Challenging the "Non-Native English Speaker" Identity in U.S. Higher Education: A Case of International Graduate Students

The present study is grounded in the theoretical understanding of U.S. graduatelevel classes as a community of practice and the poststructuralist understanding of language use and identity. In this study, I use a questionnaire and semistructured interviews to explore how graduate students—both native and nonnative English-speaking—perceive their own and others’ participation in class discussions. Also, with a focus on their identity negotiated during their class interactions, I examine possible unequal power relations in graduate classrooms. The results showed that the native students had negative attitudes toward non-native students’ participation, most participants felt that unequal power relations exist in classroom communities, and some non-native students felt marginalized in the classroom. Lastly, some suggestions are presented to bring about equal positioning and harmony in graduate classroom communities. This article is available in Working Papers in Educational Linguistics (WPEL): http://repository.upenn.edu/wpel/vol28/iss2/4 54 WPEL VOLumE 28, NumbEr 2 Database. (3266036) Trim, J. (1959). Historical, descriptive and dynamic linguistics. Language and Speech 2, 9-25. van Lier, L. (2000). From input to affordance: Social-interactive learning from an ecological perspective. In J. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 245-260). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Voegelin, C. & Voegelin, F. (1964). Languages of the world: Native America fascicle one. Anthropological Linguistics, 6(6), 2-45. Wei, L. (1994). Three generations, two languages, one family: Language choice and language shift in a Chinese community in Britain. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Widdicombe, S. (1998). Identity as an analysts’ and participants’ resource. In C. Antaki & S. Widdicombe (Eds.), Identities in talk (pp. 191-206). London, UK: Sage Publications. Yoon, B. (2008). Language use and multiple identities in interlingual couples: Case studies of Canadian-Japanese couples in Toronto. Masters Abstracts International, 46(6), 2975. Zentella, A. (1997). Growing up bilingual. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Challenging the “Non-Native English Speaker” Identity in U.S. Higher Education: A Case of International Graduate Students