The power of identity and ideology in language learning,

Multilingual Education

Peter I. De Costa

The Power of
Identity and
Ideology in
Language Learning
Designer Immigrants Learning English
in Singapore


Multilingual Education
Volume 18

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Department of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University
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Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, Hong Kong SAR
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Low Ee-Ling, National Institute of Education, Singapore
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Ricardo Nolasco, University of the Philippines at Diliman, Manila,
The Philippines
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Canada
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Peter I. De Costa

The Power of Identity
and Ideology in Language
Learning
Designer Immigrants Learning English
in Singapore


Peter I. De Costa
Wells Hall B257
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, USA

ISSN 2213-3208
Multilingual Education
ISBN 978-3-319-30209-6
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30211-9

ISSN 2213-3216

(electronic)

ISBN 978-3-319-30211-9

(eBook)

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Preface

In this book I present a critical ethnographic school-based case study that focuses
on the language learning experiences of five Asian immigrant students. These students were specially recruited by the Singapore government as part of a national
foreign talent policy. The book draws on varied data gathered over an academic
year, including video- and audio-taped classroom interactions, audio-taped interviews with the focal students and their Singaporean classmates and teachers, observations of the students outside of the classroom, and artifacts. Inspired by the work
of Jan Blommaert (2010, 2015), Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1991), Bonny Norton
(2000, 2013), and Stanton Wortham (2006), this study adopts a poststructuralist
view of language and language learning. Specifically, language is seen as an act of
semiotic reconstruction and performance engaged by the language learner. Particular
attention was paid to how the immigrant students negotiated a standard English
ideology and their discursive positioning over the course of the school year. The
book also considers how the prevailing standard English ideology interacted in
highly complex ways with their being positioned as high academic achievers to
ultimately influence their learning of English. In particular, I argue that this potent
combination of language ideologies and circulating ideologies created a designer

student immigration complex. By framing this situation as a complex, the study
problematizes the power of identity and ideology in language learning.
East Lansing, MI, USA

Peter I. De Costa

v



Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to the administrators, teachers, and students at the school I call
Oak Girls’ Secondary School. I understand the risks they took in allowing me access
to their school and thank them for their trust. For an entire year, they allowed me to
be a small part of their lives. I am particularly grateful to Daphne, Daniella, Jenny,
Wendy, and Xandy, who came to play a central role in this research project.
Boundless thanks are owed to my dissertation advisor, Jane Zuengler, for her
unstinting support over the years. Her patient guidance and expert advice were
instrumental in seeing my dissertation, upon which this book is based, to completion in May 2011. I am also deeply appreciative of the insightful input from my
dissertation committee members: Margaret Hawkins, Stacey Lee, Sally Magnan,
and Junko Mori.
This project would also not have been possible without the generous financial
support provided by the Second Language Acquisition Program and the Graduate
School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during my doctoral studies. The
funding I received by way of a university dissertation fellowship and travel grants
enabled me to collect my data, present my work at conferences, and eventually write
the thesis. I am honored that the thesis was conferred the Second Language Research
Special Interest Group dissertation award by the American Educational Research
Association in 2013.

I would also like to recognize the opportunities afforded to me by graduate student awards from the American Association for Applied Linguistics and the Applied
Linguistics Association of Australia. Equally helpful were the travel awards to present my research at various conferences during my three years (2010–2013) as a
visiting assistant professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.
However, it is primarily in the last two years that this book was revitalized through
the generous support I received from the College of Arts and Letters (CAL) at
Michigan State University. The CAL Research Award I received in 2014 and the
generous conference funding I received from MSU have been instrumental in helping me update my review of the literature and to refine my earlier analyses.
My work has benefitted immensely from open dialogue with my students at
Michigan State University, particularly those enrolled in my graduate seminar (LLT
vii


viii

Acknowledgments

855: Identity and Ideology in Multilingual Settings) and my research assistants,
Sarut Supasiraprapa and Yaqiong Cui. Jolanda Voogd and Helen van der Stelt at
Springer showed much encouraging enthusiasm. I thank them for their forbearance
and understanding in seeing this book to print.
I thank my family and friends for the support and encouragement they have provided me over the long years of this project. I had the privilege of having my parents, Augustine and Sally De Costa, believe in me from the start. I am especially
grateful to James Seals, who encouraged me to continue writing and to convert my
thesis into a monograph. Thanks for keeping it real for me. As I work on the final
revisions to this manuscript, it is only fitting that I wrap up this book project, which
began exactly eight years ago, on a gorgeous winter morning in San Francisco.
Looking out at the Bay, I am reminded by Aihwa Ong’s work on Flexible Citizenship.
In many ways, I embody the designer immigrant whom I write about in this book.
Having spent my Christmas break in Singapore, I am relishing my brief stay here in
California, a state that has always been welcoming of immigrants.
It’s been almost five years since I wrote the first full draft for my dissertation,

