Be(come)ing an English Speaker: Positioning of South Korean Students in a Canadian University

Abstract

The growth of international students across Canadian universities means classrooms are increasingly linguistically diverse. This change affects the learning and relationships that occur between English language learners and speakers. Grounded in poststructuralist understandings of language and identity and Davies and Harré’s (1990) positioning theory, this thesis explores six South Korean student’s English language experiences in a Canadian university. Through informal conversational exchanges, narrative dialogue journals, and a personal researcher diary, this qualitative study is concerned with student subject positions and identity construction pertaining to language. What emerges from the data is what I term moments of tension which include students’ encounters with ESL labels, native-speaker identity, desire for fluency, English fear, imagined communities, employment in Canada, teacher respect, direct communication, and Korean relations. These moments of tension serve as entry points for exploring similarities and differences across participants’ experiences of being an English speaker. Students accept or reject varying subject positions within discourses that position and construct their identity in particular ways. Students negotiate silence, emotion, and responsibilities of interlocutor burden in intercultural communication—unveiling complex, evolving understandings of identity negotiation, power in communication, and English speaker legitimacy. The findings of this study reveal implications for EAP programs in universities, teacher education, and future theoretical directions in second language education.