SLS660 Intro to Sociolinguistics
Dr. Higgins
December 12, 2008
Until I called her name, / She had been / No more than a mere gesture. / When
I called her name, / She came to me / And became a flower. // As I had called her name, / Somebody, please call my name, / One fitting this color and odor of mine. / I want to go to you as well / And become your flower. / …
From “The Flower” by Chunsu Kim
Whenever a discussion on identity is introduced, the most-cited poem in Korea is “The
Flower” by Chunsu Kim. He sings of being himself as becoming a colorful and fragrant flower.
To be the flower that will rightly represent his identity, he needs someone to call his name. In this poem, identity is not seen as something that is solid and concrete but as something that is situated and constructed by others, a glimpse of poststructuralist view on identity.
1

Recently, language learning has been seen as participation and negotiation of self (see
Higgins, forthcoming; Kinginger, 2004; Lam, 2000; Morita, 2004; Ohara, 2001; Pavlenko &
Lantolf, 2000; and Solé, 2007 among others). The trend is resonated in the growing interest in language learner identity and the studies in narratives. In this paper, a case of heritage language learner will be investigated upon the theoretical frame of poststructuralism. Narrative inquiry will be used to analyze how she negotiates her learner identity. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, by looking at the struggle a language learner makes to acquire her heritage language, I reclaim the centrality of identity in defining heritage language learners. Second, to widen the horizons of narrative studies to the cyber space as it provides an ample source of easily accessible data and it has become one of the commonplace media of daily communication.
To refer to the Heritage Language Learners (HLLs), various terms have been implemented such as ‘native speakers,’ ‘quasi native speakers,’ ‘bilingual speakers,’ or, from the dissatisfaction with the prior terms, ‘home background speakers,’ and ‘heritage language speakers’ (Valés, 2005: p. 412). There has not yet been a concise definition, however, that succinctly encapsulates the distinct features of HLLs. HLLs are different from L1 learners in that, among others, they have one or more fluent language(s) that they use for everyday communication; HLLs should also be differentiated from L2 learners based on the ethnolinguistic affiliation they have with the language in question. In summarizing the recent trends, Valdés (2005) comes with a broad definition of heritage languages (HLs) as the
“nonsocietal and nonmajority languages spoken by groups often known as linguistic minorities”
(p. 411). She goes on to say that HLLs are those from linguistic minority groups interested in the
2

study, maintenance, and revitalization of the their HL. Van Deusen-Scholl (2003, p. 221) defines
HLLs as “a heterogeneous group ranging from fluent native speakers to nonspeakers who may be generations removed but who may feel culturally connected to a language.”
In an attempt to embrace the varying definitions, Carreira (2004) suggests three defining factors of HLL: ‘membership in an HL community,’ ‘personal connection through family background,’ and ‘linguistic proficiency.’ The second defining factor, i.e. personal connection through family background, however, stands out as it echoes the established understanding that the primary characteristic of a HLL is the historical and personal connection to the HL not the fluency or proficiency of individual learner (Fishman, 2001). As Van Deusen-Scholl (2003: p.
221) puts it, the ethnic heritage of a learner forms “the core” in defining HLL. In other words, one of the most salient factors that defines a HLL is his/her ethnic identity. This, in turn, resonates the difficulty in defining HL and HLL, for not only the ethnic identity itself is not an easy concept to grasp but also the distance individuals feel towards their heritage is hard to measure. Nevertheless, it is hard to defy the centrality learner identity claims in discussions of heritage language and its learners.
The analysis of the data in this paper is based on the poststructuralist view on identity as being amorphous, unstable and constantly changing. As opposed to the essentialist belief that
“individuals are formed and shaped – in a word, determined – by formations which precede them” (Block, 2007, p. 12), poststructuralism perceives individuals as being positioned and constituted as a result of discourses surrounding them. In this paper, I use narrative inquiry to look into how the narrators recite their “lived experiences” (Chase, 2005: p. 658) and, in due
3

