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Heewon Chang, Ph. D.
Eastern
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IDENTITY
FORMATION THROUGH SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING: Nahid
Golafshani
Identity formation is not as transparent or unproblematic as one may assume. "Instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, we should consider identity as a 'production,' which is never complete, is always in the process" of formation (Hall, 1990, p.222). The formation of identity is an on-going process that depends on many discourses, such as language and what Hall refers to as the "old" identity. Erikson (1968) would agree with this constructive approach to identity, defining identity formation as a developmental process which takes place through the life cycle. “In a sense one can think of identity formation as the assembling of a jigsaw puzzle” (Josselson, 1990, p. 12), in which different pieces represent family, culture, language, religion and so on. [paragraph 1]
Within the boundaries constructed by social climate, everybody makes changes in his/her life. However, some of the changes in life are arbitrary and some are constrained by the social climate. With reference to identity, however, the privilege of choosing diminishes, especially when it comes to language. According to Josselson (1990), although the changes in some elements of identity formation can be self-monitored, the overall choice for identity itself is not arbitrary. She adds that identity is the interface between the individual and the world and its elements may be altered according to the environment around us. [paragraph 2]
The most visible piece of the identity puzzle,
the language, began to alter when a young girl, named Mona,
started her journey from her homeland in Middle East to North
America on a cold winter morning in December, 1987, just a month
before her eighteenth birthday. Mona was born and raised in a
religious but educated family. After religion, education was the
second most sacred element in her family. Her parents were
sending her abroad to obtain education.
[paragraph 3]
A Challenge of Entering a New Era Language makes us declare our identity (Taylor, 1994). Without language our identity stays unknown and hidden. Curiosity, discoveries and emotional charges, which lead us in our societies, would perish within the individual, if there were no means of communication with others (Tonybee, 1966). Language facilitates this communication and has given us ways to understand others. We rarely acknowledge the value of being able to communicate in our own language unless we are deprived of the opportunity. [paragraph 4] The deprivation of communicating in her own language, an old Persian language called Dari, struck Mona as she arrived in North America on a student visa with only a few common words of English. She had to wait in the line in the airport for the next available immigration officer to attend her. Waiting was over when a voice said, “Next.” Mona handed in her passport and the officer asked a question. Without understanding a word of the officer’s question, she answered, “Yes.” She felt like being on a trial in a courtroom. She was guilty of not knowing the prosecutor’s language since it was assumed that everyone knows, and should know, the English language. Mona knew that the more she talked to defend herself, the more she could convict herself. So she chose to be silent. She did not know what the verdict would be. Was she going to be refused or accepted for the entry to the new land? A few second of silence seemed a long time. Suddenly the sound of her passport being stamped broke the silence. Then she knew that she was accepted and could go to the other side of the glass wall which separated the newcomers from the insiders. [paragraph 5] Mona sought residency in the dormitory while attending ESL classes. Although her hope of meeting a classmate with whom she could converse in her mother tongue was diminished from the first day of the school, her feeling of alienation, caused by instruction in an unfamiliar language, was lessened when Mona found herself surrounded by others who also struggled in English. Mona could grasp only some of what she was hearing and wished for a short accompanying lesson in her own language. At the same time Mona realized that her adaptation in this new country would depend upon the progress in her writing and speaking in English. This belief and the teacher’s comment, “Your English needs a lot of work and improvement,” which stayed in Mona’s mind, persuaded her to take seriously her ESL teacher’s feedback to her writing and speaking. In about six months, she could comprehend most of what she was hearing, but she still saw herself as a disabled person in her English communication. Mona’s struggle had another edge to it. While her language learning was progressing and her English became more acceptable to the teacher and more understandable to the society, Mona felt that the language in which she was communicating became more foreign to her since she could not express her past experiences and emotions in this language. Mona wondered if other ESL students would feel the same way. [paragraph 6] After
one year of studying ESL, Mona’s effort had paid off. She passed
TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) and was accepted
into a university. While taking the mandatory course of English
Composition, Mona received many comments from the professor on
her first three papers, which indicated that Mona was still
struggling with writing in the second language. This indication
and the fear of not achieving a passing mark made her drop the
course. Mona turned to literature to seek help for improving her
English writing. She discovered that her writing techniques and
the content were grounded on her Non-Western cultural background
and her self identity could no longer be in isolation of
others. According to Hall (1991), identity is tied to the
relationship between you and the other. It is with the other
that you know who you are. Thus, one can assume that it is with
the other that the self knows its virtues and allows the other
to enter the self. To get a passing mark in the English
composition course, Mona had to let the other, the Western way
of thinking, enter her non-Western self identity. Her strong
