here Jia manifested one of the key concepts of translingualism: without disregarding the socially-constructed ‘Standard English’, she knew that her spoken English could be creative and therefore beautiful, and that there were other ‘possibilities for voice’ (Canagarajah, 2013: 6), such as focusing on good content instead.

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The teachers’ agency was enhanced by their cultural and linguistic capital

Another outcome from the study was that the teachers’ agency was enhanced by their available resources (Giddens, 1984; Sewell, 1992). For instance, Jia’s and Steven’s cultural capital – their US educational experiences, including the course readings and discussions – helped change Jia’s and Steven’s initial deficit perspectives toward their own identities. More importantly, the cultural capital that came from connecting with well-established transnational and translingual mentors was quite significant: those teachers helped Jia and Steven envision their ‘possible selves’ (Dörnyei, 2005) within the context of US higher education where both of them were trying to establish themselves professionally. I further argue that without access to these different forms of cultural capital, the enactment of their agency would not have been as eff ective. A telling example is that Jia reckoned her cultural capital – including the credentials of her master’s and doctorate degrees – provided her with some leverage. Thus, in class, she was empowered to advocate the importance of delivering quality content instead of focusing on pronunciation and intonation. Additionally, Jia’s cultural capital and linguistic capital of both Korean and English further enabled her to change social relations to some extent in the context where she worked. Jia used her linguistic capital of the two languages as an analytic tool to navigate and examine her own linguistic discourse in English within the sociolinguistic structures, including her institutional as well as broader academic contexts. That is, her linguistic capital enabled Jia to analyze the conventional ways that people framed their language in the US academic context and to be somewhat resistant to those ways. Jia’s cultural capital, including her upbringing in South Korea, also shaped Jia, and she aimed to keep her ways of thinking and maintain her linguistic style and cultural norms, despite bearing the risk of being seen as too direct or odd in the eyes of her colleagues. These fi ndings demonstrate that Jia embodied an ‘intentional being’ and rejected ‘a structurally deterministic view of the fashioning of individuals’ (Varghese et al., 2005: 23). More importantly, Jia demonstrated her remarkable translingual competence: fi rst, her languages served as resources that enabled her to be highly aware of the established norms or conventions in this institutional context. Second, Jia navigated the institution’s particular social structure, negotiated her available resources in relation to this particular context, and then employed those resources to produce communication that she regarded as acceptable and eff ective in the institutional community (Canagarajah, 2013).

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Transforming capital into pedagogical successes reinforced the teachers’ professional legitimacy

Another fi nding indicates that Jia and Steven enacted being ‘knowledgeable human agents’ (Giddens, 1984: 17) who strategically incorporated their linguistic and cultural capital into teaching, which in turn became their pedagogical resources. Further, being able to transform the various forms of capital into pedagogical successes reinforced Jia’s and Steven’s professional legitimacy. For example, Steven’s cultural and linguistic capital served as pedagogical resources in his classroom. Steven used his cultural capital – his life history as an English learner in Hungary – to demonstrate that being a competent English user is an achievable goal regardless of the age one starts learning. The example of Steven instructing his students in using English dictionaries demonstrates that Steven served as a translingual teacher who moved effectively across languages (Canagarajah, 2013; Zheng, 2017). Furthermore, he negotiated and adeptly incorporated all his linguistic resources and then advocated the advantages of using English dictionaries critically and strategically and was able to recommend some English learning resources for his students. Likewise, Jia used the cultural capital which came from observations of her TESOL mentor to guide her students to focus on good-quality content. As a transnational teacher, she also utilized another aspect of cultural capital – her lived experiences in South Korea and in the US – as instructional tools to elicit class discussions and to facilitate diverse perspectives. What is more significant in Jia’s case is that drawing from her lived experiences as a transnational and translingual person in the US, she understood the sorts of linguistic and cultural tensions and struggles her international students could be undergoing as they adapted to the US context. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Jia tried to maintain her cultural capital including her own ways of being and to retain her Korean linguistic speech-acts in the US higher education context. Jia highlighted the value of these two forms of capital in her teaching, for example, by actively encouraging her students to share their ideas or personal stories in class and by underscoring the importance of being respectful to others’ opinions and values. The value of the teachers’ linguistic and cultural capital varied across time and space and was impacted by groups with certain assumptions or ideologies

The fi ndings demonstrate how the value of Jia’s and Steven’s capital shifted across time and space, and that value was also impacted by their

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students or colleagues with specific ideologies (Darvin & Norton, 2015). Serving as an experienced Korean EFL teacher, Jia’s linguistic capital of English was validated and acknowledged by herself as she regarded herself as a competent English teacher in South Korea. However, as she moved across borders to become a TESOL educator in the US, she initially devalued her linguistic capital of English. Situated within the institutional context at Riverside University, Jia was fully aware that the value of her linguistic capital including communication style was being measured by her native English-speaking colleagues. Despite her concerns, Jia also knew her style was appreciated by some of her colleagues. Furthermore, manifesting her agency, Jia saw value in her linguistic capital and determined to maintain it in her institutional community. The value of Steven’s cultural capital – his dispositions and knowledge – also underwent a shift. Consciously acculturating by interjecting some humor into his class and acquiring knowledge about American pop culture and sports, Steven knew these aspects of cultural capital were highly valued in this US teaching context. Steven also noted that if he were teaching in Hungary, he might demonstrate a different personality as a more reserved or stricter educator. Steven’s investment in cultural capital demonstrated that the value of his cultural capital was measured by the students’ value systems that reflected their assumptions or ideologies: for some of his international students, the knowledge of American pop culture and sports could be perceived and recognized as essential, which echoes McKay and Wong’s (1996) idea that this aspect of knowledge helped some students win peer recognition. Therefore, teachers who were equipped with this aspect of cultural capital were regarded as legitimate in this particular context. Conclusions and Implications

Both Jia and Steven exemplify reflective teachers who can negotiate and strategically employ their linguistic and cultural capital in varying contexts. The study also shows how the teachers’ agency was enhanced by the capital they had access to. In addition, seeing value in their capital, the teachers integrated their capital as teaching resources, which in turn helped the teachers claim their professional legitimacy. Both of them served as strong advocates that their legitimacy as transnational and translingual practitioners in US higher education could be reframed in positive ways. In light of what has been presented above, it is important to develop teachers’ agency by capitalizing on their own strengths. In TESOL education programs, student teachers could have opportunities to explore different forms of capital valuable to them in varying contexts (De Costa & Norton, 2017), and this approach pertains to transnational and translingual student teachers particularly. That is, TESOL teacher education

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could be more strength-based (Liao, 2017). Students could brainstorm how to use available forms of capital strategically for pedagogical success in their teaching contexts or ‘imagined [teaching] communities’ (Norton, 2001). More importantly, capitalizing on student teachers’ strengths and integrating the strengths as pedagogical resources could help strengthen their professional legitimacy. Jia and Steven demonstrated how to utilize their capital as pedagogical resources, and this approach brought positive reinforcement for their professional legitimacy. The study also reveals how Jia and Steven strategically incorporated their linguistic capital of their fi rst languages in different contexts. This suggests that the value of translingual teachers’ linguistic capital is multifaceted. The approach of fi nding and recognizing value in student teachers’ linguistic capital, as mentioned earlier, could benefit more translingual students to see the value in their own linguistic capital. This approach could further inspire them to examine and acknowledge their own English competence more holistically. This approach is particularly crucial for translingual teachers. Even for experienced and competent transnational and translingual teachers, their perspectives on their own languages may be heavily influenced by the deep-rooted native speaker fallacy. In light of this, for those translingual teachers who work as TESOL teacher educators, it is important to see value in their own linguistic capital and then use the resources pedagogically. In this way, they would not only help their translingual students envision their future practices reaching ‘beyond the idealized native speaker of English’ (Yazan & Rudolph, 2018: 5), but also cultivate their students’ development and investment in their own ‘translingual competence’ (Jain, 2014). It took both Jia and Steven several years to fully embrace their transnational and translingual identities. Jia’s and Steven’s cultural capital, their US educational experience in particular, empowered Jia and Steven to shift their perception of their transnational and translingual identities from a deficit to an asset perspective. I argue that many transnational and translingual teachers who do not have access to similar cultural capital may still struggle to position themselves as legitimate TESOL teachers. Additionally, teachers who have acquired English or pursued their studies in EFL contexts may not have the same kind of leverage to construct their identities positively. The above fi ndings and arguments suggest that TESOL teacher education, in both English-speaking and EFL contexts, should not passively let teachers explore and negotiate their identities on their own during their careers, but instead should strongly advocate the importance of identity explorations and negotiations. Yazan (2019) has advocated for an identity-oriented approach in TESOL teacher education, and teacher education could serve as the fi rst place to construct teachers’ identities as pedagogical resources (Motha et al., 2012). In both English-speaking and EFL contexts, support regarding identity explorations and negotiations in TESOL education could be

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constructed and implemented more systematically. To begin with, as mentioned earlier, TESOL teacher education courses featuring teacher identities could be part of the curriculum (Kanno & Stuart, 2011), where students could engage in conversations related to identity issues. Additionally, student teachers would benefit from full support at the beginning, during and after their teaching practicum, so they may reflect on their processes of identity explorations and negotiations and discover possible ways to position themselves positively on a professional level. I also argue that research studies that explore how transnational and translingual teachers serve as legitimate and competent teachers situated in both English-speaking and EFL contexts could be incorporated more frequently in teacher education curricula. In this way, transnational and translingual TESOL students in both contexts would be able to connect their own personal and future professional trajectories with those of the professionals and to further envision themselves as legitimate TESOL practitioners in whichever communities they choose to establish themselves professionally. Note (1) Following Canagarajah (2013), Jain (2014) and Zheng (2017), I use the term transnational and translingual teachers to describe the participants of this study. While the term NNESTs can be problematic, as mentioned in the introduction, both participants of this study used the terms NNESTs and non-nativeness in the interviews periodically. Therefore, I kept those terms on occasions when they were originally utilized by the participants.

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Duff, P. and Uchida, Y. (1997) The negotiation of teachers’ sociocultural identities and practices in postsecondary EFL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly 31 (3), 451–486. Giddens, A. (1979) Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Higgins, C. (2003) ‘Ownership’ of English in the outer circle: An alternative to the NS/ NNS dichotomy. TESOL Quarterly 37 (4), 615–644. Holliday, A. (2005) The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Inden, R. (1990) Imagining India. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Jain, R. (2014) Global Englishes, translinguistic identities, and translingual practices in a community college ESL classroom: A practitioner researcher reports. TESOL Journal 5 (3), 490–522. Jenkins, J. (2006) Current perspectives on teaching World Englishes and English as a lingua franca. TESOL Quarterly 40 (1), 157–181. Johnson, K.E. and Golombek, P. (2016) Mindful L2 Teacher Education: A Sociocultural Perspective on Cultivating Teachers’ Professional Development. New York: Routledge. Kanno, Y. and Stuart, C. (2011) The development of L2 teacher identity: Longitudinal case studies. Modern Language Journal 95 (2), 236–252. Lamont, M. and Lareau, A. (1988) Cultural capital: Allusions, gaps and glissandos in recent theoretical developments. Sociological Theory 6 (2), 153–168. Lantolf, J. and Pavlenko, A. (2001) (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity theory: Understanding second language learners as people. In M. Breen (ed.) Learner Contributions to Language Learning: New Directions in Research (pp. 141–158). London: Longman. Lewis, C., Enciso, P. and Moje, E.B. (2007) Reframing Sociocultural Research on Literacy: Identity, Agency, and Power. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Liao, P.C. (2017) Taiwan-educated teachers of English: Their linguistic capital, agency, and perspectives on their identities as legitimate English language teachers. Taiwan Journal of TESOL 14 (2), 5–35. Lippi-Green, R. (1997) English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States. New York: Routledge. McKay, S.L. and Wong, S.C. (1996) Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students. Harvard Educational Review 66 (3), 577–608. Merriam, S.B. (2009) Qualitative Research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Morgan, B. (2004) Teacher identity as pedagogy: Towards a field-internal conceptualisation in bilingual and second language education. In J. Brutt-Griffler and M. Varghese (eds) Bilingualism and Language Pedagogy (pp. 80–96). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Motha, S. (2014) Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-racist Practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Motha, S., Jain, R. and Tecle, T. (2012) Translinguistic identity-as-pedagogy: Implications for teacher education. International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching & Research 1 (1), 13–28. Norton, B. (2001) Non-participation, imagined communities, and the language classroom. In M. Breen (ed.) Learner Contributions to Language Learning: New Directions in Research (pp. 159–171). Harlow: Pearson Education. Norton, B. (2013) Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation (2nd edn). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Norton, B. and Vanderheyden, K. (2004) Comic book culture and second language learners. In B. Norton and K. Toohey (eds) Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (pp. 201–222). New York: Cambridge University Press.