course, construct their identity. Through the utilization of narrative, storytellers discursively rebuild and reorganize past events from their own vantage point. Narratives are distinct from other genres of recountal such as chronology and editorial in that “when someone tells a story, he or she shapes, constructs, and performs the self, experience, and reality.” (ibid. p. 657)
In this paper, the data were collected from Sang-shil Kim’ blog ( Land of the Not-So-
Calm ; http://notsocalm.wordpress.com/) powered by the Wordpress.com
(http://www.wordpress.com), a free blogging service open to the public. Blog was selected as a site for data collection because of 1) the easy access to the open data, 2) the rich possibilities the virtual space holds for the future studies, and 3) the growth of the Internet as a new and widely used medium of communication. Among 358 postings (as of December 11, 2008), nine postings
(written between December 17, 2007 and October 2, 2008) under the category of Korean
Language were selected for analysis. They were selected mainly because they were more relevant to the purpose of this paper, for other postings on her blog are more concerned about her adoptee identity rather than her learner identity. Postings under other categories (e.g. About Me,
Adoption, and Uncategorized, etc.), however, along with the design and construction of her blog as a whole, were investigated as a source for the information on her personal background as a
Korean adoptee and a blogger.
Aneta Pavlenko and James Lantolf (2000), drawing on the metaphoric approach established by Sfard (1988), describe second language learning as a process of participation in a certain community. They argue that second language learning is as much the process of an individual acquiring membership to a community of practice as it is a process in an individual’s
4

mind and knowledge internalization. They also point out that the application of this participation metaphor shifts the focus of SLA investigation from “language structure to language use in context, and to the issues of affiliation and belonging ” (ibid, p. 156; italic added). The same metaphor applies to heritage language learning only with the more densified emphasis on affiliation and belonging.
They also discuss second language learning as the phases of identity loss and reconstruction. They contend that the process of second language learning is the loss of an individual’s L1 identity and reconstruction of L2 identity as an activity to achieve a membership to the target community. To investigate this process, they use the narratives of adult bilingual writers arguing that the narratives “represent a space where identities are reconstructed and life stories retold in the security of the double displacement granted by writing in a second language”
(ibid, p. 162). In this paper, I look into the narratives of a heritage language learner posted on her blog based on the belief that the cyber space provides the security of double displacement granted by writing in pseudonym. I also base the analysis on the identity loss and reconstruction model modified to HLL. In the modification, I replace the loss of L1 identity with the loss of heritage, and the reconstruction of L2 identity with the reconstruction of HL identity.
The history of adoption in Korea started after the Korean War which lasted for three years from June, 1950. The war orphans were entrusted to the hands of religious groups who provided the ‘lost children’ with new homes and families in the USA and Europe (Jang, 1998).
According to the Trend of Health and Social Affairs in 2008 (Korea Institute for Health and
5

Social Affairs, 2008), the number of international adoptees grew smaller from 7,949 in 1987 to
1,264 in 2007, being outnumbered by the number of domestic adoption for the first time.
Sang-shil Kim, the participant of this paper, is a Korean adoptee (KAD) who was sent to an American family six months after her birth. She is now in her early thirties and she lives mainland US. She traveled to Korea twice, once in a group tour of KADs and once with her friend LB. She hardly had any Korean, or Asian, connection while growing up in, as she puts it, a ‘white’ American family and a ‘white’ American town. Judged by her stories on trips to Korea, she seems to be able to have broken conversations with local Koreans but without significant miscommunication. Her first formal Korean class was at her junior year in college. Now, she teaches herself Korean with a textbook and goes to a Korean class offered by graduate students at a nearby university.
Her name on the Internet, Sang-shil Kim, was chosen by herself. Kim is one of the most common family names in Korea, while Sang-shil in Korean means ‘loss’ or ‘forfeiture.’ She doesn’t specify why she chose this particular name, but on her posting on December 8, 2007, she narrates about her name. After giving an excerpt from the film Robin hood: Prince of Thieves , where a character introduces the meaning of his name, great one, Sang-shil writes,
I have given myself the name Sang-Shil Kim. ... It is not my “real” name, but right now it feels more “real” to me than anything else I am called. … But this one I gave to myself. And it does not mean Great One (emphases original).
The narratives on her Korean language learning have recurrent themes: the sense of loss and her struggle to get connected to the circle of ‘real’ Koreans. In what follows, I will
6