sense of belonging to the society was compelling Mona to make
changes to her identity while she was living in the
English-speaking community. [paragraph
7] Identity Formation Through Second Language Learning As a child grows in the course of life, a family-oriented identity will be formed with parental guidance mostly through learning a mother tongue (Erikson, 1968). Guidance begins when parents are trying to serve as loving and wise instructors, helping children to form social relationships, correcting faulty perceptions, and providing assurance to them. All those early instructions must have formed Mona's solid sense of self, which helped her survive in a new land without their direct involvement. Instead of staying in her homeland where the language of the society was the same as her mother tongue, she chose to move to a land where she needed to function in a language other than her native tongue. This new language began to constitute the social identity of the language learner, in this case, Mona (Peirce, 1994). [paragraph 8] Mona, now in her fourth and last year of the university, realized that for the sake of her destiny she had to change the path from a family-oriented identity to an individual one. This feeling became stronger every time she received a phone call from home. She was hearing the warm voice of her family, especially her mother's, giving her advice in her mother tongue but Mona realized that this was not the same language that she was using to negotiate a sense of self in the foreign land. Mona felt that she left behind a valuable piece in her identity jigsaw puzzle. During her education, she envied those students who could go home to the warm family environment, be their "old self" again, and speak in the language which was not so foreign to them. On the other hand, Mona knew that growth involved taking a risk. “To reach for something, one must give up what one already has” (Josselson, 1990, p. 182). Mona gave up the presence of her parents, whom she could talk to in the language that she did not have to struggle to find the next word, in order to gain something else, her education along with her new identity. [paragraph 9] Mona’s self-consciousness of differences and strong desire to belong to a group helped her to form a new identity as she was learning a new language as a tool for belonging. Along the way she experienced conflict and then reconciliation with her old identity. Integration of the Western culture into her new identity became evident in her improved communication and writing skills in the English Composition course that she was retaking. She accepted English as a language for the public and educational conduct. Although a language can express someone’s cognitive understanding and emotional feelings which represent the soul of the person (Meng, 2000), English was neither Mona’s voice nor soul. While writing papers with assertive and conclusive passages, she was thinking in English. When the idea became complex or humorous, she was thinking in Dari. She wrote the first draft of the final paper for the course. Among his feedback, the professor wrote, "Write from your soul and be yourself." Mona did not understand the intent of the professor. Did he mean that she had to be in her new identity which enabled Mona to write in English academically or that she needed to express her old identity with the logic and writing style of Dari which is foreign to this English professor. Mona had never participated in any of the class conversation and had no intention of discussing the matter of the identity and her writing with the professor since she was afraid of be labeled as an ESL student due to her non-English accent. This might prompt the professor to evaluate her paper even more thoroughly and precisely (Meng, 2000). Mona did not want to be the casualty of that preciseness since she had to pass the course and graduate from the university. [paragraph 10] Hall (1991) stated that one's identity develops in the relationship with the other. Mona's English learning contributed to her social identity formation. Her communication with others in her non-English accent was usually followed by the question, "Where are you from?" She accepted the question in the same way as she accepted her new identity as a foreigner. This new identity, developed after being separated from her homeland for many years, is indeed integrated into who she is. [paragraph 11]
Suitability of Mona's New Identity Over the course of life, we realize that we do not have to be the way we have been. We revise our perspectives and self-identity as we adapt to environments and changing experiences. During Mona's twelve years of stay in North America, as initially an ESL student and later a graduate student and as initially a teenage girl and later a mother of two children, she has formed an identity which is more Western than Eastern. Her Western identity, tempered with non-Anglo appearance and non-English accent, may be variant from a "real" Anglo identity. Yet it was her identity that was shaped by many struggles of learning second language. Then she decided to follow the lead of her new identity because it was acceptable to her and it seemed to be acceptable to the world around her. She grew to be more confident. She owed most of her confidence and comfort in the new identity to her own effort of learning English, the language of society. The base of this identity scaffold was the passing score she received in TOEFL and her term paper. [paragraph 12] While Mona, as a graduate teaching assistant, was giving a lecture in English to some native students, she could tell that her voice and gestures could be understood. Her speculation was confirmed when she received a perfect evaluation from the students in her class. She was pleased and proud. Finally, she could achieve something with the confidence and comfort in her new identity. She could never forget the comment of her supervisor as he was looking at the evaluation result. He said, "You did very well. Even an English-speaking teaching assistant could not do better than this." [paragraph 13] As she began parenting, she felt that identity change was taking place mostly inwardly rather than outwardly. For example, she had to accept the fact that her children were going to a co-ed school, mixing