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12 Teaching as Transnational Spaces: Exploring the Teacher Identity Construction of International Graduate Teaching Associates of Second-Year Writing Courses Min-Seok Choi, Tamara Mae Roose and Christopher E. Manion

Studies of graduate teaching associates (GTAs) in writing courses across the curriculum have called attention to the challenges they face in negotiating multiple roles: as novice scholars just beginning to master the discourse of their fields yet asked to introduce undergraduates to their disciplines; as new instructors and, at the same time, curricular gatekeepers teaching general education courses (Rodrigue, 2012; Williams & Rodrigue, 2016). Scholarship focusing on international graduate teaching associates (IGTAs) have examined the liminal positioning of their work, in terms of barriers and constraints – as challenges or limitations – rather than as sites where instructors are agents of their own teaching and learning (Zheng, 2017). Recent studies are beginning to focus on the agency IGTAs assert as they draw upon their linguistic and cultural experiences as teachers in ESL or EFL programs (e.g. Kim & Kubota, 2012; Kubota & Lin, 2006). However, less attention has been paid to IGTAs outside of ESL/EFL programs, in First Year Writing programs (Ruecker et al., 2018; Zheng, 2017), or in writing courses across the curriculum (Rodrigue, 2012; Williams & Rodrigue, 2016). In examining IGTAs’ experiences 204

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teaching writing across the curriculum through narrative inquiry, it is important to uncover not only the challenges they face but also how they actively form their teacher identities and their teaching practices. In this study, we employ a transnational lens to foreground how IGTAs of writing across different disciplines are ‘resourceful and bringing with them repertoires and competencies for their self-fashioning’, as well as ‘reconfiguring contexts in order to represent their own voices and interests’ (Canagarajah, 2018: 43). More specifically, since transnationals often occupy what Canagarajah (2018: 41) refers to as ‘a space that is liminal’, we are interested in how ‘such positioning motivates in them a search for identities and literacies that go beyond bounded, static, and territorialized constructs and norms’. To illustrate how these institutional identities and pedagogical agency intersect, we use the term IGTA to refer to how the participants are categorized institutionally and the ideologies placed upon them, as the literature discussed earlier suggests; however, we intentionally use the term transnational to emphasize how these individuals actively mobilize their resources and prior experience ‘between and beyond bounded nations’ (Canagarajah, 2018: 42). Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss interviews conducted with three IGTAs teaching general education writing courses in two different departments: a department in Education and one in Economics. Our central research question was: how do IGTAs of writing construct their teacher identities and practices? Conceptual Framework Transnational spaces

Transnational scholars have emphasized the nature of creativity, fluidity and multiplicity of people’s identities, constructed through the ways in which people locate themselves in the liminal social spaces between or beyond their bounded nations or geographic places. These liminal spaces have been called borderland spaces (Anzaldúa, 2002) or transnational spaces (Canagarajah, 2018), and the performing identities in those spaces are situated in sociocultural in-betweenness (Canagarajah, 2012). These concepts emphasize the fluid, changing and emerging nature of identities informed by intersectionality between two bounded norms and discourses and people’s agency and voice responding to the divergence. Noting that both terms, international and multinational, focus on geographically bounded nationals, Canagarajah (2018: 42) distinguishes the term transnational from the other two in that it focuses on ‘relationships that transcend the nation-state’. Thus, ‘transnational’ is a conceptual lens through which we can develop an asset-driven, agentive perspective of multilinguals who cross borders in the context of transnational relations. From this perspective, IGTAs are individuals who juggle complex positions as

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they fashion and refashion their practices and the perceived boundaries in which these practices occur (Canagarajah, 2012). IGTAs construct their teacher identities within transnational spaces where they face ‘multilevel constraints and challenges’ and, in doing so, they also produce ‘creative, agentive work in encountering and countering those obstacles’ (Hornberger, 2007: 328). As multilingual, multicultural individuals, they do not simply react to their circumstances, but instead, actively draw upon their prior experiences, sociocultural resources and funds of knowledge from outside of the classroom to construct their teacher identities and develop their own pedagogical approaches (Motha et al., 2012). In other words, IGTAs creatively ‘carve out and maintain transnational spaces’ within their departments and institutions, seeking to use ‘literacy practices within these spaces to position themselves as academically or socioeconomically successful’ (Hornberger, 2007: 326). Teacher identity as pedagogy

Language Teacher Identity (LTI) research asserts that teaching is a social action situated in complex contexts entangled with discourses and ideologies that shape what counts as knowledge and who counts as teachers and students. Dominant discourses and homogeneous language ideologies often oppress language teachers who have transnational identities, questioning their legitimacy and authority as teachers due to their linguistic, racial, national or cultural identity (Kayi-Aydar, 2018). However, a body of LTI research has shown that transnationals’ border-crossing experiences create new meanings and bring alternative ways of seeing and understanding to language and literacy education (Zheng, 2017). Similarly, drawing upon Morgan (2004), Motha et al. (2012) focus on how translingual teachers deploy their identities to inform their own teaching. In both studies, the authors discuss how they consciously or unconsciously drew upon their identities for their pedagogy. As they discuss its consequences and potentials in language learning and teaching, Motha et al. (2012) argue that teacher education programs should support teacher-candidates to understand the relationship between teacher identities and practice. Using Morgan’s (2004) teacher identity as pedagogy and extending Mortha et al. (2012), we focus on the discursive nature of teacher identity in teacher narrative. Although the literature on LTI focuses particularly on how instructors negotiate their linguistic identity, primarily in TESOL or First Year Writing contexts, we are focusing on our participants’ professional identity, more specifically the interrelationship between linguistic and professional identity. While they are teaching writing, they are refracting their understanding of writing and its role in the course through the lens of their varied cultural perspectives, developing disciplinary expertise, as well as views on language.

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Teacher identity is socially constructed and dialogically developed in relation to students through their everyday interactions. In the classroom, language ideologies and discourses always play mediating roles in people’s construction of culture and relations (e.g. relations of power), along with their positioning of one another as they collaboratively create knowledge (Woolard, 1998). These collaboratively constructed identities are fluid and changing, although an accumulation of social identification contributes to salient identities imposed on each other. To understand teacher identity and practice in the dialogic nature of the interaction, we looked for narrative moments in the teachers’ reflections that presented how their identities were reflected in their interactions. Narrative has been used in teacher inquiry, which plays an essential role in teacher development. Golombek and Johnson (2004: 307) view narratives as ‘a constructive process in which humans interpret and reinterpret their experiences’. As they told their stories, the IGTAs were encouraged to reflect on how they understood their students and themselves. Thus, in narratives where teachers reflect on their teaching, teachers’ identity work plays a central role. This aligns with Motha et al.’s (2012) approach to teacher narrative in which they examine how teachers employ their identity as pedagogical resources (see also Morgan, 2004; Zheng, 2017). Teacher identities are reflected in the ways in which they position themselves in relation to their students. To illustrate IGTAs’ teacher positioning, we draw upon the concept of stance-taking (Jaffe, 2009: 3), which can be defi ned as an act of ‘taking up a position with respect to the form or the content of one’s utterance’ and revealing how one’s positionality ‘is built into the act of communication’. Du Bois (2007: 163) has provided a systematic framework of stance composed of three stance-taking acts: (a) positioning, (b) evaluation and (c) alignment. First, positioning of the subject is central to the act of stance-taking. For example, in our analysis, this concerns how IGTAs position themselves and their students. Second, evaluation involves identifying the object of stance and the quality or value assigned to it. This relates to instances when IGTAs assess their past experiences, their current teaching practices, and students’ work and behavior. Third, alignment involves the dialogic and sequential nature of interaction where people respond to their prior stance. This was often seen in how the IGTAs align themselves as similar to, or disalign themselves as different from, their students. The concept of stance allows us to see how IGTAs employ their identities as pedagogy to respond to their students’ assumed stances on particular issues. With regard to identity work, we attend to how the IGTAs claim, challenge and negotiate their teacher identities as they perform social acts. Through this negotiation, IGTAs negotiate their transnational identities as they situate their experiences across boundaries and frame their knowledge in relationship with their students. We also employ stance-taking to make visible the ways in which these IGTAs exercise their

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agency, that is, an individual’s ability to assign certain positions to themselves and others to respond to existing discourses (Kayi-Aydar, 2018). We see these IGTAs acknowledge the dominant ideologies and discourses in the context of their teaching and respond to them by employing their transnational experiences to position themselves and their students. A detailed description of participants’ discursive interaction through stancetaking allows us to illustrate how they exercise their agency to mobilize their identities and experiences, often considered confi ned and bounded by nations, in creative ways. Thus, we deepen our analysis of how IGTAs draw upon their identities as resources to construct their teacher practice. Furthermore, as these IGTAs use stories to reflect on and imagine their identities, they deploy their transnational experience in constructing their teacher identity as pedagogy. That is, their transnational experience is critical in shaping not only who they and their students are but also how they teach the course.

Methodology Context and participants

This study was situated in a large land-grant midwestern university where second-year writing (SYW) courses are largely staffed by GTAs and offered across 30 different departments within six different colleges. The support, training, oversight and curriculum vary widely, with instructors in different departments establishing a different balance between subject-area content and writing instruction (Ohio State, Writing Across the Curriculum, 2016). Furthermore, the SYW courses must address ‘major topics and writings pertaining to the United States’ (College of Arts and Sciences, 1988), which potentially presents particular challenges for instructors whose experiences and expertise are grounded outside of the US. Through purposive sampling, we identified instructors to recruit for the study based on our prior knowledge of departments that house SYW courses and contact with course coordinators and instructors through Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) events. In addition, we drew upon information publicly accessible on university websites, and contacted those who self-identified as international students across different departments. The following three participants (all names are pseudonyms) were selected for the focus of this study because they were all currently teaching the course for the fi rst or second time. None of them mentioned formal training for teaching (in the US) apart from engagement with course supervisors or fellow GTAs who were more experienced. Yasemin came from Turkey where she did her bachelor’s in English language and literature and master’s degrees in curriculum and instruction with a teaching certificate in TESOL. At the time of collecting data, she was a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Education.

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She had four years of prior teaching experience in Turkey: two years teaching English language courses at the college level and two years within elementary schools. She also had more than a semester of teaching experience as an elementary school ESL teacher in the US. This was Yasemin’s second time teaching SYW, of which she taught two sections each semester. According to the course syllabus, which was handed down to her by her supervisor, this SYW course ‘is designed to help students reflect critically, both orally and in writing, on the social, political, and cultural contexts that influence writing education in today’s society’. Jiayi came from China and was a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Economics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from her home country, and then completed her master’s degree in economics at a university on the East Coast in the US before beginning her PhD program. Jiayi was a teaching assistant in other classes in her department in the past, but at the time of data collection, it was both her first time being an independent instructor of a course and her fi rst semester teaching SYW. According to the course syllabus, which she adapted from a former GTA teaching the course, ‘this is a topics class covering various economic issues and their impact on the economy and citizens of the United States, [and] the aim of the course is to help [students] understand how to analyze policy issues using economic ways of thinking’. Jiayi said that she replaced some of the former open class discussions with debates and guest lecturers as new components of the course to incorporate a range of expertise in economics. Pari came from India and was a fi fth-year doctoral student also from the Department of Economics. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degree in economics in her home country before coming to the US to pursue her PhD. She was a teaching assistant in many classes in her department in the past, and was the instructor of a macroeconomics course, but this was her fi rst time teaching SYW. The same course description was used in Pari’s syllabus as Jiayi’s; however, Pari featured student presentations as a way to incorporate their own economic interests in the course. In different ways, they both reported that they adapted the course topics to better align with their own disciplinary specializations. Data collection

The data for this qualitative research study were collected and analyzed as part of a larger study conducted by the WAC program to examine the teaching experiences of GTAs in their SYW courses. Interviewing was selected as the most appropriate method for this part of the study because it provides access to the context and meaning behind people’s behavior by creating the occasion for stories to be told and heard. In doing so, we were able to gain access to IGTAs’ ‘subjective understanding’ of their roles and relationships with their students; in other words, their perceptions of their

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teaching emerging in the moment (Seidman, 2006: 9). In this sense, our methodological approaches to analyzing teachers’ narrative were: (a) taking a biographical approach to retell their experiences, (b) undertaking analysis of their narratives, and (c) focusing on what the narrators told us rather than how they said it (Barkhuizen et al., 2014). More specifically, the first two authors, Choi and Roose, conducted two semi-structured interviews (approximately 45 minutes each) with each participant, one during the semester and the other shortly after the semester concluded. Given our roles working for the WAC program, we were cognizant that our participants could potentially feel uncomfortable sharing their teaching experiences with us, particularly regarding the role of writing in their courses. Thus, by approaching the interviews as a ‘friendly conversation’ (Spradley, 1979: 55), we sought to build trust and rapport with the participants. Particularly, by expressing both interest and less knowledge on the subject, essentially reinforcing that they are the experts of their own experience, we encouraged participants to share more about their teaching (Spradley, 1979). To be responsive to our participants, we also adjusted the wording and order of the questions on the spot throughout the interviews as their stories emerged. The interview questions prompted IGTAs to share about the experiences and resources they drew upon in their teaching, the roles the teachers and students took in their classroom, the interactions between teachers and students, and the curricular decisions they made. Data analysis

Choi and Roose transcribed the interviews turn by turn. We then independently identified the boundary of interactional moments told in each story and located three stance-taking acts (evaluation, positioning and alignment) within the stories. Then, when we were informed about the connected events by the participants’ indexical language use such as ‘at that time, then, there’, we drew on details from their stories that helped us to better understand their perceived relationships, agency and positioning. The second interviews were conducted shortly after the semester ended to understand if their positioning of themselves had shifted, and if so, why. We transcribed and analyzed the second interviews in the same way as the fi rst interviews. In each interactional event, we focused on how the IGTAs drew upon their transnational experiences and identities to take up a specific stance on a particular issue in relation to their students. Utilizing Du Bois’s (2007) framework, we grounded our analysis in their language use when they talked about their experiences. For example, IGTAs’ evaluative stance was signaled by the descriptors in their predicates, such as ‘good’ or ‘wrong’; their positioning indexed via personal pronouns with stance predicates such as ‘I don’t know’; and their alignment indicated by the speaker’s response to the prior utterance such as ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘I agree’.