with most of my writing done while looking out at a different bay in Monterey. But
now, as I look at the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance, I think about my own
Pacific shuttle and how blessed I am to be able to move back and forth between
multiple worlds. Without all of these people and places in my life, I would not have
completed this book on mobility, which is as much mine as it is theirs.
January 2016

San Francisco


Contents

1 Foreign Talent and Singapore ..................................................................
1.1 Global Flow of Migrants ....................................................................
1.1.1 Designer Immigration: A Worldwide Phenomenon ..............
1.1.2 Language as a Filtering Tool .................................................
1.2 Critically-Oriented Research on Model Minority
and Immigrant Youth ..........................................................................
1.3 Making the Case for Designer Immigrants ........................................
1.4 Overview of the Chapters ...................................................................
References ...................................................................................................
2 Reconceptualizing Language, Language Learning,
and the Language Learner in the Age of Globalization ........................
2.1 Introduction ........................................................................................
2.2 Globalization and Educational Processes ...........................................
2.3 Poststructuralism and SLA .................................................................
2.4 Pierre Bourdieu and SLA....................................................................
2.5 Consequences of Globalization and the Commodification
of Languages ......................................................................................
2.5.1 Language as Ideology, Semiotic Reconstruction,

and Performance ...................................................................
2.5.2 Language Learning Through an Ideology
and Identity Lens...................................................................
2.5.3 Imagined Communities, Social Imaginaries,
and Circulating Ideologies ....................................................
2.5.4 Symbolic Competence and Enregistering
the Globalized Language Learner .........................................
References ...................................................................................................
3 Researching, Analyzing, and Constructing the Data .............................
3.1 Introduction ........................................................................................
3.2 Critical Ethnographic Case Study Research Concerns .......................

1
3
4
5
6
9
9
10
13
13
14
15
16
18
19
22
24
26

27
33
33
34

ix


x

Contents

3.3 Conducting Ethical Research at Oak Girls’
Secondary School (OGSS) .................................................................
3.3.1 Gaining Access to Oak Girls’ Secondary School ..................
3.3.2 The School and Its Participants.............................................
3.3.3 Designer Immigrant Participants ..........................................
3.3.4 Situating Myself as a Reflexive Researcher..........................
3.4 Performing a Critical Ethnographic Case Study at Oak .....................
3.4.1 Observing Classroom Interaction .........................................
3.4.2 Video-Taped Classroom Interaction......................................
3.4.3 Audio-Taped Classroom Interaction .....................................
3.4.4 Observing Interaction Outside of the Classroom ..................
3.4.5 Interviews..............................................................................
3.4.6 Artifacts.................................................................................
3.5 Coding and Analyzing the Data ..........................................................
3.5.1 Coding and Categorization ...................................................
3.5.2 Transcription of Interaction and Interview Data ...................
3.5.3 Discourse Analysis ................................................................
3.6 Conclusion ..........................................................................................

References ...................................................................................................
4 The Sociolinguistic Context of Singapore and Oak ...............................
4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................
4.2 The Different Languages of Singapore ..............................................
4.2.1 Singapore’s National Bilingual Policy ..................................
4.2.2 English in Singapore: A Tale of Two (Unequal)
Englishes ...............................................................................
4.3 The Ideology of English Language Standardization ..........................
4.3.1 Policing English: The Discourse of Crisis
and the Speak Good English Movement...............................
4.3.2 Policing English: The English Language Syllabus
and the Singapore School......................................................
4.3.3 Class Matters: The Cosmopolitan and Heartlander Divide
in Relation to English............................................................
4.4 Conclusion ..........................................................................................
References ...................................................................................................
5 Designer Student Immigration and the Designer Student
Immigrant Complex at Oak .....................................................................
5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................
5.2 Designer Student Immigration in the Singapore Education System ..
5.2.1 Two Types of Scholarships ...................................................
5.2.2 The Designer Immigration Recruitment Process
at Oak: Insights from the Ground .........................................
5.2.3 Recruiting Designer Immigrant Students in China ...............
5.2.4 Recruiting Designer Immigrant Students in Vietnam ...........
5.2.5 Applying World Systems Analysis to the Oak Context ........