boys and girls, rather than to a single-sex school, the kind that she used to attend. She also had to give up on teaching her children her native language. She had to make some changes to her identity for the sake of her children in favor of the Western new world rather than her good old days. They did not know anything about the good old days; rather, they were attending schools in the Western world. Accepting these changes indicate that she was willing to adopt the new identity in place of her traditional one. [paragraph 14] Sometimes when we think it is the end, it is the beginning. It is the same with identity formation. It seems there is no end to its construction. Despite all the changes which occurred in Mona’s identity, she never realized that her identity formation was more self-oriented than family-oriented until one day when she was dropping off her six-year-old child at the school's main entrance. Her child politely, but uncomfortably, told her, "Please pick me up from the school's back door. I do not want my teacher and my friends know that my mother is different and talks in different English." [paragraph 15] Mona could read the message that underlay the child's request. The child was asking her not only to look like others but also speak like others, with an English accent. Apparently, Mona’s appearance as a Middle Eastern woman and her non-English accent were the sources of embarrassment to her child. Although Mona explained to her child the reason behind her different appearance and accent, she knew the child could not understand the cultural and lingual differences. She realized that her child should be taken into consideration in her identity formation. [paragraph 16] The flaws in her self-oriented identity formation began to make themselves more apparent in the family-oriented situation where Mona’s different look, accent, and manifested culture became problematic for her child's social adjustment. She had thought that the formation of her new identity was the end of her struggle living in a far away land. In fact, it was the beginning of a new phase, the construction of a family-oriented identity. [paragraph 17]
What we call the beginning is often
the end (T. S. Eliot cited in Bridges, 1991, p. 90) [paragraph 18] Having been separated from the old identity and immersed in the new identity, a person will float in a kind of limbo between two worlds when the person has to go back to the old self again (Josselson, 1990). More than a decade passed before Mona's desire to go back home and to share her past with her children became a reality. She had not forgotten her four grandparents and four in-laws who were anxiously waiting to meet their strange grandchildren, daughter and son in the airport. Mona’s children ran to the relatives and hugged them as if they had known them for a long time even when the language barrier was blocking the communication between the grandparents and the grandchildren. While the children adapted to the new situation naturally, it was not the case for adults. The expression in Mona’s face showed the fear of entering the society of her past. Her fear was about the various changes that she had made in her values and identity during her living in the Western culture. [paragraph 19] Very soon she was accepted as a faculty member in one of the universities in her homeland. Holding a degree from a Western university and knowing English language were regarded highly among the university faculties. Finally, she could contribute something back to the society that she came from but never had a chance to conform with. [paragraph 20] As her initial excitement and fear of her altered identity began to wane, an incident happened between Mona and her students, which showed her that she was again on an alien turf. She was standing in front of her class, trying to attain students' attention. She used the Western expression "Shish" instead of her native expression "Sss." Suddenly students' murmuring filled the classroom. The expressions on their faces were sending Mona one message that her appearance resembled them but she was not one of them. The message brought back many memories to her. It was the most embarrassing moment in Mona’s educational career when she realized that the expression "Shish" was used to move cattle from one place to another and was very impolite to use for people in her culture. She accidentally referred to her students as cattle because the elements of the old identity had not yet been reintegrated into her identity. Disagreement between Mona’s new identity and her old society was manifested in many ways--identity, gestures, and language use. [paragraph 21] Mona and her Western identity were blended so intimately that she was not able to make a complete sentence in her mother tongue without using an English word in the sentence. Linguists call such a phenomenon, a speaker's moving between languages in conversations, “code switching” (Holiday, 1978). A shift of identity may accompany code switching. She used English possibly because the English expressions and notations were readier than the Dari’s ones in the subject she was teaching in the classroom. Mona’s body language was also affected by her Western identity. For example, she was used to move her head sideways instead of tilting it backward like others in her homeland to say "No." The use of the unfamiliar body language left her students and her audiences in confusion. [paragraph 22] Contrary to her expectation and despite all her efforts of eight years to stay in her homeland, she was not able to immerse herself back in the society and culture of her past. She was imprisoned in an identity which was neither Western nor Middle Eastern. When her identity was not acceptable to people who were born under the same sky as she, Mona was forced to live in between and in the limbo of identity. It was the land of no identity. [paragraph 23]
I am not what I ought to be,
Some of us handle
transition in life with more difficulty than others
(Josselson,
1990). We move from one country to another, encounter different
cultures, and learn different languages. Yet each movement in
life brings with it a new shock of identity transformation,
further confusion, and emptiness of living in between cultures