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Findings: IGTAs’ Reflections

This study aimed to understand how three IGTAs of writing in their departmental SYW courses constructed their teacher identities and practices. Our analysis of three stance-taking acts in their reflections revealed that all three participants drew on their transnational identities and experiences to position themselves and their students and thus create opportunities for them to learn. Specifically, we found that these IGTAs contextualized their courses in ways that reflected how they situated disciplinary thinking and the relationship between writing and disciplinary knowledge. Their contextualization of the course often helped us infer how these IGTAs in their teaching responded to the dominant ideologies and discourses in their discipline and department. As each IGTA positioned herself and her students and provided her evaluation concerning teaching and learning, she also adjusted and readjusted her alignment with her students and, by doing so, constructed her teacher identity and developed her own pedagogical approaches. Yasemin’s reflection

In her interviews, Yasemin emphasized reflexivity on her transnational experiences and identities as her primary source of expertise as a writer and teacher. She made use of this reflexivity as a pedagogical resource to help her students reflect on their own cultural knowledge and biases. Her transnational experiences enabled her to make connections between her experiences and identities across borders, in the past and present, as she frequently adjusted her alignment with her students as she constructed her teacher identity and pedagogy. Situating disciplinary knowledge and writing in the course

When Yasemin was asked about the course, she shared that the focus of the course was on students learning to write reflectively about issues on social justice as they connected course topics to their personal experiences. Her emphasis on ‘reflective writing’ as a core goal (Interview 1, 25 February 2019) echoed her course description as stated in the syllabus: ‘this course is designed to help students reflect critically, both orally and in writing, on the social, political, and cultural contexts that influence writing education in today’s society’. Based on this goal and reflecting on the course content focused on racism and social justice in the US contexts, Yasemin distinguished between simply having cultural knowledge on a topic and knowing how to talk or write critically about those cultural topics. She used this distinction to position herself and her students. In the first interview (25 February 2019), she positioned her students as ‘most of the time a lot more knowledgeable on the content knowledge that [they’re] talking about because this is the country they have been living in’,

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but she evaluated their perspective as often biased when they wrote about racism and social justice. From her perspective, they reproduced dominant discourses and failed to reflect on their own cultural privilege because ‘sometimes people of privilege do not understand or question their privileges. And they just assume that these privileges are already available to everyone’. Along with this evaluation and positioning of her students, Yasemin positioned herself as more adept in some ways: ‘But I think I am, I feel more skillful in terms of how we can talk about other people, people coming from different cultural, historical, linguistic backgrounds’. Characterizing her course as such not only helped her take an epistemic stance (Du Bois, 2007) but also gave her space to view her transnational experiences and identities as resources, rather than limitations. Transnational experience as resources for teacher knowledge

Yasemin grounded her pedagogy in her reflexivity built upon an awareness of her shifting identities in different contexts. Through her relocation from Turkey to the US, Yasemin recognized that discourses that positioned her as part of dominant groups in Turkey placed her now as part of a minority group in the US. She argued that her reflexivity was used in her classroom as a resource to construct opportunities for her students to critically reflect on their perspectives and, in particular, to reflect more deeply on their responsibility as writers and the role of writing in communicating about social justice issues. In responding to a question about the relationship between her identities and instruction, Yasemin emphasized that her transnational experiences allowed her to ‘see the things differently’ (Interview 1, 25 February 2019). For instance, Yasemin talked about her loss of privileges as she moved from Turkey to the US: So coming from a linguistically dominant background, and then never having to learn a different language to continue my life in that society, it was just very easy for me. And I never questioned about what’s happening with the other people who are coming from different linguistic backgrounds in that community, in that society, or people coming from different religious backgrounds, until I came here, because this time I was that religiously or linguistically minority group. Yeah, and I lost my privileges.

At a different point in the same interview, Yasemin reinforced this shift in her identity and positioning in society and highlighted how it deepened her awareness and understanding: When I came to the United States, I became even more marginalized, or minoritized because of my linguistic differences, my ethnic background, my religious background, and everything. So I can think about who am I in these two different societies and how those people are perceiving me.

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In her narrative, she argued that her relocation from Turkey to the US allowed her to recognize the privileges that she had taken for granted and to understand them not as fi xed and given but as socially situated. This experience made her think about her identities across the two countries, and her reflexivity is based on her awareness of her fluid and concomitant identities as she is positioned differently contextually. By locating herself in-between the two countries, Yasemin did not see her identity as fi xed as either part of the dominant group in Turkey or part of the marginalized group in the US. Rather, Yasemin traversed the geographical boundaries to be reflective and use that experience of shifting social identities as a frame of reference to help her students reflect on their own privileges and perspectives. In other words, this reflective practice was used as her pedagogy when she challenged the taken-for-granted assumptions of her students, mostly from White middle-class backgrounds. Yasemin was aware that her students’ lack of critical reflection on the dominant ideologies and their privileges was natural because those were ingrained as truth in their everyday life experiences. As she looked back on her social identities and their concomitant privileges or disadvantages in Turkey that were often ‘a taken for granted kind of thing’, Yasemin could identify with the perspective of her students: So it is very similar to some of my students’ thinking like ‘if you work hard you get all the things and all the good things in life’. So because this is the kind of thing they experienced all through their lives, so they think that this is how the system works. So it was very similar to me. (Interview 1, 25 February 2019)

Yasemin’s use of reflexivity as the source of her pedagogy is not just made by simply recalling her prior experience in Turkey but rather by seeing it as associated with dominant discourses and ideologies from her minoritized identities. As Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004) affirmed, identities are always embedded in the power relations and ideologies of language. Yasemin believed that her experience in the US made her see ideological associations between languages and social identities and traverse across time and space to constantly shape and reshape herself and her relationship with her students. Reflecting on her past, taken-for-granted perspective shaped by the mainstream discourses in Turkey, Yasemin fi rst acknowledged how it could be natural for students to ventriloquize the dominant social discourses (Bakhtin, 1981), and then challenged them to be critical about their voice and its consequences: I understand where their ideas are coming from, because this is kind of what the mainstream society’s thinking or saying or sharing. But I also want them to know, ‘when you’re writing such a thing, you should think about the implications as well, especially in writing’. (Interview 1, 25 February 2019)

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These instructional conversations illustrate how Yasemin’s teacher identity is constructed and dialogically developed in relation to her students through their classroom interaction. Throughout her narrative, Yasemin emphasized her reflexivity and awareness of possible interpretations in language use as her strength as a teacher, and this allowed her to challenge her students’ assumptions in their writing more deeply. She not only positioned herself and her students and evaluated their speaking and writing but also shifted the alignment between herself and her students. The shifted alignment through border-crossing across times and spaces showed how she employed her transnational experience as a resource to claim her teacher identity and construct her pedagogy. Jiayi’s reflection

Jiayi organized her classroom activities around her disciplinary expertise by positioning her students as in need of learning ways of thinking in economics, and positioning herself as ‘not a native speaker’ with less authority to teach writing (Interview 1, 12 February 2019; Interview 2, 2 May 2019). Furthermore, by anticipating the needs of her international students (e.g. differences in communication style and content familiarity from their domestic classmates), she drew upon her transnational experience to design classroom activities. This enabled her to claim her teacher identity, as well as facilitate her students’ thinking and knowledge development in the field. Situating disciplinary knowledge and writing in the course

In describing what the course was about, Jiayi drew on her students’ identity, as well as her identity as a non-native English speaking (NNES) student and ideologies associated with this identification. Jiayi viewed the course as focused not so much on learning writing as on learning how to think about economic topics. Although she acknowledged that it was a writing course, Jiayi emphasized that it was not ‘a pure writing course’. To warrant the way she characterized the course, she inferred her students’ needs and interests based on their grade levels and majors: I think most students do not, like, take it as a writing course because most students are seniors and most of them are from like the Arts and Sciences or the Business school. So it’s kind of like an elective course to them, aside from the core course. So they’re expecting to learn, like, more topic issues, like for the economics major rather than just for writing. (Interview 1, 12 February 2019)

Along with aligning herself with her students’ stance, across the two interviews, Jiayi emphasized that her identity as a ‘non-native’ English speaker did not allow her to have legitimate authority to teach writing: I just don’t want it to be a pure writing course because I am not a native speaker. I just can’t force them to do anything, to do just everything with

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like grammar or like, yeah, anything like that. So I want to expose them to as many economic topics as possible. (Interview 1, 12 February 2019) This is a writing course, but my feeling is that since I am a non-native speaker so I cannot really, I cannot really say how well they’re doing on their writing. So what I’m focusing on is trying to, is to expose them to different economics topics so that they can learn more about different aspects of economics and also what is more important is to do the critical thinking. (Interview 2, 2 May 2019)

Such positioning of herself, ‘I am not a native speaker, so I cannot …’, is associated with her stance-taking about the characterization of the course. Focusing on learning logical thinking on economics topics was her response to a perceived lack of knowledge and authority to teach writing in English. However, she did position a role for writing in the course that was grounded in her experiences as a language learner and her valuing of disciplinary thinking in economics. Transnational experience as resources for teacher knowledge

Although Jiayi enacted a strong NNES identity as her self-positioning, this does not mean that she was constrained by ideology and identity. Jiayi was critical about how language could create inequality and creatively organized her class to create a more inclusive learning environment for all students. For example, Jiayi characterized writing assignments as a tool for learning logical thinking, which she compared to the kind of writing she remembered doing for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) exam. She later used this as a model for her Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) essay writing and evaluated this approach as successful because it had developed her logical and critical thinking. By connecting her GRETOEFL experience as an international student to her use of writing in teaching disciplinary thinking, she assumed that the GRE writing would be applicable to her students as well, which is a good example of the deployment of her transnational experience as a resource for constructing her teaching. In this sense, she claimed her teacher identity by showing how she constructed her pedagogy with her transnational and disciplinary identities. Jiayi’s use of her NNES identity as a resource was also demonstrated in the way she designed the class and organized learning, particularly for NNES students to help them leverage the resources they bring into the classroom. I think the fact that I am non-native speaker kind of makes me design a lot of different components, so that some other international students can also receive good grades in the class … I mean the international students defi nitely cannot perform as well as the local students, domestic students as in the debate or presentation. But they can do better in probably like reading or some other stuff … So I’ve tried to design different parts of this course so that different people can like show their strengths even in this one part. (Interview 2, 2 May 2019)

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Presumably reflecting on her learning experience as an NNES, Jiayi thought about how she could support her international students to position themselves competently in the classroom. This resulted in diversifying the types of activities so all students could perform effectively and thus become successful. Jiayi provided further support for international students by focusing on how students could engage with each other better. By allowing Chinese students to form their own group not only to better understand each other’s accents but also to draw on their shared knowledge (e.g. familiar topics) (Interview 2, 2 May 2019), Jiayi attempted to help her students view Chinese language as useful to share thoughts and clarify each other’s meaning. By sharing that she also struggled at times to ‘keep up’ with the local students’ speech, she identified with her Chinese students’ difficulties, which strengthened the rationale for their grouping. While Jiayi introduced dominant discourses through the binary labels, NES and NNES, which can marginalize students identified as NNES, Jiayi used these discourses to create a more equitable environment for her classroom community. Thus, her NNES identity as a student might have marginalized her in her learning, but her NNES identity as a teacher raised her critical awareness of who benefits more than others in the classroom and how it happens. Jiayi’s narrative evidenced her identity as an NNES as a unique resource, rather than a constraint, in her teaching. Pari’s reflection

Although Pari was similar to Jiayi in considering the focus of the course to be on disciplinary ways of thinking and writing, the source of knowledge that informed the way she viewed the course as such was different. Unlike Jiayi, Pari drew on a novice-expert model and her expertise within the model to understand her relationship with her students and organize her course activities to promote disciplinary ways of thinking and writing. In this sense, she argued that she could play the role of a guide and facilitator by using her learning experience as resources for teaching. Based on her perceived expertise in disciplinary thinking and writing, Pari constructed her conception of teaching as a reflection of her own learning experience. Situating disciplinary knowledge and writing in the course