investigate these themes by paralleling them to the modified loss and reconstruction model mentioned above.
Land of the Not-So-Calm is the title of Sang-shil’s blog. It is a sarcastic twist of the well known nickname for Korea, the Land of the Morning Calm . By assigning this name to the blog, she foregrounds the characteristics of her blog, i.e. a secure place where she unravels her ambivalent feelings to Korea. The header photo is four small dishes of
반찬
( panchan ; side dishes) taken from one of her trips to Korea. Though she gives her own explanation that the four small dishes represent what the blog is about (“a little bit of this and a little bit of that”), typical
‘Korean’ side dishes inevitably signify the orientation of the blog. In the introductory heading,
Who is Sang-shil Kim?
, she announces her KAD status. Among twenty categories, Adoption and
Things Korean contain the most postings, 53 and 65 respectively. All in all, whoever visits the blog cannot miss that the blog is a secret, but open to public, haven for her Korean HLL identity with the strong tint of adoption.
She sees blogging as a way to express a voice that has been oppressed so far as well as a way to be connected to other KADs. In a prepared questionnaire by the blog service provider, she explains why she continues to blog:
Because I have a voice and I want to use it. … Because I need a place where I can just vent. … Because I want to meet like-minded fellow transracial adoptees. … Because I
7

want to let other transracial adoptees know that they’re not alone… Because I wanted a hobby that would give me carpal tunnel.
Her clear-cut dichotomy between the ‘real’ world and the ‘virtual’ world also supports the point. She says that none of her real world fiend, except one, knows that she has a blog, and the day when her real world friends know that she blogs is the day she stops blogging. This is not uncommon among bloggers, for the secrecy of their real-life identities is one of the cornerstones for the sustenance of cyber space. The urgent need for privacy in her case, however, signals another implication as the case elaborated by Lam (2000) in her identity study on a teenage writing on the Internet. In her blog, Sang-shil unleashes her full-fledged HLL and KAD self on the stage, while Sang-shil Kim doesn’t even exist off-the-stage. In other words, as long as the anonymity is guaranteed, she will play the role of Sang-shil Kim, the uncamouflaged HLL self of whoever is out there in the real life. This dramaturgical concept (Goffman, 1959, 1981) applied here, thus yields an explanation of her blogging as a legitimate way to vent off her oppressed self by the means of narrative.
As Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) distinguishes the phase of loss and the phase of recovery and (re)construction in L2 learning, Sang-shil’s HL learning also has the phase of loss and regain. In her case, however, what she lost is not her L1 but her heritage. Heritage here is a broadly defined term that refers to anything loosely related to the ethnic and linguistic identity of a HLL. Since she was sent to an American family six months after her birth, it is hard to say that she once possessed the ability to speak or understand Korean. Nevertheless, Sang-shil expresses
8

her sense of loss throughout many postings on her blog. On Hearing Loss posted December 17,
2007, she narrates the loss of her ability to discriminate certain sounds in Korean. In this posting, she positions herself as someone with ‘American ear’ and the ability to pronounce English that native Koreans struggle to acquire. Her evaluation to her ability in English, however, is not the favorable one.
I lost the ability to discriminate between certain sounds in the Korean language, sounds that seem exactly the same to my American ear … True, I have gained many things through adoption, including the ability to pronounce English sounds that native speakers of Korean struggle with for years (the l/r distinction comes to mind). ... But whenever I try and explain that one of the losses of international adoption is the loss of language, people will often tell me, “Well, you can just learn Korean as an adult.” Well, yes and no. Yes, I can try, and no, it’s not the same as learning to differentiate and produce the sounds of Korean as a child, surrounded by people who speak Korean to me every day.
It is still a loss. … (T)he loss of the Korean language feels frustratingly deep to me. To say nothing of the loss of my Korean family. I’m not sure that I’ll ever recover either one.
In narrating the loss of Korean language, she moves from her own voice to the voices of others saying that she could ‘just’ learn it as an adult. This movement is understood as the shift in footing, the change of the way narrators project their stance to the remarks people make
(Goffman, 1981). By shifting the footing, that is, by moving from first person narration to reported speech, Sang-shil presents the way others think of her inability to speak and understand
9

