"Fragile bilinguals: rescaling ""good"" and ""bad"" South Korean bilinguals"

My dissertation explores how U.S.-based multilingual South Korean speakers of English and Korean negotiate their positions in the over-crowded and complex lingusitic market, and try to stake a claim to being legitimate bilinguals through the process of metapragmatic typification (Agha, 2007). First, I investigate how tensions between Koreanness (nationalism/tradition) and cosmopolitanism (national betrayal) are exercised and displayed through mediatized discourses. Using discourse analysis, I then analyze interactions among a group of transnational South Korean graduate students who attend a North American university. By analyzing naturally occurring data from their social meetings and computer-mediated conversations, I examine how they consume circulating language ideologies, and locate themselves through the selective production of ideological representations or language registers associated with certain models of personhood. In particular, I focus on the process of metapragmatic typification, which shows how participants discursively typify linguistic registers, linguistic practices and models of personhood as indexical emblems of ‘good/successful’ or ‘bad/failed’ bilinguals as an attempt to legitimize themselves. By analyzing both macro- and micro- contexts, my dissertation highlights how such tensions have been reconstructed and rescaled in society, and how individuals participate in the process of developing sense-making discourses (Heller & Duchêne, 2012) in order to secure their positions and marginalize ‘other’ English speakers (e.g., Agha, 2003; Inoue, 2006).

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Educational Policy Studies

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2014

Author dc:creator

• Choi, Lee Jin

Contributors dc:contributor

• Lo, Adrienne S.
• Dyson, Anne H.
• Harris, Violet J.
• Park, Joseph Sung-Yul

• bilingual education
• multilingualism
• second language acquisition
• transnational education
• subjectivities

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2014 Lee Jin Choi

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/50370

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/50370