Pari’s stance about the focus of the course was inferred from positioning herself and her students within their discipline. Applying her theory of learning as developing knowledge from a novice to an expert, Pari understood her ability to teach as determined not only by the knowledge gap between herself and her students, but also by her stance in the field. Pari positioned herself as someone who could equip students to go ‘in the right direction’ with ‘economic ways of thinking’ based on her disciplinary

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writing experience, but she also felt ‘a little limited’ in teaching writing because she was ‘right now learning about writing professionally’ – working on her dissertation – at the time of the interviews (Interview 1, 22 February 2019). Unlike Jiayi, who distanced herself from teaching writing by referencing binary language ideologies, identifying as a NNES, Pari here positions herself more as a developing writer in the context of her discipline, which gave her a more growth-oriented model toward herself as a teacher and, in turn, the writing in the course. Pari saw the course as focused on US economic issues and considered this her biggest challenge in teaching the course. However, Pari did not regard her prior experience and knowledge in India as irrelevant. Rather, to promote learning what she called ‘logical thinking’ and ‘professional writing’, she actively incorporated her knowledge and made connections: Okay, so when I was talking about inequality, I spoke about other countries a little, but the focus was primarily on the US and the issues here … I’ve spent most of my life in India, and the structure there, the economy there is very different. So sometimes I bring in comparisons, uh, just to show that, you know, something could be different across the two countries, which will have differences in the impacts. So, uh, that’s something that I talk about because that’s the economy that I know better about. So, yeah, I tried to bring in these comparisons. (Interview 1, 22 February 2019)

Pari drew on her learning and thinking about economic issues in different countries as resources for her students to better understand the US economy. Pari employed a comparative perspective that she had learned from her transnational experience as well as the knowledge she had gained in the discipline. As a student, she may have studied economic issues locally situated but globally interrelated from a comparative perspective as part of her transnational disposition. As we shall see, she saw this as important not just from her vantage point as a teacher and disciplinary expert, but also in how she engaged students with the material, particularly in what she valued about the work they ended up doing. Transnational experience as resources for teacher knowledge

Regarding her challenges in classroom teaching, Pari acknowledged her lack of familiarity with the content she covered in the course as her biggest difficulty: I think the primary challenge that I face is that, so the topic, the course that I’m teaching is current economic issues in the US. Um, my, my main challenge is trying, um, trying to bring in variety in terms of content because I don’t specialize in or I don’t know enough about a lot of these topics. (Interview 1, 22 February 2019)

This quote shows that her teaching is situated in intersections between the disciplinary knowledge and her understanding of the local context. Her lack of knowledge about the local context makes her feel constrained at

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times, but she also drew upon it as a resource to enrich her students’ learning. In her classroom, Pari often tapped into her comparative perspective based on her transnational experience as a source of knowledge for teaching students about the impacts of an economic system. By reflecting on her epistemic stance toward course topics, which led to the pedagogical decisions she made, Pari allowed students to bring their own interests into the classroom and juxtapose them with the US context. Indeed, she had a positive evaluation on the cross-cultural connections students made in their projects: They used topics which were like international trade, which we had discussed in class and we had spoken about it in the US context, but they took that idea and spoke about Brexit. So I think that was interesting. (Interview 2, 10 May 2019)

Along with her explanations about the difference between the US and India and other countries, her positive evaluation of her students’ use of their cross-cultural knowledge in the class may have encouraged her students to bring in outside knowledge as a way of learning the disciplinary content. This is an example of the argument that monolinguals can acquire transnational dispositions because ‘transnational’ is not geographically bound (Canagarajah, 2018). Pari’s students expanded their understanding of ‘international trade’ and looked at the phenomenon more critically by making connections between two different national contexts. Pari’s awareness of the difficulty in employing a comparative perspective in her class shows that its use may not simply result in comparing and contrasting two countries. The Chinese economy is very different. It’s doing different things right now, and India is a little different, so it’s difficult to directly compare. But um, but yeah, I think even for just generally students like to hear about what’s happening in other worlds, in the other countries. (Interview 1, 22 February 2019)

Pari brought her knowledge about India and other countries to engage her students with the economic issues or used comparisons to the extent she felt it was useful to think about US issues. In this way, she sought to critically engage her students with the content covered in the course. That is, although she felt limited about diversifying topics due to her lack of understanding about the local context, Pari adapted her transnational experience and knowledge to deepen the course discussions, and this also allowed her students to value and bring in their own knowledge that otherwise might have been considered irrelevant. Discussion and Conclusions

Given the complexity of defi ning SYW courses, these IGTAs situated their knowledge about content and writing in their SYW course in

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different ways. This opened up spaces for each of them to uniquely draw on their transnational experiences and identities as resources for their teaching. In employing their identities as pedagogical resources, Yasemin and Jiayi shared some moments in which inferred ideologies informed their situated identity or the way they organized their teaching. Yasemin found that the writings of her students, identified as White middle-class, reflected dominant ideologies in the US. By involving her students in deeper discussions, Yasemin helped them understand that their language use, shaped by their identities, presented a particular stance toward social issues and may reinforce inequalities. Yasemin’s call for her students’ critical reflection on their identity and language showed that reflexivity is key to taking up a transnational lens. Unlike Yasemin and Pari, Jiayi brought in a dominant language identity and ideology, the binary labels, NES and NNES, through which she constructed her teaching. She might have been constrained by the ideology she inherited because she was aware of the former department policy that NNESs were not invited to teach the SYW course. However, attending to her and her students’ NNES identity, Jiayi made pedagogical decisions to create opportunities for her NNESs to use their linguistic and cultural backgrounds as assets in her classroom. These pedagogical decisions implicitly challenge the privilege that NNESs often take for granted and the marginalization NNESs experience (Yazan & Rudolph, 2018). As Mahboob and Lin (2016: 25) argue, ‘non-recognition of local languages is supported by and contributes to other hegemonic practices that limit the role of local languages in education’, thus Jiayi’s awareness of who could benefit more than others in the classroom created a more equitable learning environment for all students. This study expands on the literature on Language Teacher Identity (LTI), which has primarily focused on TESOL or First Year Writing contexts, by examining the interrelationships between disciplinary and linguistic identities. This has been minimally researched although how one perceives themselves in disciplines informs the way instructors frame the classes they teach. IGTAs in this study actively navigated different aspects of their identities, and in doing so, fashioned their situated identities in relation to their classroom teaching. The SYW courses provided contexts in which both linguistic identity and professional identity played significant roles in shaping how the IGTAs made pedagogical decisions and built relationships with students, thus constructing their teacher identity. This context also calls attention to the ideologies of the department and program in which each SYW course is housed. Inhabiting the ideologies of language and literacy in their departments and disciplines, IGTAs may encounter conflicts and challenges in positioning themselves as instructors of writing. This echoes the necessity of having critical awareness of dominant discourses and ideologies in language teaching and teacher identity (Kubota, 2004; Motha, 2006; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018). Showing that

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ESOL practitioners’ identity became racialized, Motha (2006) critiques the argument that the ESOL program is racially neutral and calls for attention to a deliberate awareness of colonial ideologies that obscure power relations, privileges and marginalization. Similarly, Yazan and Rudolph (2018) argue for criticality in understanding emergent identities beyond the dichotomy, NES and NNES, in language teaching. This complexity of defi ning the SYW courses may allow the participants to construct their transnational spaces in creative ways. None of the participants saw their transnational experience as simply binary; rather, they engaged in the complexities of their perceived challenges and strengths. They viewed it as a resource for teaching with which they came up with new ways to understand who they and their students were in the context of teaching disciplinary writing, how they negotiated their multiple roles, and how they promote their students’ learning. As they engaged in complex identity work in the course, they responded to the dominant ideologies they inherited in their everyday life experience in varied ways, at times reproducing the ideologies and at other times challenging them. For example, Jiayi brought in the binary labels, NES and NNES, to position herself and to frame the course. Although she reproduced nativism, the dominant ideology that prioritizes those identified as NES over those NNES and arguably contributes to linguicism, she used these labels not to marginalize the international students but to create more culturally appropriate opportunities for them to learn. This echoes the argument for reconceptualizing nativeness and non-nativeness not as predetermined, dichotomized, binary labels but as fluid identity options contextually made available as people act and react to each other in time and space (Aneja, 2018; Yazan & Rudolph, 2018). Given this framing, it is important for coordinators and departments offering Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) or Writing in the Disciplines (WID) courses like SYW to create spaces in which these NNESTs can explore and negotiate identities beyond dichotomized labels (Aneja, 2018; Canagarajah, 2012; Motha et al., 2012). Across the three IGTAs’ narratives, we found that their teaching allowed them to cross different times and spaces as they wrestled with tensions and conflicts (Anzaldúa, 2002; Canagarajah, 2012). This bordercrossing was essential for them to reflect on their transnational experiences which were employed to construct their teacher identity (Canagarajah, 2018; Yazan et al., 2019). For example, Pari brought her own transnational experience and expertise to bear on her disciplinary knowledge and invited her students to bring forth their own interests and topical knowledge to the classroom. Yasemin continuously adjusted her alignment with her students as she made reference to her past and present within her narrative. Although her reflexivity based on her transnational experience distinguished her from her students, which helped her position herself as more skilled, her reflexivity also allowed her to recognize herself in the past as not being aware of her

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privileges, which helped her better understand her students. This enabled her to accomplish one of the course goals: building a writing community in which everyone felt safe to share their thoughts and reflect on their ideas. In sum, border-crossing in teaching enabled both Pari and Yasemin to explore their teacher identity and relationship with students. This study looked at IGTAs’ narratives from a relatively narrow vantage point. Further research could examine these narratives from broader perspectives. First, we could focus more on details in the immediate context of these instructors’ storytelling, such as the paralinguistic features of their interaction with us (Du Bois, 2007). We could also study their narratives within a broader context, including studies of their classrooms or examinations of the wider institutional milieu, such as institutional policies or their stories in comparison to other local instructors. Or we could longitudinally study how instructors’ narratives about teaching develop over time: how they continue to construct and reconstruct their teacherly identities and fit teaching into their wider professional and personal trajectories as transnational scholars and teachers. This last option is particularly appealing to us, since we would have so much to gain programmatically in terms of the WAC program: what would it mean for us to provide an occasion for instructors to share their stories with others, to value and advocate for the creativity and insight these transnational scholars bring to our institutions? References Aneja, G.A. (2018) Doing and undoing (non)nativeness: Glocal perspectives from a graduate classroom. In B. Yazan and N. Rudolph (eds) Criticality Teacher Identity and (In)equity in English Language Teaching: Issues and Implications (pp. 257–273). New York: Springer. Anzaldúa, G. (2002) Preface: (Un)natural bridges, (Un)safe spaces. In G. Anzaldúa and A. Keating (eds) This Bridge We Call Home (pp. 1–5). New York: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. (1981/1935) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barkhuizen, G., Benson, P. and Chik, A. (2013) Narrative Inquiry in Language Teaching and Learning Research. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2012) Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. New York: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Transnationalism and translingualism: How they are connected. In X. You (ed.) Transnational Writing Education (pp. 41–60). New York: Routledge. College of Arts and Sciences, The Ohio State University. (1988) Model Curriculum (Babcock Report). See https://www.oaa.osu.edu/sites/default/fi les/uploads/generaleducation-review/Babcock-Report-1988-ASC-Model-Curriculum.pdf. Du Bois, J.W. (2007) The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.) Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction (pp. 139–182). New York: John Benjamins. Golombek, P.R. and Johnson, K.E. (2004) Narrative inquiry as a mediational space: Examining emotional and cognitive dissonance in second-language teachers’ development. Teachers and Teaching 10 (3), 307–327. Hornberger, N.H. (2007) Biliteracy, transnationalism, multimodality, and identity: Trajectories across time and space. Linguistics and Education 18 (3–4), 325–334.

