Multiple Schools, Languages, Experiences and Affiliations: Ideological Becomings and Positionings

This article focuses on the identity accounts of a group of Chinese children who attend a heritage language school. Bakhtin’s concepts of ideological becoming, and authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, frame our exploration. Taking a dialogic view of language and learning raises questions about schools as socializing spaces and ideological environments. The children in this inquiry articulate their own ideological patterns of alignment. Those patterns, and the children's code switching, seem mostly determined by their socialization, language affiliations, friendship patterns, family situations, and legal access to particular schools. Five patterns of ideological becoming are presented. The children’s articulated preferences indicate that they assert their own ideological stances towards prevailing authoritative discourses, give voice to their own sense of agency and internally persuasive discourses, and respond to the ideological resources that mediate their linguistic repertoires.

Evidentiality and morality in a Korean heritage language school

Previous work on Korean grammar has claimed that one person can not have access to another person’s thoughts, feelings or sensations, as indicated by the use of evidential markers. By looking at cases in which a teacher at a Korean heritage language school claims to read her students’ minds with a high degree of certainty, I demonstrate how expressions of epistemic stance relate to moral evaluation. Speakers portray their access to the thoughts and sensations of individuals who they deem morally worthy as more distant and uncertain. When individuals are evaluated as morally suspect, however, speakers represent these persons’ emotions, thoughts and sensations as self-evident displays of affect. This paper thus argues that evidential marking in Korean interaction is a social act through which interlocutors morally evaluate others.