and self identities. [paragraph 25] The emptiness of her living in between cultures and her mother's encouragement led Mona to immigrate to the West along with her immediate family. As the nature always forces everyone to make changes, Mona had to give priority to her immediate family over her extended family. The love for her parents was never lessened, but the guilty feeling of leaving them behind and shifting the priority stayed with her for a long time. This guilt was ultimately dissolved in time zones between her old country and new residence. Although Mona had vowed to herself not to allow her children to go abroad for education and live through similar experiences such as hers, she ended up exposing her children to the Western culture and education through this move. [paragraph 26] Now, Mona in her late forties speaks in her native language, Dari, with her family. Her writing in Dari is weakened and the English words come to her mind more fluently than her native language. Her children understand their mother's tongue but could not make a complete sentence in Dari. Mona’s desire of teaching her children the language of her past persuaded her to send them to Dari school on Saturdays. [paragraph 27] Mona, as a mother and international student counselor in an educational institute, shares the lessons she has learned with her children and others who experience the life of "In Betweens." Mona learned that there was no wall between the past and the present. She tells her children, “We should use our past to build our present and our future. Our future is hidden from us. Until it arrives, we have to look to our past for a light on our future. Our identity, however, will be formed neither by the past nor by the present. It will be formed within the past and within the present." [paragraph 28]
Mona also learned
that each change or transition in life engenders a new kind of
knowledge. Although some changes were chosen by her and some
were not, each could contain a valuable lesson, which had to be
looked for in order to ease the pain of transition. When she
looked for the lesson that she learned through her language
learning and its relation to her identity formation, she came to
believe that what language she used defined who she was. She
located the relationship of her language learning and identity
formation in the social environment. [paragraph 29] Halliday (1978) wrote about the role of language in identity formation
If Halliday’s
(1978) notion of personality can be interpreted as one’s
identity and language contributing to the role complex in
identity formation, the most important lessons that Mona gained
from her experience of learning a new language was that language
formed her identity when she used English as a medium to become
a member of the Western English-speaking community.
[paragraph 30] Belonging to a society also means revising one's identity from one rooted in childhood and family experiences to something mature and independent (Josselson, 1990). Like any other change and revision, which has its own difficulties, Mona’s revision in her language and identity was accompanied by the feeling of being lost, being disconnected, and having no voice. She experienced that having flexibility toward changes would ease the emotional discomfort caused by the inner resistance toward letting go of old memories. [paragraph 31] The last, but not least, important aspect of her learning took place when she returned home. She learned that it was not just the pace and the kind of change that disturbed her orientation but the effect it had on her identity and sense of alienation. [paragraph 32] In conclusion, it is hoped that Mona’s experiences and lessons will help those who, by chance or choice, were, are, or will be experiencing identity formation through second language learning in different societies and environments. [paragraph 33]
In this our round of coming and
going (Omar Khayyam, cited in Whinfield, 1980, p. 340) [paragraph 34] Bridges, W. (1991). Managing transitions. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity, youth and crisis. New York: Norton. Hall, S. (1990). Cultural identity and diaspora identity: Community, culture, difference. Jonathan Rutherford (Ed.), Identity: Community culture difference (pp.222-237). London, UK: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (1991). Old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. In A. D. King (Ed.), Culture, globalization and the world system (pp. 41-69). London, UK:Macmillan. Halliday, M. A. K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of language and meaning. London, UK: Edward Arnold. Heath, S. B. (1986). Taking a cross-cultural look at narratives. Topics in Language Disorders,7 (1), 84-94. Josselson, R. (1990). Finding herself: Pathways to identity development in women. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Meng, Z. (2000). Chinese graduate students' stories. In Epistemological Learning of English Academic Writing. Unpublished Master thesis, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto. Peirce, B. (1994). Language learning, social identity, and immigrant women. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto. Taylor, C. (1994). Multiculturalism: Expanding the politics of recognition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University . Tonybee, A. J. (1966). Change and habit: The challenge of our time. London, UK: Oxford University. Whinfield, E. H. (1980). The quatrains of Omar Khayyam. London, UK: Octagon.
Nahid Golafshani is a Ph. D. candidate and researcher in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, where she works with a diverse group of students and faculties. Her research areas include multicultural teaching and learning, teachers’ beliefs, and problem-based mathematics learning and teaching. (She may be reached at ngolafshani@oise.utoronto.ca) Recommended Citation in the APA Style: Golafshani, N. (2002). Identity formation through second language learning: A journey through a narrative. Electronic Magazine of Multicultural Education [online], 4 (1), 34 paragraphs <Available: http://www.eastern.edu/publications/emme/2002spring/golafshani.html>[your access year, month date] (Please note that in order to comply with APA style citations of online documents regarding page numbers, only the PDF versions of EMME article, which are paginated, should be cited.) |