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Jaffe, A. (2009) Introduction: The sociolinguistics of stance. In A. Jaff e (ed.) Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives (pp. 3–28). New York: Oxford University Press. Kayi-Aydar, H. (2018) Positioning Theory in Applied Linguistics: Research Design and Applications. New York: Springer. Kim, S. and Kubota, R. (2012) Supporting non-native English-speaking instructors to maximize student learning in their courses: A message from the guest editors. Journal of Excellence in College Teaching 23 (3), 1–6. Kubota, R. (2004) Critical multiculturalism in second language education. In B. Norton and K. Toohey (eds.) Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (pp. 30–52). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kubota, R. and Lin, A. (2006) Race and TESOL: Introduction to concepts and theories. TESOL Quarterly 40 (3), 471–93. Mahboob, A. and Lin, A. (2016) Using local languages in English language classrooms. In H. Widodo and W. Renandya (eds.) English Language Teaching Today: Building a Closer Link between Theory and Practice (pp. 25–40). New York: Springer. Morgan, B. (2004) Teacher identity as pedagogy: Towards a field-internal conceptualisation in bilingual and second language education. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 7 (2–3), 172–188. Motha, S. (2006) Racializing ESOL teacher identities in US K-12 public schools. TESOL Quarterly 40 (3), 495–518. Motha, S., Jain, R. and Tecle, T. (2012) Translinguistic identity-as-pedagogy: Implications for teacher education. International Journal of Innovation in English Language Teaching and Research 1 (1), 13–28. Ohio State, Writing Across the Curriculum (2016) Cultures of Support for Second-level Writing: A Survey of 2367 Instructors. See https://cstw.osu.edu/sites/default/ fi les/2021-05/2016_WAC_White_Paper_on_2367_Cultures_of_Support.pdf. Pavlenko, A. and Blackledge, A. (2004) Introduction: New theoretical approaches to the study of negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. In A. Pavlenko and A. Blackledge (eds) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (pp. 1–33). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Rodrigue, T.K. (2012) The (in)visible world of teaching assistants in the disciplines: Preparing TAs to teach writing. Across the Disciplines 9 (1), 1–14. https://wac. colostate.edu/atd/articles/rodrigue2012.cfm (accessed 18 November 2019). Ruecker, T., Frazier, S. and Tseptsura, M. (2018) ‘Language difference can be an asset’: Exploring the experiences of nonnative English-speaking teachers of writing. College Composition and Communication 69 (4), 612–641. Seidman, I. (2006) Interviewing as Qualitative Research: A Guide for Researchers in Education and the Social Sciences (3rd edn). New York: Teacher College Press. Spradley, J.P. (1979) The Ethnographic Interview. New York: Wadsworth. Williams, A. and Rodrigue, T.K. (2016) TAs and the teaching of writing across the curriculum: Introduction. Across the Disciplines 13, 1–5. https://wac.colostate.edu/atd/ wacta/intro.cfm. Woolard, K.A. (1998) Introduction: Language ideology as a fi eld of inquiry. In B.B. Schieffelin, K.A. Woolard and P.V. Kroskrity (eds) Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (pp. 1–47). New York: Oxford University Press. Yazan, B. and Rudolph, N. (2018) Introduction: Apprehending identity, experience, and (in)equity through and beyond binaries. In B. Yazan and N. Rudolph (eds) Criticality Teacher Identity and (In)equity in English Language Teaching: Issues and Implications (pp. 1–19). New York: Springer. Yazan, B., Rudolph, N. and Selvi, A.F. (2019) Borderland negotiations of identity in language education: Introducing the special issue. International Multilingual Research Journal 13 (3), 133–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/19313152.2019.1633095 Zheng, X. (2017) Translingual identity as pedagogy: International teaching assistants of English in college composition classrooms. Modern Language Journal 101 (1), 29–44.

13 Becoming Critical Transnational English Teachers: A Narrative Inquiry of Fulbright Preservice English Language Teachers Willa Swift Black, Danning Liang and Gloria Park

Most US-based (language) teacher identity inquiries in teacher education focus on pre-service and in-service teachers enrolled in MA TESOL programs (i.e. Aneja, 2016a; Kanno & Stuart, 2011; Park, 2017; Wolff & De Costa, 2017). However, what is lacking in the literature are the experiences and perspectives of international students with prior learning and teaching experiences in other global contexts, especially Fulbright teachers matriculated in the MA TESOL programs. As such, this chapter is one way to address the dearth of studies by privileging the voices and experiences of four Fulbrighters using a narrative inquiry. The four Fulbrighters are graduate students enrolled in the US MA TESOL program and sponsored by the Fulbright Program for foreign students. The Fulbright Program, established by the US Government in 1946 in partnership with several other countries, serves as a grant program for graduate students, young professionals and artists from around the world, and funds their research and education in the United States. The Fulbright Foreign Student Program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide, and approximately 4000 foreign students receive Fulbright scholarships each year (IIE, 2018). The four Fulbright students who were the focus of this study were from Indonesia, Russia and Afghanistan. The narrative inquiry presented here is one thread of a larger study spanning nine years on the educational experiences of 34 MA TESOL students at a public university in the United States. In particular, this

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thread included a focus on the four Fulbrighters’ past educational experiences in their home educational landscape and their navigation of their current MA in the TESOL program in the United States in hopes of fi nding a new vision to enhance their teaching to support their students back home. Furthermore, their experiences as transnational, pre-service teachers matriculated in a MA TESOL program in the US were examined using transnational (teacher) identity perspectives. Transnational Identity and Transnational Teacher Identity

Vertovec (2009) has argued that transnationalism is a manifestation of the globalization process. Similarly, De Fina and Perrino (2013: 510) have stated that ‘transnationalism is a direct result of globalization’. As a result, there is a growing interest in transnationalism which includes ‘cross-border relationships, patterns of exchange, affi liations and social formations spanning nation-states’ (Vertovec, 2009: 2). According to Vertovec (2009), the forms and activities of transnationalism happen within many kinds of groups and institutions. Further defi ning the concept, Bookman (2019: 25) provides three thematic areas that outline the concept of transnationals: First, the term transnational refers to migrants who are embedded within the social field created by their cross-border connections. Second, the transnational social field created by transnationals may transcend the sender and receiver countries. Third, transnationals’ cross-border connections are dynamic, situated, and highly differentiated.

Globalization and transnationalism impact both transnationals’ identities and how they perceive their identities (De Fina & Perrino, 2013; Duff, 2015; Garces-Conejos Blitvich, 2018). De Fina and Perrino (2013) have asserted that the trend toward globalization, and especially the new technology that comes with it, is what makes transnationalism so much easier and prevalent than in the past. Because transnationals can maintain contact with their home countries through the internet and media, they can maintain a connection with the various cultures they have lived in, thus deepening and strengthening their perceived affiliation to those cultures. In addition, the impact of globalization on transnational identity is ‘due to the interaction of new and more complex forms of migration and communication as well as of knowledge circulation’ (Garces-Conejos Blitvich, 2018: 122). Closely connected to transnational identity is transnational teacher identity. Transnational teacher identity is, in many ways, an addition to the other inclusive alternatives (Jain, 2018; Selvi, 2016) currently being offered by scholars to the long-held NEST/NNEST binary (Aneja, 2016a, 2016b; Faez, 2011; Reis, 2011; Ruecker, 2011; Selvi, 2016). Reis (2011) discussed the internalized values that the binary instills in instructors, and

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by extension in language students and speakers as well: although Kang, a participant in the study, disliked and disagreed with the binary, he frequently referenced it in respect to his position and identity as a teacher, and in doing so granted the binary a level of credence. Reis (2011) called for mediational spaces to deal with these ideologies so that they can no longer be spread by language users as they move across national and linguistic borders. Park (2017) has suggested a transnational teacher identity as a movement toward equity among teachers of varying cultural backgrounds in higher education. Through the narratives of East Asian teachers who have lived or live in the United States, she demonstrates the power and usefulness of mixing cultural identities, and how the changes that occur can create an identity that is not all one culture or another, but rather a combination of the two. This transnational identity can then be connected to teacher identity, as demonstrated by Menard-Warwick (2008) who examined the use of transnational teacher identities in the classroom. The two participants in his study utilized their transnational teacher identities to connect with students and address their sense of alienation. Ellis (2016) came to a similar conclusion when examining multilingual speakers of English who have taught in multiple countries. Perhaps the most compelling participant in relation to this study was Stan, a British man who had taught in Japan for many years. During that time, he had become fluent in Japanese and felt a strong connection to both Japanese culture and language. He used his transnational and multilingual identity, developed over time as he interacted with Japanese people and culture, to connect with his students and help bring a mixture of cultures into his classroom. In keeping with these emerging key trends in literature, in our work with the four Fulbrighters, we decided to focus on our participants as transnationals in terms of how these Fulbright students shuttled between the new US culture and the original home country culture, especially by reflecting on and imagining their future (transnational) teaching identity and practice. Their worldview, cultural upbringings and academic and familial socialization continue to be shaped by how they move across borders not only geographically, but also epistemologically and ontologically, impacting their construction and negotiation of their teacher identity. Our work with the Fulbrighters is, hence, an extension to the existing discourse around identifying teachers from various linguistic and cultural contexts as transnational, as opposed to viewing them as a fi xed entity of non-native English-speaking teachers. Furthermore, our work with the Fulbrighters is a response to the lack of publications focusing on Fulbright students enrolled in MA TESOL programs which resulted in the works of Lee and Lew (2001) and Park and Amevuvor (2016), the latter being the preliminary publication emerging from our larger study, which housed the four Fulbrighters.

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The Participants and the Context

As part of the larger study, this research thread employed narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) to study the educational experiences of Fulbright MA TESOL students at a public university in the United States. While the larger multi-year study focuses on their academic and professional experiences while being enrolled in the MA in TESOL program as well as how they imagine their future teacher identity, this chapter specifically examines four Fulbrighters’ narratives as they traverse between their home and the US educational contexts through an analysis of the data collected through an in-depth individual interview process (each interview lasting 90–120 minutes). Interviews were transcribed verbatim. Each author read through each participant’s transcribed data twice and the following coding categories emerged: transnational identity, selfperceived transnational identity, self-doubt, self-perceived improvement, self-perceived change in teacher identity, self-perceived change in student identity, reference to NEST/NNEST binary, difficulty adjusting, homesickness and self-perceived future identity. From these coding categories we developed themes (Creswell & Poth, 2018; Joffe & Yardley, 2004) and re-storied the interview data to align with Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) past-present-future time frame. To accomplish this, we took the interview data and chronicled biographies for each of the participants detailing their self-described past, present and future, paying particular attention to their descriptions of their identity and the factors they referenced as having had an impact on them.

The Four Fulbrighters

We focus specifically on the narratives of Nia, Anto, Kristina and Mike (self-selected pseudonyms), as their stories highlight their reflections on how they learned and taught English in their home countries and how they were reawakened by the new academic contexts in the US MA TESOL program. These reflections became a fuel for imagining their English language teaching grounded in critical and transnational perspectives. Nia grew up on the main island of Indonesia until around the age of ten. Her father’s plantation company had branches all around the country, causing the family to move to a new community every five years, which provided Nia with opportunities to learn many local languages. In the interview, Nia stated that learning the local languages helped her become an insider since her classmates, despite one national language, only spoke the local languages at school and at play, prompting her to learn them in order to be accepted. Through such commentary, it is evident that from very early on, Nia understood the roles of languages and how they served her to meet her social and academic needs.

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After receiving her undergraduate degree, Nia taught at three different levels of institutions in Indonesia (language school, junior high school, and university). During her teaching career in Indonesia she realized that she needed to further her education to learn the most effective pedagogical practices. To Nia, being a teacher meant being authentic and addressing the needs of students organically, not through the dictates of teaching manuals. Nia’s desire to continue building her teaching repertoire in order to learn and implement effective pedagogies for her students in Indonesia drove her to apply for the Fulbright Graduate Studies program in the United States. Nia recalls that her fi rst MA TESOL course was a source of much frustration. According to Nia, her responses to the professor’s questions were always wrong, and she stated, ‘[Even though] I have a lot of years of teaching. So practically I know a lot. But in this class, I realize[d] that I still need to learn more because there is so much to learn…’ (Interview, May 2012). One of her takeaways from the courses in the program was ‘being critical … In the past, I just accepted … without questioning whether something was good for my students’ (Interview, May 2012). More specifically, Nia recalls reading about Kumaravadivelu’s postmethod pedagogy, which was eye-opening in terms of how to foreground students’ needs and their educational contexts over teaching methods. Nia never considered that she needed to question the methods she was using in her teaching in Indonesia, commenting ‘there is a gap between what I did and what my students do’ (Interview, May 2012). Nia’s teacher identity was reawakened with the concept of questioning and challenging the status quo, and she was urged to ‘be more critical’ after being exposed to critical perspectives on ELT. When asked to reflect on what she has gained from the program, Nia stated that although her initial goal was to improve her teaching methodology, the lesson she felt had been most valuable was in knowing how to be a critical thinker. As a result, she plans on taking this new, more critical outlook on pedagogical practices and applying them in her home context, and to remember to always put her students first. Anto was born in south Sumatra, Indonesia. He completed elementary school through to high school there, and he spent the last three years of his secondary schooling at an Islamic madrasa focused on religious studies. After graduating from high school, he went on to study English at a public university in Indonesia. After receiving a bachelor’s in English education, Anto went on to teach English for about six years at both the high school level and the university level. While teaching at the university, Anto felt that the school and students had very high expectations of him, and as a result he experienced constant stress attempting to meet those expectations. He felt that in order to work in such an environment he had to learn to teach more effectively and needed to improve his scholar identity. He described this

