Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Subtractive Schooling: US-Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring: A. Valenzuela

missing); some questions have no results presented; most results are not subjected to statistical tests but are merely presented as frequencies of replies; and where statistical tests are reported, the details are often too sketchy to judge the validity of the procedure. Many of the studies seem to have been executed and analysed by the author’s students, which may account for some of the reporting and validity problems. Still, the patterns of results are intriguing and should prompt further, more controlled research into these issues. Also, where differences are exceptionally large, statistical tests are probably unnecessary to confirm the pattern that is discerned. Interpersonal communication scholars may therefore find the studies useful in revealing the social meanings ascribed to certain nonverbal behaviours and the mediating effects of perceived context and demographics on those interpretations. Practitioners should likewise discern many valuable conclusions about successful and unsuccessful interview behaviours.

Bilingualism and Special Education: Issues in Assessment and Pedagogy

With a new approach and fortified by a wealth of experimental findings this book reverberates the hereditary-environment discussions of earlier decades. Little, if any, new data were obtained specifically for this research. Instead the author utilized available results from numerous longitudinal studies in a variety of disciplines. Testing the Overlap Hypothesis on these studies is the primary contribution of the book. The Overlap Hypothesis used here was formulated by J. E. Anderson who suggested that correlations between scores at two temporal points in longitudinal studies approximate the square root of the ratio obtained by dividing the mean of the first set of scores by the mean of the second. Hypothetical assumptions underlying this formulation are too involved to be included in a review; thus, it may suffice to say that this formula provides a method for comparing actual correlations with those expected on the basis of

Stability and Change in Human Characteristics.

Carola Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco and Irina Todorova, Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008, 440 pp., $29.95 hb. (IS...

Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society

The paper examines the role of cultural identity and heritage language maintenance among the lives of 40 second-generation Korean-American university students in the United States. The study focuses on three questions: (1) what is the level of heritage language proficiency and language use among second generation Korean-American youths?; (2) which culture(s) do these youths identify themselves with, Korean or American, and to what extent?; and (3) is there a relationship between cultural identity and heritage language proficiency? Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the questionnaire data showed that most second-generation Korean-Americans achieve some level of Korean proficiency, but they overwhelmingly agree that it is not enough. They acknowledge the importance of knowing their heritage language, but feel that the existing language courses in the community-based language schools are not meeting their needs. The informants stated that the absence of societal recognition of the importance in maintai...

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The Korean Language in America: The Role of Cultural Identity in Heritage Language Learning

This paper examines teachers' attitudes towards their students' heritage language maintenance and their engagement in classroom practices that may or may not affirm the value of maintaining and developing heritage languages among students. Through surveys and interviews with K–12 teachers in California public schools, the data show that the nature of teacher training and personal experience with languages other than English significantly affect teacher attitudes toward heritage language maintenance and bilingualism. Teachers who did not receive training as language educators expressed negative or indifferent attitudes toward heritage language maintenance and did not see a role for themselves and schools in heritage language maintenance efforts. This study highlights the need for all educators to better understand the critical role and functions of heritage languages in the personal, academic, and social trajectories of linguistic minority students.

“It's Not My Job”: K–12 Teacher Attitudes Toward Students' Heritage Language Maintenance