Korean. This movement inevitably entails evaluative comments added by the narrator (Labov &
Waletsky, 1967), as the statement of people on Sang-shil’s Korean language is presented with negative tint by an evaluative word ‘just.’ Underlined sections in the following are all evaluative comments on the absence of Korean language in her.
(T)he Korean language program at the school was so nascent there was only one level offered: Beginner. Which was perfect for me, or so I thought, since I was nothing if not an absolute beginner. ( Speaking My Heritage , January 19, 2008)
When will the loss of a language that I was meant to have spoken no longer feel like an amputation? ( Cramming , March 28, 2008; emphasis original)
First excerpt shows how she evaluates herself as a speaker of Korean. She thinks, i.e. on the footing of her inner voice, that the beginner level course is ‘perfect’ for her, the use of evaluative language for her language ability. She goes on to say that she is ‘nothing’ but an
‘absolute beginner.’ In the second excerpt, she evaluates the loss of her HL as an ‘amputation’ with italicized bold characters, expressing her emotional emphasis on the comment. By using evaluative language, she expresses the frustration she feels because she is removed from her root and the language that she would have grown up speaking if she “had stayed been allowed to stay in Korea” ( K-Class Drama , October 2, 2008; correction original).
10

Sang-shil’s struggle to reconstruct her Korean identity materializes as her endeavor to have access to the ‘real’ Koreans, the speakers of Korean with native proficiency. Between the native speakers of Korean and her, she places HLLs. She uses the term HLL to refer to the learners of Korean language grown up in Korean or Korean-American families with higher proficiency than herself. This limited definition for HLL positions her at the farthest distance away in the degreed continuum of Koreanness.
(T)here were several new students in the class who turned out to be heritage speakers: people who grew up speaking (or hearing) at least some Korean. … I felt very non-
Korean in comparison. With them around, the bar for not looking (and sounding) like an idiot was suddenly much higher than when it had just been me and a handful of white guys. ( K-Class Drama , October 2, 2008)
Linguists call these people heritage speakers, folks who have grown up in Korean families and can understand the language, and sometimes even speak at intermediate levels. ... Some of the heritage speakers in that first class … swore up and down that their Korean really wasn’t as good as it seemed. “I can only talk to my grandmother [in
Korean] at the level of a six-year-old,” one guy complained to me, clearly expecting sympathy. ( Speaking My Heritage , January 19, 2008)
In the first excerpt, she introduces her definition of HLL followed by her evaluation of herself in comparison to them. She uses evaluative comments saying that she feels very ‘non-Korean’ and look like an ‘idiot’ in front of HLLs. In addition to that, she aligns herself with other ‘white
11

guys’ as being the lowest proficiency group in her hierarchy of Koreanness. In the second excerpt, the introduction of reported speech shifts the footing the narrator stands on. By borrowing the voice of the speaker himself, Sang-shil casts doubt on the legitimacy of the speech at the same time declining the speakers request for sympathy.
Her episodes from a trip to Korea and her interactions with the native speakers of
Korean living in Korea exhibit her efforts for the membership of the community. After a failure to be granted the membership in Korean speaking community by an English-speaking cashier, she and her friend succeed in asking direction to an open-air market.
(W)hen we asked where the market was we were continually directed to regular shopping malls. Finally I looked up the word “fruit” in my dictionary, explained “We want to buy fruit,” and — success! — we were on our way. It kind of made up for the convenience store experience. However, looking for restaurants and open-air markets is one thing; looking for your Korean parents is another. … How will I acquire enough language so that I can stand on Korean soil and pretend, if only for a few minutes, that I am a “Korean-Korean”? When will the loss of a language that I was meant to have spoken no longer feel like an amputation?
( Cramming , March 28, 2008; emphasis original)
The triumph of the interim membership, however, does not last long because she immediately realizes the distance between her and the ‘Korean-Koreans.’ She feels that because of her insufficient language competence, she is cut from the access to the community of practice.
12