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sentiment clearly, stating ‘because the challenges and the demands from the university were quite high, I mean to produce more qualified English language teachers so I myself fi rst need to be informed about what is TESOL and how we can teach language more effectively’ (Interview, October 2016). This is what led him to apply for a Fulbright scholarship and enroll in an MA TESOL program in the US. Upon entering the MA TESOL program, Anto was initially overwhelmed by how little he knew in terms of TESOL topics, such as teacher identity. To make up for this, he did extra reading so that he could truly begin to understand the concepts he was struggling with. As time went on, he began to notice a change in his teacher identity. He stated, ‘I feel that I am becoming a more global teacher in terms of how should I teach my students … to become a more global language user’ (Interview, October 2016). He became especially mindful of teaching his students to be more communicative and fluent, moving away from imitating a specific group of ‘native’ English speakers and standard American English. The fact that the program focused on using individual students’ linguistic repertoire to communicate made it attractive for Anto. He rejoiced that the program, and what he taught, did not focus on one type of English over another, such as American English or British English. He felt that his goal was as follows: [W]e are not specifically teaching the culture of American people or English of American version, but we try to integrate our local [languages] and English is not only one. So I need to inform my students whatever the language they have, they should be able to communicate using their capacity and using English. (Interview, October 2016)

Anto also focused on effective teaching, which he believed is synonymous with preparedness. Not only did this mean having all the materials for the class ready, but he also believed it meant being mentally prepared with various theories and practices, as well as an awareness of the teaching context and the teacher’s own philosophy. For his future teaching plans, Anto emphasized promoting local context-dependent practice, preparing authentic materials to meet the needs of the learners. Moreover, Anto wanted to raise students’ awareness around the importance of communicative competence of English. He stated, ‘I tell my students, for example, that the idea of communication is to understand and to be understood … I want to emphasize that they have to make a successful communicative communication. We do not have to worry about making mistakes’ (Interview, October 2016). Kristina, born and raised in Russia, was taught English by Russian teachers who learned English during the Soviet Era and primarily promoted the grammar translation method. At that time, for Kristina, learning and teaching English meant teaching/learning ‘vocabulary, grammar, and then being able to read academic text, answer some questions,

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produce some dialogue…’ (Interview, May 2015). Kristina obtained a specialist post bachelor’s degree in teaching English and German. During her undergraduate studies, she was inspired by her teachers who had been educated in the US. Kristina understood that the US student-centered teaching philosophy was in direct contrast with the academic context of her home country, but from the beginning of her teaching career in Russia, she emphasized the importance of each student’s unique background and its potential usefulness in class. She also focused on the importance of being sensitive to each person’s background when teaching the target language and culture. Her undergraduate education and her initial teaching experience in Russia led her to realize that there are other teaching approaches, which compelled her to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to begin her MA in TESOL in the US. She stated: I don’t want to generalize, but based on my experience, … [my] view of teaching English … was constructed based on … Soviet ideology, teachers’ [influences], and some travels abroad … experiences, too different. [S]o I was thinking I need … another perspective on teaching. (Interview, May 2015)

After she started her graduate study, Kristina embarked on a whole new experience being part of the MA TESOL program. She described her MA TESOL program as ‘promoting thinking and problematizing and, you know, not taking things for granted, and it gives me a broader approach’ (Interview, May 2015). Kristina continued to deepen her understanding of student-centered pedagogy, and stated ‘that’s completely different from what we have … the teacher student interaction is absolutely different, even the way you address … we don’t eat in class, we don’t even drink in class … it’s super formal … the distance between the teacher and student is really huge’ (Interview, May 2015). With regards to her future teaching, Kristina plans to promote an empowering learner-centered approach. Despite her prior practices of focusing on her students’ backgrounds in Russia, she confessed, ‘I have never thought about how they feel, whether they perceive themselves really like English speakers … I never thought that I would have the power to provide them different ways of thinking about learning English’ (Interview, May 2015). Kristina realized that her teaching role created space for her to empower her students in terms of how they perceived themselves as English learners and speakers: ‘I really want them to feel that they can do this [learning English], they can use it [use English in authentic contexts]’ (Interview, May 2015). In addition, Kristina continued to emphasize the importance of each student’s unique background and the potential usefulness that might have in class; she believed that ‘the whole name “Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages” implies the idea that we should be sensitive about every single individual in class and his or her background so that’s like the general thing. I should always

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consider their experiences and their cultures, traditions…’ (Interview, May 2015). Mike was born in Afghanistan but was raised and educated in Iran until the end of his seventh-grade year. He then returned to Afghanistan to complete his secondary education. The schools he attended across the two countries were large, and he recalled that there were generally at least thirty students in each class. He feels a strong connection to both Iran and Afghanistan, referring to them both as ‘my country’. Although he never directly relates this to transnationalism, his self-identification as someone who has a home across physical and cultural borders is indicative of a transnational identity. His descriptions of his childhood memories grant both countries equal importance in his early development, further pointing toward an identity that is not strictly bound by national borders. Although Mike was initially interested in becoming an engineer, his college entrance exams placed him in the department of letters and languages. He later selected English as his major because he felt that it would help him improve his English, which he felt was substandard. However, he soon felt that he was simply bad at English because, ‘I had to just ask all my friends to translate what the teachers were saying in the classroom because they were speaking all in English’ (Interview, March 2016). His friends eventually convinced him that teaching English would help him improve, so Mike started teaching at orphanages through a group known as Red Cressin, which is similar to the Red Cross. Through this experience, he realized that he wanted to be an English teacher. With a newfound passion for teaching English, Mike became an English teacher, which eventually brought him to the MA TESOL program. He said in the interview: ‘everyday my desire to teach [continued to grow], I liked it a lot, now I’m here doing my master’s in TESOL’. When he reflected on his learning moments during the program, he stated the following: ‘I think about … either adapting or changing some of the activities and implementing them in the context of Afghanistan. So whatever I do at [my US institution], my heart is with my country and my courses, and I think about them’ (Interview, March 2016). Mike was particularly interested in how he could best apply what he learned in the program to his own teaching context. Mike hoped to continue reflecting on his own teaching in the future, something that he reiterated in the interview as ‘thinking about the way I taught, the way I was taught as well and the way I will be teaching’ (Interview, March 2016). Additionally, Mike emphasized that he wants to contextualize theories into his own teaching contexts; and this is a key point about how he sees himself as a teacher: thinking about his students in a specific context: ‘a lot of things I learned newly and that I believe are new in my context … and I learned that, what might work in one context doesn’t mean it should work in another context’ (Interview, March 2016). Mike was also very aware of the personal changes he experienced in the program, stating that

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he feels much more mature as a teacher and a person because of it. Finally, he was wary of how people in his context would react to him, as people may now perceive him as ‘Americanized’, thus revealing how transnational teachers may face new tensions emerging from their transnational trajectories across the home county and the host country. Discussion of the Themes

The descriptions of the four Fulbrighters illustrate their reflections of how they were taught English in their home countries, which was often in stark contrast to what they gained from their MA TESOL in the United States. While these narrative snapshots do not provide a fullblown description of the language learning and teaching stories of each Fulbrighter, they do provide powerful images of transnational identity: going back and forth and moving across educational contradictions to understand, challenge and re-construct who they are as English teachers, and imagining the most appropriate ways to introduce the English language and culture to their future students in their home contexts. Hence, in what follows, we discuss three key themes that emerged from the data. The Fulbrighters as transnationals

One emerging theme from the four Fulbrighters’ narratives focused on understanding who they are as transnationals (border crossers). However, the border-crossing went beyond just the geographical move – their transnational identity construction and negotiation included how they view their academic landscape and what was occurring in the educational space. Jain (2020) and Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2015) similarly observed that the border-crossing experienced by transnationals went beyond political and physical borders and spread into nearly every aspect of the transnationals’ lives, both personal and academic. For our participants, physical border-crossing was compounded by how knowledge was created and by the relationship between teachers and students as well as the discussions that ensued in the classroom spaces. The participants reported a time period that, although varying in duration, was necessary to be socialized into US academia as their US educational experiences were often in stark contrast to what they had experienced in their home countries. Zheng (2017) observed a similar sentiment as the international student TAs were forced to navigate an academic world where the rules with which they were familiar were either absent or altered in a way that made them aware of their sense of otherness in the classroom. Our participants reported that this contrast was not only based on the new teaching styles they were experiencing and their interactions with the professors in the program, but also with their fellow students.

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While each Fulbright cohort varied in student makeup, all of them were a mix of various countries including the US. As a result, adjusting to classroom dynamics was difficult, as students had varying ideas of how they should act in class, as highlighted by the four participants in this study. This diversity, like Jain (2020) observed, called for the participants to constantly reevaluate their positions and identities, which can be frustrating. For example, Nia felt frustrated when she could not get used to the new study context (e.g. classroom atmosphere, professors’ expectations etc.). As the participants progressed through the program, they reported beginning to adjust to the new context while also keeping a strong connection to their original ideologies on how classroom interactions should occur. Ellis (2016) and Zheng (2017) saw similar adjustments to different academic environments in their studies, albeit from a teacher’s perspective. Although all the participants reported that they successfully integrated into the academic culture of the program, they also reported feeling overwhelmed when they fi rst began to transition into the new culture. In all, becoming transnational and embracing a transnational student identity in the MA TESOL program was a process that began when they were first exposed to a new culture and continued as their previouslyheld ideologies were challenged by the new ones they encountered; this is congruent with the constant renegotiation of identity that Jain (2020) and Park (2017) observed. The participants’ border-crossing (geographical as well as epistemological) is integral to a transnational identity, which, in turn, becomes part of their academic and professional identities. A reconceptualization of pedagogy

The second theme that emerged from the narratives was how the transnational, pre-service English teachers saw themselves as English language teachers who needed to re-conceptualize their pedagogies given the new insights they gained throughout their two-year education. There were two reasons for the participants’ seeking admission into the US MA TESOL program: (1) to learn to employ effective English language pedagogies and (2) to become more qualified English teachers. As they journeyed through the coursework, therefore, they began to ask questions and raise issues related to using diverse pedagogical ideas into their future teaching contexts. As the participants thought critically about how their new ideal pedagogical practices would be received by their students and administrations, they also began to connect the identities that they were forming in the program with the identities they had held as teachers in their home contexts. They reported that although a method might work and be perfectly valid in one context, they had come to the realization that it might not work in their home context because of the differences in culture, especially the academic culture, and the ways in which English language is

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used in daily communication as well as in academic and professional settings. As Mike and Kristina mentioned in their interviews, they anticipated changing and adapting the teaching methods and teaching materials to meet students’ backgrounds and academic needs and goals. They attributed this new critical view at least partially to their growing understanding of English as a global language and their relationships with their own version of using English, with its focus not on standard American or British, but whether a speaker can communicate using a variety of Englishes represented from around the world. Anto, for example, during the program, saw himself develop as a global English language teacher and plans to similarly prepare his students to become global English language users as opposed to being native English speakers. Most of the participants reported beginning their tenure as master’s students with ideologies similar to that of Kang in Reis’s 2011 study. Although they did not want to be seen as non-native speakers, with its negative connotations, they held deeply instilled beliefs and ideas of what is the ideal language user based on the NES/NNES binary. For example, even though Nia had various English teaching experiences and had a clear goal before she joined the program, she was still experiencing difficulties and demonstrated a conflicted sense of identity: ‘[The] fi rst class, I took Introduction to TESOL. To be honest, I was frustrated … I feel like I have a lot of years of teaching … But in this class I realize that I still need to learn more because there is so much to learn …’ (Interview, May 2012). As time passed, however, Nia began to move away from her past pedagogical experiences and adjust to her new context. She described the shift, stating ‘the group work and stuff … it built up on my confidence, and say, now maybe, I can contribute something in this teaching context’ (Interview, May 2012). This exemplifies a shift toward a more transnational identity. Important to this process was the opportunity for participants to stay in contact with their families and their cultures, either through other students and student communities on campus or through phone calls and the internet. De Fina and Perrino (2013) emphasized the importance of this continued connection across distance towards the development of a healthy transnational identity, as it allows for a slower, less jarring transition to the new culture while maintaining a safe connection to the old. While the participants were connected to the cultures they came from, they were also immersed in new cultures, such as the academic culture of the university, the local culture of the town, and the larger culture of the United States. All presented challenges to the students, but the most difficult cultural adjustment seemed to be the academic culture, which varied greatly from the academic cultures to which they were accustomed. For example, Kristina stated that the academic culture she was used to in Russia was quite different from the MA TESOL program in the US. In particular, she noted that in Russian contexts, students were not allowed to eat in class or

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have direct informal interactions with the teachers. She characterized the Russian educational setting as being ‘super formal’ (Interview, May 2015). However, Anto saw the type of class instruction and teacher-student interactions as a chance to express himself, and stated the following: I have the opportunity to speak up, to express my own experience and my background and I always tried my best to share what I had because I have some years of teaching experience and I think that would be worthwhile sharing it with our students in the class and they really appreciate what we talk about once we express our personal experiences. (Interview, October 2016)

Zheng (2017) also saw the dissonance between teacher ideology and student expectations in the case of Ming, a participant who had a difficult time adjusting to student-teacher interaction when teaching in the United States. Her understanding of culture and her expectations for students were very different from what her students expected, and over time her identity as a transnational scholar and a transnational teacher both helped her in the classroom and alienated her. Her ideology was foreign to students from the same background because she had internalized pedagogical and social ideologies from the United States while retaining some of the pedagogical and social ideologies from China. The participants in this study showed similar shifts in their scholarly identities. Transitioning from their own home country, the Fulbright students were experiencing learning and living in the US; through adjusting to the two different cultures, the home country culture and the US culture, they constructed their transnational identity, thus influencing their transnational teacher identity in the future.