ion, a bridge back to social science literatures and public debate, one among a number of potential resources for answering ‘so what?’” (p. 1). Implications for the study of identity cannot be easily realized methodologically owing to the use of inappropriate or insufficient methods (Omoniyi & White, 2006). These criticisms not only reflect the multifaceted and complex nature of the construct of identity but create room for further development of identity as a conceptual component of research on education, the ontological and epistemological discussions framing its use, and the methodologies by which it is operationalized. Ontological Debates About the Nature of Identity What has been termed the discursive turn (Harré, 2001), the crisis of late modernity (Giddens, 1991), and the information age (Castells, 2004) generally refers to a paradigm shift in how the “reality” of human communication and understanding has come to be characterized in social theory. This shift reflects epochal social changes in culture and systems of communication related to globalization, technological advances, new capitalism, and various post’s (e.g., postindustrial, poststate, postmodern) that characterize the last century. In their introduction to a recent volume on discourse and contested identities, Iedema and Caldas-Couthard (2008) characterize the various fragmentations that trouble earlier notions of identity through rapidly changing communities, commitments, politics, and hierarchies. Thus, the supposed grounding of one’s identity is less about how and where you belong and more about how transitions across contexts in the here and now render identities as boundary objects that index salient kinds of identities through behavior over time. Though far from over, this paradigm shift brings to light two heuristics that can be characterized as being ontologically distinct in their theoretical assumptions about the nature of mind and society—essentialist views of identity and social constructionist views of identity.1 Essentialist views are often associated with the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s; with psychological definitions of identity (e.g., Erikson, 1968); and with structuralist/mentalist constructions of the nature and development of the self (i.e., that there exists a unified or coherent sense of self internal to an individual). Essentialist views assume that identity is relatively stable and grounded in shared, self-evidently meaningful experiences that are unproblematically accepted (Rouse, 1995). As a result, such essentializing trends obscure the heterogeneity of individuals in identity discourses (Lemke, 2008). Criticisms of the essentialist/Eriksonian/psychological approach hail largely from those sympathetic to social constructionist views of identity, which generally characterize identity as a process embodied in social practice and not as a given or a product (deFina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006). Identity is a fluid, socially constituted achievement that is multiply constructed across micro-social (individual) and macrosocial (cultural/institutional) timescales (Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Chuang, 2004; 186 Review of Research in Education, 33 Grossberg, 1996; Hall, 1989, 1990, 1996; Lemke, 2008; McCarthey & Moje, 2002; Nasir & Saxe, 2003; Rampton, in press). Social constructionist views are associated with the discursive revolution of the 1980s and 1990s; with the anthropological approaches to identity that grew out of George Herbert Mead’s earlier work (e.g., 1934) in symbolic interactionism in the early 20th century; with Vygotsky’s sociocultural work (e.g., 1978) on how meaning is achieved through symbolic, socially constituted resources; and with sociocultural views of selves that are reflexively situated in social and cultural contexts (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007; Holland et al., 1998). In fact, social constructionism can be defined in terms of what it is not (i.e., anti-essentialist; Fenton, 1999). Furthermore, as the aforementioned global reconfigurations continue to offer new ways for people at the intersections of fragmenting social structures and relationships to articulate their identities (as well as offer new ways for analysts to conceptualize them), how people position themselves will differ, depending on the interactions that they have (Davies & Harré, 1990) and from context to context (Hall, 2000). Whereas describing the theoretical differences between these two views of identity as a dichotomy is convenient for the sake of discussion, these theoretical camps are by no means airtight or even agreed on in some respects. However, a general understanding of essentialist and social constructionist views of identity places them at opposite ends of an ontological continuum, with identity being (a) fixed, internal, and in direct correlation with measurable characteristics at the essentialist end and (b) fluid, social, and variably related to contestable and constructed categories and contexts at the social constructionist end. As with any ontological discussion, attendant ideologies influence how the object of study is specified, relative to what one is looking for, how, and to what analytic ends, and how such ideologies are or are not taken into account in analysis, which we now discuss further. Ideological Considerations The acknowledgment of ideological influences on how identity is construed and studied is often excluded from essentialist treatments of identity, where the stability of self is unproblematically assumed to exist and be studiable. Social constructionist views, however, provide a critical lens to understand identity. Writ large, such views position the nexus of identity construction in social interaction. A subset of these views, poststructuralist approaches to identity, further highlight the ideological components to identity discourses (both public and academic) concerning interfaces between and among power, social structure, agency, and the immediate and longerscale practices and events therein that compose the negotiation of available identity categories (Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004; Rampton, in press). Poststructuralist views position ideological connections within the larger sociopolitical discourse, unlike essentialist treatments, which form an implicit ideological link between categories or actions (e.g., racial label and language practices) and identity, without acknowledging the value-laden-ness of this connection (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004). When discussing issues of risk and opportunity, as is the charge of this volume, educational Lee, Anderson: Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities 187 researchers who are concerned with the social negotiation of identities are increasingly considering issues of language ideology (e.g., Corson, 1993; Hornberger, 1988); the deconstruction of received categories, such as race, gender, nationality, social class, and sexual orientation (e.g., Cavanagh, 2008; Kumashiro, 2001; Moya & Hames-Garcia, 2000; Orellana & Bowman, 2003; Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004); multiple and new literacies (e.g., Jewitt, 2008; Luke, 1999; Street, 2003); globalization (e.g., Burbules & Torres, 2000; Castells, 2004); and other agencyand power-related issues in the examination of identity. The complexity of social processes in the study of identity has led to other subfields of social constructionist orientations that attempt to capture the fluidity of identity constructions. For example, hybridity theory enables an understanding of how integrations and interactions based on mutual or forced influence, convergence, and mixing between cultures, language, and peoples disrupt understandings of identities, boundaries, and worldviews (e.g., Bhabha, 1990, 1994; Gilroy, 1993; Hall, 1996). It provides a framework to understand the experiences and identity work of multilingual/multicultural persons who may cross multiple linguistic and cultural borders in their daily interactions. Hybridity is also associated with third spaces wherein the negotiation between identities can occur (Bhabha, 1994, 1996) and the “in-between-ness,” or interconnectedness, that characterizes hybridity affords exploration of identities’ fluidity and intentionality (Bhabha, 1996; Turner, 1990). With the ambivalence and contradictions that are inherent when the familiar and foreign clash, the third space offers a fertile ground for translation and negotiation of identities to happen. However, as Lemke (2008) points out, the notion of hybridity can reify categories as cultural ideals, even when individuals are positioned as crossing them, so long as the categories being crossed are presupposed. We live across categories consistently, Lemke contends, and the notion of identity as being multiple requires consideration of how identity is a construct that mediates embodied phenomena (e.g., relationships, affiliations, and lifetimes) and characterized kinds or categories (e.g., enduring structures and semiotic abstractions). This contention leads us to consider some of the epistemological issues surrounding the study of identity negotiation. Epistemological Divides in the Treatment of Identity We now turn to epistemological considerations that such ontological debates about the nature and reality of identity raise regarding the construction, development, and negotiation of identities across the institutional landscape of formal public education in the United States. There is a general implication that we draw from the somewhat dichotomous relationship between essentialist and social constructionist views of identity—namely, that how one defines the nature of identity affects the way that one chooses to study it and the techniques one uses to study it, with the definition encapsulating where it lies (in the self or in interaction), how it develops (cognitively or socially), and how is it mediated (psychic struggle or cultural power

Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities: Theorizing and Constructing Opportunities and Risks in Education

States, and the total student enrollment is about 60,000 (Lee & Shin, 2008). The number of schools may be higher, because many small schools are not officially registered in the database of the U.S. Korean Embassy. Wiley (2001) claims that â€œalthough not widely recognized in the United States, a great deal of heritage language education takes place outside the formal school system, in afterschool and weekend programsâ€ ​ (p. 32). Most Korean heritage language schools The current English-Only movement, which advocates that English be the official and only language used in the United States, dramatically influences the life of language minority children, their families, and educators working with them. In this Digest, we will first examine the ideologies undergirding the English-Only movement, then review the consequences of imposing this legislation on the language minority population.Â The amendment poses a threat to civil rights, educational opportunities and free speech, even in the private sector. It is an insult to the heritage of cultural minorities, including groups whose roots in this country go deeper than English speakers--Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and American Indians. School Education. The difference between Russian and American schools lies in the structure and the approach to the study process. Russia: school is conventionally divided into primary, secondary and senior, and all stages can be attended in the same educational institution. The

Korean Heritage Language Education in the United States: The Current State, Opportunities, and Possibilities.

This paper focuses on the electronic literacy practices of two Korean-American heritage language learners who manage Korean weblogs. Online users deliberately alter standard forms of written language and play with symbols, characters, and words to economize typing effort, mimic oral language, or convey qualities of their linguistic identity such as gender, age, and emotional states. However, little is known about the impact of computer-mediated nonstandard language use on heritage learners’ linguistic development. Through in-depth case studies of two siblings, the study examines the linguistic and pragmatic practices of these learners online and the perceived effects of non-standard forms of computer-mediated language on their heritage language development and maintenance. The data show that electronic literacy practices provide authentic opportunities to use the language and support the development of a social network of Korean speakers, which results in greater sociopsychological attachment to the Korean language and culture. The informants report that the deviant language forms found in e-texts enable them to engage in online interactions without the pressures of having to spell the words correctly. However, they express frustrations in not being able to distinguish between correct and non-standard forms of the language, which appear to be affecting their offline language use.

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Jin Sook Lee

Papers

The Korean Language in America: The Role of Cultural Identity in Heritage Language Learning

“It's Not My Job”: K–12 Teacher Attitudes Toward Students' Heritage Language Maintenance

Negotiating Linguistic and Cultural Identities: Theorizing and Constructing Opportunities and Risks in Education

Korean Heritage Language Education in the United States: The Current State, Opportunities, and Possibilities.

Exploring the relationship between electronic literacy and heritage language maintenance