Nevertheless, relative superiority in language competence on occasion elevates her selfevaluation and helps her reset her learner status as high as HLL.
I signed up for another beginning Korean class, this time with LB, and at a different school with a more established Korean language program. Although I still remembered the Hangul characters and a few basic phrases from my first attempt, I was more than happy to start at the beginning. … (I)t was a nice feeling not to be behind on the first day of class. And for a few short weeks, until the rest of the class caught up with me, I almost felt like a heritage speaker. ( Speaking My Heritage, January 19, 2008)
In this paper, I investigated the process of heritage language learning as a phase of loss and reconstruction of self. The participant, being a KAD, was given a congenital deficiency of what can be called heritage. As an adult language learner, she reconstructs her identity as a language learner whose position in the degreed nativeness is on growth. Though the participant herself emphasized language proficiency as a defining factor of HLL, it is more suitable to center in the discussion of defining HLL on learner identity.
For the second aim of this paper, the utilization of the cyber space in identity studies should be more cautious. Even though the fancy possibilities the ocean of information promises is tempting, it is not easy to find suitable data for the purpose of the study. For the purposeful collection of rich data on a chose topic, the Internet may not be the best site to start with.
Nonetheless, researchers should not be discouraged to delve into the new source of data, for what it may provide to them often is worth the time and effort.
13

Block, D. (2007). Identity in the social sciences today. Ch. 2 in Second language identities .
London: Continuum.
Carreira, M. (2004). Seeking Explanatory Adequacy: A Dual Approach to Understanding the
Term Heritage Language Learner. Heritage Language Journal, 2. Retrieved December 10,
2008, from http://www.heritagelanguages.org/
Chase, S.E. (2005). Narrative inquiry: Multiple lenses, approaches, voices. In N.K. Denzin &
Y.S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research 3rd ed. (pp. 651-679).
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Fishman, J. A. (2001). 300-plus years of heritage language education in the United States. In J. K.
Peyton, D. A. Ranard, & S. McGinnis (Eds.), Heritage languages in America: Preserving a national resource (pp. 81–97). Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics/Delta
Systems.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life . Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
__________ (1981). Forms of talk . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Higgins, C. (forthcoming). Western women’s resistance to identity slippage in Tanzania.In C.
Higgins (ed.) Negotiating the self in a second language: Identity formation in a globalizing world. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jang, J. (1998, December 10). Adult Korean Adoptees in Search of Roots. Korea Herald .
Kinginger, C. (2004). Alice doesn’t live here anymore: Foreign language learning and identity reconstruction. In A. Pavlenko & A. Blackledge (eds.) Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts (pp. 219-242). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Lam, E. (2000). Second language literacy and the design of the self: A case study of a teenager writing on the internet. TESOL Quarterly, 34 (3) : 457-483.
Labov, W. & Waletsky, J. (1967). Narrative analysis. In J. Helm (ed.), Essays on the Verbal and
Visual Arts . Seattle: U. of Washington Press. Pp. 12-44.
14

Morita, N. (2004). Negotiating participation and identity in second language academic communities. TESOL Quarterly , 38, 573-603.
Ohara, Y. (2001). Finding one’s voice in Japanese: A study of pitch levels of L2 users. In A.
Pavlenko et al. (eds.) Multilingualism, second language learning, and gender (pp. 231-
256). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Pavlenko, A. & J. Lantolf. (2000). Second language learning as participation and the
(re)construction of selves. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.). Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp. 155-177). Oxford: OUP.
Sfard, A. (1988). On Two Metaphors for Learning and the Dangers of Choosing Just One.
Educational Researcher, 27, 4-13
Solé, R. (2007). Language learners’ sociocultural positions in the L2: A narrative approach.
Language and Intercultural Communication 7, 203-216.
Valés, G. (2005). Bilingualism, Heritage Language Learners, and SLA Research: Opportunities
Lost or Seized?. Modern Language Journal , 89 (3), 410-426.
Van Deusen-Scholl, N. (2003). Toward a definition of heritage language: sociopolitical and pedagogical considerations. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education , 2 (3), 211-230.
15