The emergence of a transnational teacher identity

A shift toward a more transnational identity led to the development of a transnational teacher identity within the participants. All four participants had prior teaching experience. Because of this, they had already established teacher identities when they entered the program, and they often found that their conceptualization of a teacher’s place in the classroom and the ideas promoted in the program were very different. For example, Nia had previously taught in an English school where all the teaching materials were already set up for the instructors: ‘They have books for students. And they have book for teachers, this is how you have to teach … after one year, I feel like … I’m a robot’ (Interview, May 2012). This view was in stark contrast to the teacher identity that the US MA TESOL program emphasized: one of flexibility and on a near-equal footing with the students. This was seen by the participants both in the readings assigned by the instructors within the program and by the actions of the instructors themselves.

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In Zhang’s (2018) study, ESL teachers facilitated their transnational teacher identity through transnational practices. Many of the participants in his study emphasized how contextual differences could influence their way of teaching and that it was necessary to pay attention to students’ background and needs. The Fulbright students in our study demonstrated similar concerns about how to adapt their learning of English teaching in the US to their own teaching contexts. For example, Mike considered the following: … particular methods and here at [western Pennsylvania university] I learned that the method kind of limits us like having one particular method limits the creativity of teaching; here they taught us that we can voice our concern and as Afghani English teachers we can theorize from our teaching practices and I learned that, what might work in one context doesn’t mean it should work in another context. (Interview, March 2016)

This disconnect between the methods and ideologies the participants were learning and the methods and ideologies they anticipated using caused some tension for the participants. While none of them had applied what they had learned in their home contexts at the time of the study, they were all very aware that even if they agreed with a certain teaching methodology, so much of what they can and cannot do is often dictated by the system they are teaching in. As a result, the participants anticipate having to heavily (re)conceptualize who they are as English language teachers doing teacher-scholar work in transnational practices. They reflected that they may have to be one teacher in their minds and another in the classroom.

Moving Forward and Raising Critical Questions for Teaching and Conducting Research

The above narratives indicate the importance of the development of transnational identities for the Fulbright pre-service English language teachers in this study. Therefore, more emphasis should be placed on the contexts that the students might fi nd themselves in, and how methods and theories can be adapted to fit the new context. In addition, the narratives show the importance of self-development and of spaces that help students develop and envision the shifting and fluid nature of their own identities. Finally, the narratives emphasize the importance of a transnational teacher identity when learning and teaching in multiple contexts. The willingness to continue to learn, paired with the criticality that comes from experience in various contexts, made these participants stand out from the crowd and was something that they listed as one of the most important ideas they gained from the program. While a wealth of knowledge and information was gained from the experiences of the four Fulbrighters, we cannot ignore the limitations of our inquiry. For instance, future research

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directions with Fulbrighters enrolled in the US MA TESOL programs could open up possibilities that are beyond the scope of this inquiry, such as large-scale mixed-method studies as well as longitudinal studies following the Fulbrighters’ academic journey during the MA TESOL program and their teaching years in their home countries post-Fulbright. Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that US MA TESOL programs may be limited in assisting transnational language teachers negotiate tensions, which may emerge when they return to their home countries with reawakened pedagogical desires and practices. In short, MA TESOL programs should place more focus on fostering a shift in perspective in students’ identities and helping the transition to become transnational teachers as they venture into new contexts and return to old ones. We need to continue working on ways to promote transnational teacher identities in our (under)graduate teacher education programs, and as a way to develop the conversation around this work, we conclude with teaching and research focused questions, that will hopefully expand into future teaching, research and professional development endeavors: (1) What are some ways for teacher education programs to help construct multilingual graduate students’ transnational teacher identity and to prepare them for transnational language teaching? (2) How can teacher education programs support transnational graduate students through their learning process and future professional development? In particular, pedagogical tensions between what US MA TESOL programs propose and the reality of the educational mandates of their home countries’ language teacher practices cannot be ignored. With this in mind, how can MA TESOL programs be prepared to assist our transnational teachers to negotiate these tensions? (3) In what specific pedagogical and research ways can faculty and students alike continue to have conversations around what it means to prepare English language teachers to be critical around the demands of the globalized landscape? Acknowledgments

We thank the research assistants (Jocelyn Amevuvor, Ravyn McKee Canale and Lama Alharbi) who have worked on data collection and analysis throughout the project. References Aneja, G. (2016a) (Non)native speakered: Rethinking (non)nativeness and teacher identity in TESOL teacher education. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 572–596. Aneja, G. (2016b) Rethinking nativeness: Toward a dynamic paradigm of (non)native speakering. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 13 (4), 351–379.

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Bookman, B. (2019) The intersection of transnationality and scholarship: Lived experiences, positionings, and practices of five transnational TESOL teacher-scholars. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA. Clandinin, J. and Connelly, M. (2000) Narrative Inquiry: Experience and Story in Qualitative Research. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Creswell, J.W. and Poth, C.N. (2018) Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches (4th edn). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. De Fina, A. and Perrino, S. (2013) Transnational identities. Applied Linguistics 34 (5), 509–515. Duff, P.A. (2015) Transnationalism, multilingualism, and identity. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 57–80. Ellis, E. (2016) ‘I may be a native speaker but I’m not monolingual’: Reimagining all teachers’ linguistic identities in TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 50 (3), 597–630. Faez, F. (2011) Reconceptualizing the native/nonnative speaker dichotomy. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 10 (4), 231–249. Garces-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2018) Globalization, transnational identities, and confl ict talk: The superdiversity and complexity of the Latino identity. Journal of Pragmatics 134, 120–133. IIE (Institute of International Education) (2018) Number of international students in the United States reaches new high of 1.09 million. See https://www.iie.org/Why-IIE/ Announcements/2018/11/2018-11-13-Number-of-International-Students-ReachesNew-High. Jain, R. (2018) Alternative terms for NNESTs. In J.I. Liontas (ed.) The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp. 1–5). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. Jain, R. (2020) (Re)imagining myself as a translingual, a transnational, and a pracademic: A critical autoethnographic account. (Preprint), ResearchGate. Joffe, H. and Yardley, L. (2004) Content and thematic analysis. In D.F. Marks and L. Yardley (eds) Research Methods for Clinical and Health Psychology (pp. 56–68). London: Sage Publications. Kanno, Y. and Stuart, C. (2011) Learning to become a second language teacher: Identitiesin-practice. Modern Language Journal 95 (2), 236–252. Lee, E. and Lew, L. (2001) Diary studies: The voices of non-native English speakers in a Master of Arts program in TESOL. The CATESOL Journal 13 (1), 135–149. Menard-Warwick, J. (2008) The cultural and intercultural identities of transnational English teachers: Two case studies from the Americas. TESOL Quarterly 42 (4), 617–640. Park, G. (2017) Narratives of East Asian Women Teachers of English: Where Privilege Meets Marginalization. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Park, G. and Amevuvor, J. (2016) An MATESOL program housed in the English Department: Preparing teacher scholars to meet the demands of a globalizing world. In M. Strain (ed.) Degree of Change: The MA in English Studies (pp. 215–233). Urbana, IL: National Council for Teachers of English. Reis, D. (2011) Non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) and professional legitimacy: Sociocultural theoretical perspective on identity transformation. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 208, 139–160. Ruecker, T. (2011) Challenging the native and nonnative English speaker hierarchy in ELT: New directions from race theory. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 8 (4), 400–422. Selvi, A.F. (2016) Native or non-native English-speaking professionals in ELT: ‘That is the question!’ or ‘Is that the question?’ In F. Copland, S. Garton and S. Mann (eds) LETs and NETs: Voices, Views and Vignette (pp. 51–67). London: British Council. Vertovec, S. (2009) Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Learning in landscapes of practice: A framework. In E. Wenger-Trayner, M. Fenton-O’Creevy, S. Hutchinson, C. Kubiak and B. Wenger-Trayner (eds) Learning in Landscapes of Practice: Boundaries,

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Identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice-Based Learning (pp. 13–30). London: Routledge. Wolff, D. and De Costa, P. (2017) Expanding the language teacher identity landscape: An investigation of the emotions and strategies of NNEST. Modern Language Journal 101 (1), 76–90. Zhang, Y. (2018) English teacher identity development through a cross-border writing activity. In X. You (ed.) Transnational Writing Education: Theory, History, and Practice (pp. 187–202). New York: Routledge. Zheng, X. (2017) Translingual identity as pedagogy: International teaching assistants of English in college composition classrooms. Modern Language Journal 101 (1), 29–44.

Afterword

As you, the reader, may have already deduced, a cross-analysis of the 12 research studies reported in this volume brings up some common themes. While the individual contributions explore the themes in depth in terms of the writers’ conceptualizations along with reviews of relevant literature, we discuss the most significant themes briefly here. The three key common themes that spanned many of the contributions were: researchers’ reflexivity, transnationals’ sense of ‘belonging’ and translingualism within transnationalism. Researchers’ Reflexivity

As stated in the Introduction, reflexivity is key to critical work (Canagarajah, 2006; Pennycook, 2001). Many of the authors in this volume have woven threads of self-reflexive writing within the larger research reports, thereby also providing a ‘human’ lens through which to understand research processes that may otherwise seem sterile or unfathomable to those whose professional ELT practices are not embedded within academia and especially academic research. This question of making research accessible to a larger group of stakeholders is especially significant given that the transnational authors in this volume bring a rich diversity of voices and perspectives through their writing. Martínez-Prieto and Lindahl (Chapter 8), for instance, explicitly identified their own positionality as researchers with transnational backgrounds and addressed the question of how their worldviews shape their research. Other researchers emphasized their hybrid roles that go beyond simply doing research, for instance, Kim (Chapter 10) identified herself as a facilitator-researcher and contrasted her own transnational journey across South Korea and the US with that of her research participant to help readers understand the researcher’s active participation in the creation of data. Some contributors articulated a self-awareness in terms of their own growth as part of the research, for instance, when Kwon (Chapter 2) realized that some of her own assumptions about her participants could be wrong, and in Altun (Chapter 4) and Cinkara’s (Chapter 9) frequent use of the fi rst person in presenting their respective research studies (which, in turn, could be a culturally-informed authorial style, given that both 239

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contributors hail from Turkey, like their research participants). Researcher sensitivity and insights based on shared backgrounds and experiences with the participants, in fact, seem to have provided an additional layer of texture to the research reports; some of the authors in this volume referred to this explicitly. For instance, Keles and Yazan (Chapter 5) emphasized their ‘insider perspectives’ by virtue of the shared backgrounds of the two researchers and the one research participant, as well as their shared experiences, especially between one of the researchers and the research participant. Likewise, Ustuk and De Costa (Chapter 6) explained the connections that the fi rst author and the research participant share, with Ustuk frequently providing mentorship and support to the emerging TESOL practitioner, and both authors also mention how their own transnational backgrounds and ‘professional mobilities’ helped them relate to the experiences of their research participant. In Chapter 12, Choi, Roose and Manion acknowledged their own professional roles in the WAC program from which they drew their research participants and explained how they endeavored to use that connection to build trust and rapport with the three IGTAs. Similarly, Martínez-Prieto and Lindahl (Chapter 8) described the fi rst author-researcher’s self-identification as a Mexican (trans)national and the second author’s own mixed heritage while living in a US state bordering Mexico and working with transnational as well as Mexican-American teacher-candidates. Collectively, the reflexive selfpositioning invited the reader to understand not just the research in terms of methods, fi ndings, implications and so forth, but the underlying researcher roles as well, thus contributing to the demystifying of research as an academic practice and deepening the critical tone of the edited volume overall. Transnationals’ Sense of ‘Belonging’

Several chapters in the volume explore, directly and indirectly, ideas around how transnational participants construct a sense of belonging (and/or unbelonging) across countries, cultures and languages. Yeom (Chapter 3) explored transnationals’ varying sense of ‘belonging’ as the main focus in her study. Of her four international student participants, two were more successful than the others in creating a sense of belonging when they had a large community of fellow international students from their home countries on their campuses to tap into, whereas the other two experienced more tensions in their struggle to integrate into their new academic and social contexts, especially as they had limited representation in terms of fellow countrymen/women in the existing on-campus student communities. Interestingly, the research participants in Cinkara’s study (Chapter 9) agentively used their roles as Syrian refugees who are EFL professionals to facilitate acculturation between the refugee children and the children in the host community in an effort to create a sense of

