ABSTRACT
This chapter explores instances of international students owning their transnational and translingual identities, as they describe their linguistic performances and their affiliations with English and a variety of other languages, including, but not limited to Mandarin, the official language of China. C. Leung et al. offer the language affiliation-expertise-inheritance model of language identity in order to counter the binary of “native-speaker” and “non-native speaker,” which they show to be too reductive to account for the lived experience of high school students from immigrant families in England. The students in Leung et al. study are routinely raciolinguistically profiled in their schools and in the broader English culture, and are often assigned “non-native speaker” identities because of what Leung et al. refer to as “reified ethnicities”. Students whose prior education has taken place in a language other than English confront expectations of fast adjustment to English-medium instruction and to extensive reading and writing in disciplinary genres and discourses.