35
36
37

38
39
41
41
43
44
44
45
46
47
47
48
49
50
51
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55
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56
59
60
60
62
64
65
66
69
69
70
70

71
72
72
74


Contents

5.3 Oak: A Cosmopolitan ‘Mecca’ ...........................................................
5.3.1 The Benevolent Culture at Oak.............................................
5.4 Circulating Ideologies and the Designer Student
Immigrant Complex............................................................................
5.4.1 The “Scholars” ......................................................................
5.4.2 Circulating Ideology #1: Focused
and Hardworking Students....................................................
5.4.3 Circulating Ideology #2: Better and Brighter
Students Than Their Singaporean Classmates ......................
5.5 Bringing Language and Circulating Ideologies Together:
The Social Identification of Scholars and the Designer
Immigrant Complex............................................................................
5.5.1 Ideologies at Work: Iconization, Recursiveness,
and Erasure at Oak ................................................................
5.6 Conclusion ..........................................................................................
References ...................................................................................................
6 Language Ideologies at Oak .....................................................................
6.1 Introduction ........................................................................................
6.2 The Standard English Language Ideology at Oak ..............................
6.2.1 Language Management at Oak .............................................
6.3 Linguistic Practices Valued and Denigrated at Oak ...........................
6.3.1 Sanctioned Genres: Conforming to the “Right”

Organizational Structure .......................................................
6.3.2 Other Valued Forms of Accuracy ..........................................
6.4 A Monoglot Standard English Ideology at Oak .................................
6.4.1 Enacting a Monoglot Standard English
Ideology: Its Impact on Jenny and Daphne...........................
6.4.2 Jenny .....................................................................................
6.4.3 Daphne ..................................................................................
6.5 Responding to a Monoglot Standard English Ideology:
Learner Investment, Styling, and Semiotic Reconstruction
by the Designer Immigrant Students at Oak.......................................
6.5.1 Jenny’s Investment ................................................................
6.5.2 Jenny’s Styling and Semiotic Reconstruction .......................
6.5.3 Daphne’s Investment.............................................................
6.5.4 Daphne’s Styling and Semiotic Reconstruction....................
6.5.5 Linguistic Negotiations by Daniella, Wendy, and Xandy .....
6.6 Conclusion ..........................................................................................
References ...................................................................................................
7 The Designer Student Immigrant Complex:
Its Impact on Learning .............................................................................
7.1 Introduction ........................................................................................
7.2 Revisiting the Designer Student Immigrant Complex........................
7.3 The Effects of the Complex on Three Focal Students ........................

xi

75
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78

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125

xii

Contents

7.3.1
7.3.2
7.3.3
7.3.4
7.3.5
7.3.6

Daphne: Countering the Master ‘Scholar’ Narrative ............
Negotiating Teacher Expectations and Positioning ..............
Negotiating Personal Expectations and Positioning .............
Negotiating Peer Expectations and Positioning ....................
Daniella .................................................................................
Negotiating Teacher and Peer Expectations
and Positioning......................................................................
7.3.7 Negotiating Personal Expectations and Positioning .............
7.3.8 Jenny .....................................................................................
7.3.9 Harnessing ‘Scholar’ Expectations .......................................
7.3.10 Relating the Designer Student Immigrant
Complex to Examination Performance .................................
7.4 Conclusion ..........................................................................................
References ...................................................................................................
8 Looking Back and Moving Forward .......................................................
8.1 Overview ............................................................................................
8.2 Implications of the Study....................................................................

8.3 Future Directions ................................................................................
References ...................................................................................................