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belonging in the host country for those forced to flee their homes and home country. It can be surmised that these agentive roles served to help the research participants establish themselves in their new professional and personal communities, while they kept alive their connections with their communities back in their home country, thus contributing to the creation of a sense of belonging transnationally. However, the tension that those who traverse transnational spaces via border-crossing struggle with came across more starkly in Altun’s study (Chapter 4), where the two research participants created a sense of unbelonging by separating themselves from their ethnic Turkish identities while not fully embracing the identity offered by their host culture either. In contrast, the research participant in Keles and Yazan’s study (Chapter 5), also originally from Turkey, created a sense of belonging by associating, in varying degrees, with both members of his home culture in the host country and fellow immigrants from other countries of origin (and eventually with ‘old-timer’ members of the host community as well), and by agentively embracing his existing multilingualism as an asset in contrast to the views he previously held regarding his language skills. While ‘belonging’ is not specifically addressed in Liao’s research (Chapter 11) with two transnational TESOL practitioners in the US, the research participants validated their own multilingualism and served as positive role models to their students by affirming their own linguistic and national backgrounds, as part of a broader effort to legitimize their own and their students’ professional and academic participation in the host communities. It is important to note that race seems to play a painful role in this sense of (un)belonging as well. In Chapter 3, Yeom theorized that her research participants constructed their sense of belonging at the intersections of race, ethnicity and language; for instance, ‘Tili’ explicitly referred to her racial and linguistic minoritization by students of the racial majority (white, in this case). Similarly, ‘Emrullah’ in Keles and Yazan’s study (Chapter 5) frequently experienced a racialization of his identity on the basis of his appearance and name upon crossing national borders from his country of origin into his host context. While race was not a focal issue in Ustuk and De Costa’s research study (Chapter 6), socioeconomic class played a key role in their participant’s navigation of transnational spaces in terms of agentively gaining access to those spaces and creating a transnational habitus to belong to. Translingualism within Transnationalism

A fi nal key theme that connected many of the chapters was that of the concurrence of transnationalism and translingualism (see also Canagarajah, 2018). In many of the research studies in this volume, the examination of participants’ transnational identities and practices frequently brought up their translingual practices and identities as well. For

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instance, Taehoon in Kwon’s study (Chapter 2) incorporated both Korean and English in the same sentence when describing the differences between the libraries he visited in South Korea and in the US, and Minsu did the same when explaining contrasting experiences in terms of supervised and unsupervised activities that he could engage in in the two countries. Shira, one of the participants in Yeom’s study (Chapter 3), engaged in translingual practices (with ‘accent-switching’) as a coping mechanism to maintain a meaningful connection with speakers from her minoritized home community while learning to interact successfully with the members of her ‘majority’ host community. In Keles and Yazan’s research study (Chapter 5), ‘Emrullah’ wrote his journal entries in English, but ‘code-switched’ frequently between English and Turkish in conversations during interviews. Similarly, Kim (Chapter 10) described the creation of a ‘translingual space’ in her study, in which her research participant moves freely across Korean and English during the process of producing poetry, despite the fi nal product being in Korean. The move towards ‘transnational-translingual’ nomenclature occurred in tandem with the problematization of and/or disuse of the deficit ‘native/ non-native’ identity labels (see also Jain et al., 2021; Yazan et al., 2021), in many of the chapters. In Kidwell’s study (Chapter 7), for example, Nita decentered her curriculum by deliberately exposing her students to diverse cultures that used English, instead of focusing on ‘native’ English speakers or the cultures they represented, an aspect that Kidwell identified as being especially significant. Martínez-Prieto and Lindahl (Chapter 8) also took a critical stance to problematize the ‘native/non-native’ dichotomy and, instead, visualized the English language teacher identity as ‘situated and fluid’ in a deliberate effort to adopt a critical orientation. In Chapter 11, Liao critiqued the ‘NEST’ and ‘NNEST’ labels for their deficit orientation and artificial dichotomization, choosing instead to identify her two research participants as ‘transnational and translingual TESOL practitioners’. Swift Black, Liang and Park (Chapter 13) rejected identifying their research participants through such fi xed labels as ‘NNESTs’ and, instead, deliberately positioned the four Fulbrighters as transnational teachers with diverse linguistic and cultural resources at their disposal. Conclusion

As pracademics (Jain et al., 2021) embedded within a US-centric professional landscape, we (the editors) are well aware that critical scholarship, ‘mainstreamed’ via and in Western academia, inadvertently reproduces some of the same practices that it aims to disrupt, such as by invariably centering work by Western and West-based scholars in academia or not decentering Western academic discourse enough (see Banegas et  al., 2021; Bhattacharya et  al., 2020; Kubota, 2020). It is our hope,

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however, that the critical thread running throughout this volume (also reflected in the three themes described above) results more in the disruptions rather than the reproduction of the practices that we collectively need to problematize as a field. Nevertheless, we wonder what we could have done additionally to ensure an even more diverse set of contributions as part of our goal to truly decenter and decolonize academic discourse through our collaboration. However, despite global economic and structural conditions that constrain the ability of diverse scholars contributing to such publishing ventures, all that we can hope for is to make the best representation possible to nudge the profession forward. Additionally, we wonder how much the field of ELT itself needs to change and evolve to enable and ensure more equitable representation in academic publications. Further, the transformative potential of any publication depends on the uptake of the readers. We hope that our audience will read the book critically, reflect on the themes in relation to their own conditions of work, and generate new knowledge to transform our profession. We thus invite all stakeholders in the global ELT field, especially those working in and operating from the ‘centers’ to reflect on the issues raised in this volume, for there is a great need to bridge the academic rhetoric around critical orientations with actual academic (and publishing) practices that result in true change and real impact. As a fi nal parting thought, and as mentioned in the Introduction chapter as well, we started working on this volume before the world was gripped by a global pandemic and all our lives have been changed in varying degrees in the time since. Incredible as it may sound, more than two years after the fi rst COVID-19 cases were detected, the world is still reeling from the coronavirus as new variants, including the Delta variant and the Omicron variant, devastate entire countries and create continued economic and social chaos. And yet the human spirit runs stubbornly strong. The pandemic has also given an opportunity to all of us to practice what we preach in this book – it has strengthened the dispositions and themes we articulate by managing the new conditions for our students, colleagues and families. The Indian author and activist, Arundhati Roy, has described the current pandemic as ‘a portal’. Roy (2020: np) writes, ‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next’. While Roy focuses primarily on the challenges within her home country in her essay, her words can be transferred and applied to other landscapes of practice (Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015), including that of the transnational TESOL landscape. The turmoil of the past few years is also an opportunity to imagine a new TESOL landscape – a more just and a more equitable one. It is our hope that this volume becomes part of this transformed and transforming landscape.

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References Banegas, D.L., Bullock, D., Kiely, R., Kuchah, K., Padwad, A., Smith, R. and Wedell, M. (2021) Decentring ELT: Teacher associations as agents of change. ELT Journal (Online fi rst), https://doi-org.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/10.1093/elt/ccab090. Bhattacharya, U., Jiang, L. and Canagarajah, S. (2020) Race, representation, and diversity in the American Association for Applied Linguistics. Applied Linguistics 41 (6), 999–1004. Canagarajah, S. (2006) TESOL at forty: What are the issues? TESOL Quarterly 40 (1), 9–34. Canagarajah, S. (2018) Transnationalism and translingualism: How they are connected. In X. You (ed.) Transnational Writing Education: Theory, History, and Practice (pp. 57–76). New York: Routledge. Jain, R., Yazan, B. and Canagarajah, S. (eds) (2021) Transnational Identities and Practices in English Language Teaching: Critical Inquiries from Diverse Practitioners. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Kubota, R. (2020) Confronting epistemological racism, decolonizing scholarly knowledge: Race and gender in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics 41 (5), 712–732. Pennycook, A. (2001) Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Routledge. Roy, A. (2020) The pandemic is a portal. Financial Times, 3 April. Wenger-Trayner, E. and Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015) Learning in landscapes of practice: A framework. In E. Wenger-Trayner, M. Fenton-O’Creevy, S. Hutchinson, C. Kubiak and B. Wenger-Trayner (eds) Learning in Landscapes of Practice: Boundaries, Identity, and Knowledgeability in Practice-based Learning (pp. 13–30). London: Routledge. Yazan, B., Canagarajah, S. and Jain, R. (eds) (2021) Autoethnographies in English Language Teaching: Transnational Identities, Pedagogies, and Practices. New York: Routledge.

Index

academia 127, 239 Mexican 125 US 10, 231 Western/West-based/West-oriented 1, 242 agency 31–33, 40, 58, 65, 70, 79, 93, 126, 148–149, 185, 187–188, 208 children’s 15–16 international graduate teaching assistance (IGTA) 204 pedagogical 205 teacher 190–191, 195, 197, 199 agentive decision-making 7, 65, 79 roles 241 self 52 voice 7 Ahmed, A. 1 Anzaldùa, G. 63, 78, 205, 220 Asian 37, 165, 171 teachers of English 164 Asian American 165 autobiography 149 autoethnography 3

capital 9, 87, 93, 101–102, 164, 185, 188 cultural 10, 87, 95–96, 164, 175, 185–186, 197–199 economic 87, 93–94 forms of 87, 96, 195, 198 linguistic 10, 174, 185–186, 196–199 social 87, 93–94 symbolic 164, 176 case study 8, 106, 110, 189 comparative 110 multiple 6, 34, 89 center 243 communities of practice 1, 3, 68 criticality 2, 127, 220, 235 culture 31–32, 57–58, 106, 109, 113, 116, 120–121, 148, 207 Davies, B. 107 De Costa, P. 86, 102, 165 decenter 2–3, 242 decolonize 2–3 denaturalization 56–57 disciplinary writing 220 discursive acts 47, 50–51

Barnawi, O.Z. 1 belonging 36, 59 lack of 37 linguistic 54 sense of 6, 28–31, 37, 51, 147, 240 ways of 28 belongingness 40–41 Bennett, K. 165 Bhabha, H.K. 46, 63 bilinguality 170, 174–175 boundaries 45, 78 intergroup 31, 39

ecological perspective 46 English for academic purposes 168 English Language Learners (ELLs) 5, 149, 186 English Learners (ELs) 6, 28, 31 Englishes 196 mainstream 187 global 189 variety of 233 epistemic stance 212, 218 Erasmus+ 7, 88–90

Canagarajah, S. 2, 45, 62–63, 86, 106, 135, 164, 167, 186, 198, 205, 218, 220, 239

fluidity 86, 205 fluid identities 127, 130, 141, 164, 173 245

246

Transnational Research in English Language Teaching

Glick Schiller, N. 28, 41 globalization 45, 148, 224 GLocal agenda 86, 102 habitus 87–88 Transnational 7, 85–87 Hawkins, M.R. 127 historicity embodied 87 hybridity 45, 187 identity as fluid 173 language teacher 206, 219 teacher 127, 147–148, 156, 164, 207 transnational teacher 224–225, 234–235 identity-as-pedagogy teacher 188, 206 ideoscape 45, 58 translocal 58 indigenous 128 in-betweenness 54, 63, 78, 205 international graduate teaching associates 204–205 intersectionality 205 Jain, R. 1, 36, 46, 79, 188, 200, 224, 231–232, 242 Jenkins, J. 107, 186 Kubota, R. 79, 108, 166, 204 landscape of practice 1, 243 language ecology 46 language teacher education 188 Latinx 38–39 language ideologies 207 binary 217 homogenous 206 liminality 63 liminal spaces 64, 205 linguicism 220 marginalization 9, 127, 164, 177, 219 membership 63 Mixteco 130 model minority 165 Morgan, B. 163, 188, 206 Motha, S. 2, 79, 89, 164, 186–187, 206, 220

multilingualism 241 multi-local spaces 21 narrative analysis 46, 49, 190 narrative inquiry 64, 223, 226 narratives 47, 58, 207 translocal 7, 47 Native English Speaker (NES) 120 nativespeakerism 56 native-speaker fallacy 7, 128, 200 nativeness 127, 220 Non-native English speaker (NNES) 127 Non-native English-speaking Teachers (NNESTs) non-nativeness 10, 191, 220 Norton, B. 86, 184, 186, 200 otherness 32, 196 Pennycook, A. 2, 33, 127, 164, 171 peripheral participation 176 periphery 107 Phan, L.H. 62 post-colonial performativity Pracademic 1, 242 reflexivity 2, 211, 239 Rudolph, N. 64, 176 second year writing 208 self-positioning 191 Selvi, A.F. 86, 102, 224 semiotic resources 167 sociocultural in-betweenness 205 third space 7, 51, 58 transcultural identities 25 translingual competence 36, 197 identities 86 identity as pedagogy 189 orientation 166–167 practice 186, 242 space 172 translingualism 241 translocal 58 transnational childhoods 16 communities 16, 146, 155–156 identities 7, 50, 207 longing 23

Index

247

mobility 67 paradigm 106 TESOL pracademics 1 transnationalism 146–147, 166, 224, 241

Wenger, E. 3, 63, 79 Wenger-Trayner, E. 1, 231, 243 Whiteness 171–172 writing across the curriculum 208

unbelonging 7, 51, 241 ethnic 50

Yazan, B. 1, 46, 79, 126, 163, 180, 200, 219

van Lier, L. 187

Zheng, X. 184, 189, 204, 207, 231, 234