Hits 1.501 – 1.511 of 1.511
| 1502 |
Immigration, Literacy, and Mobility: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Well-educated Chinese Immigrants’ Trajectories in Canada
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Abstract:
This dissertation interrogates the deficit assumptions about English proficiency of skilled immigrants who were recruited by Canadian governments between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Through the lens of literacy as social practice, the eighteen-month ethnographic qualitative research explores the sequential experiences of settlement and economic integration of seven well-educated Chinese immigrant professionals. The analytical framework is built on sociocultural approaches to literacy and learning, as well as the theories of discourses and language reproduction. Using multiple data sources (observations, conversational interviews, journal and diary entries, photographs, documents, and artifacts collected in everyday lives), I document many different ways that well-educated Chinese immigrants take advantage of their language and literacy skills in English across several social domains of home, school, job market, and workplace. Examining the trans-contextual patterning of the participants’ language and literacy activities reveals that immigrant professionals use literacy as assistance in seeking, negotiating, and taking hold of resources and opportunities within certain social settings. However, my data show that their language and literacy engagements might not always generate positive consequences for social networks, job opportunities, and upward economic mobility. Close analyses of processes and outcomes of the participants’ engagements across these discursive discourses make it very clear that the monolithic assumptions of the dominant language shape and reinforce structural barriers by constraining their social participation, decision making, and learning practice, and thereby make literacy’s consequences unpredictable. The deficit model of language proficiency serves the grounds for linguistic stereotypes and economic marginalization, which produces profoundly consequential effects on immigrants’ pathways as they strive for having access to resources and opportunities in the new society. My analyses illuminate the ways that language and literacy create the complex web of discursive spaces wherein institutional agendas and personal desires are intertwined and collide in complex ways that constitute conditions and processes of social and economic mobility of immigrant populations. Based on these analyses, I argue that immigrants’ successful integration into a host country is not about the mastery of the technical skills in the dominant language. Rather, it is largely about the recognition and acceptance of the value of their language use and literacy practice as they attempt to partake in the globalized new economy. ; PhD
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Keyword:
0275; 0282; 0326; 0340; 0516; 0535; 0628; 0727; 0745; 0747; adaptation; and commodification; and participation; and socialization; China's English education policies; Chinese immigrant professionals in Canada; classroom activities; community colleges; community of practice; consequences of literacy; contradiction; critical ethnography; curriculum; deskilling; dilemma; discourse analysis; economic performance; economic returns; educational credentials; employment opportunities; English proficiency and divisions of family obligations; ethnography of literacy; field; forms of capital; forms of discrimiation; gatekeeping process; globalization; globalized new economy; home; immigrants' language and literacy proficiency levels; immigrants' social and linguistic identity (re)construction; immigration; immigration policies; individual and institutional habitus; instructions; job advancement; job market; language and literacy in the job market; language and literacy in the workplace; language ideologies; language learning; language problem and deficit assumptions on immigrants' language and literacy; language proficiency; legitimate access to rescources; LINC/ESL programs; linguistic and racial discriminiation; literacy; literacy and orality; literacy and social political participation; literacy artifacts; literacy as social practice; literacy as strategy; literacy policies; marginalization; multiculturalism; multilingualism; multimodal uses of language and literacy; New Economy Orders; positioning; post-secondary education; power relations; reading and writing; recognition; school; settlement; situated learning and literacy practice; social domains and discursive discourses; social economic stereotype; social network; social relationships; social reproduction and categorization; social selection; socioeconomic mobility; socioeconomic mobility and upward mobility; symbolic domination; tension; the trans-contextual phenomenon of literacy; the web of ideological practices; trajectories; workplace
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/27608
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| 1503 |
Development and Pedagogical Applications of an Audio-Textual English-Spanish Parallel Literary Corpus for the Study of English Phonology
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| 1504 |
Analyzing English L1 and L2 Paraphrasing Strategies Through Concurrent Verbal Report and Stimulated Recall Protocols
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| 1505 |
An Argument-based Validity Inquiry into the Empirically-derived Descriptor-based Diagnostic (EDD) Assessment in ESL Academic Writing
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| 1506 |
Silence, Intercultural Conversation, and Miscommunication
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| 1507 |
Citizenship Learning of Adult Immigrants in ESL Programs: It will help you pass the citizenship test, but it won't make you (m)any Canadian friends
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| 1508 |
Delayed Versus Immediate Corrective Feedback on Orally Produced Passive Errors in English
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| 1509 |
Drama Pedagogies, Multiliteracies and Embodied Learning: Urban Teachers and Linguistically Diverse Students Make Meaning
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