126
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149
152
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158
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163
163
164
167
170

Appendix .......................................................................................................... 173
Transcription Conventions .......................................................................... 173


About the Author

Peter I. De Costa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics and
Languages at Michigan State University. He teaches on the Second Language
Studies Ph.D. and MATESOL Programs. His primary areas of research are identity

and ideology in second language acquisition, English as a lingua franca, and ethics
in applied linguistics. His work has appeared in Applied Linguistics Review, Critical
Inquiry in Language Studies, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal
of Asia Pacific Communication, Language Learning, Language Policy, Language
Teaching, Linguistics and Education, Research in the Teaching of English, System,
and TESOL Quarterly. He is the editor of the recently published Routledge volume,
Ethics in Applied Linguistics: Language Researcher Narratives.

xiii



List of Figure

Fig. 4.1

SGEM artifact on the door of the staff room at Oak:
I love my English teacher .................................................................

62

xv



List of Tables

Table 1.1 Total population as of June 2010 ...................................................

2

Table 3.1 Student population at Oak according to ethnicity ..........................
Table 3.2 Student population at Oak according
to mother tongue languages studied ...............................................
Table 3.3 Summary of database .....................................................................
Table 3.4 Summary of classroom observations .............................................

37
37
42
43

Table 4.1 Percentage of reported home languages
by the resident population aged 5 years and over ..........................
Table 4.2 Percentage of resident population by age group
who spoke English most frequently at home .................................

59

Table 5.1 Circulating ideologies surrounding designer
immigrant students at Oak .............................................................

84

Table 6.1 Scheme of assessment ....................................................................
Table 6.2 Marking key for free writing and situational writing .....................

90
95

57

Table 7.1 Responses to being called a ‘scholar’ ............................................ 157
Table 7.2 End of the year examination grades ............................................... 158

xvii


Chapter 1

Foreign Talent and Singapore

Abstract This chapter describes the backdrop of national social engineering
against which this Singapore-based study, which explores the language learning
experiences of five Grade 9 immigrant students in an English-medium school, is
situated. I refer to these students as designer immigrants (Simmons, Economic integration and designer immigrants: Canadian policy in the 1990s. In M. Castro (Ed.),
Free markets, open societies, closed borders? Trends in international migration and
immigration policy in the Americas (pp. 53–69). Miami: North-South Press, 1999a;
Simmons, Immigration policy: Imagined futures. In S. Halli & L. Driedger (Eds.),
Immigrant Canada: Demographic, economic and social challenges (pp. 21–50).
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999b) as they were recipients of scholarships funded by the Singapore government. By using a language identity (Norton,
Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation. Bristol: Multilingual
Matters, 2013), language ideological (Blommaert, The sociolinguistics of globalization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and circulating ideological
(Wortham, Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) framework, I
explore the struggles and pressures they encountered in learning English in my
year-long critical ethnographic case study. The school became not only a site of
control where the interests of the state were promoted, but also a site of struggle for
these designer immigrant students as they wrestled with a hegemonic language ideology and a cosmopolitan identity that demanded homogeneity by way of English
language standardization. For them, language acquisition was not a gradual and
neutral process of internalizing the rules, structures and vocabulary of a standard

language. Rather, the dynamics of their language acquisition were entangled with
deeper social issues that characterize the nexus of language identity, ideology and
migration.
Keywords Language learning • Designer immigrants • Identity • Ideology •
Migration • Singapore • Social engineering

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
P.I. De Costa, The Power of Identity and Ideology in Language Learning,
Multilingual Education 18, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-30211-9_1

1


2

1

Table 1.1 Total population
as of June 2010

Foreign Talent and Singapore

2000
2010
Singapore citizens
2,985,900 3,230,700
Permanent residents (PRs)
287,500
541,000
Non-residents

754,500 1,305,000
Total
4,027,900 50,076,700
Source: Singstat (2010, p. v)

Much has been written about global cities. Hannerz (1996), for instance, who prefers the term “world cities,” believes that a truly world city must also be an active
producer of the symbols and ideas that move the world today. One feature common
to such cities is their ability to draw human capital. In many ways, as Fernandez
(2008) observes, Singapore, with its long history of immigration going back to its
founding in 1819, is the quintessential “brain gain” city. It has always drawn in
people from abroad who seek to create a better life for themselves and their families. This continuing trend in attracting foreigners is borne out in the recent Census
2010 data in Table 1.1.
Particularly significant as indicated in Table 1.1 is the rise in the number of citizens in one decade. Given that Singapore’s birth rate remains below the required 2.0
replacement level,1 the steady increase in the number of citizens between 2000
(2,985,900) and 2010 (3,230,700) is intriguing. Equally important to note is the
growth in the permanent resident (PR) population from 287,500 in 2000 to
541,000 in 2010. In both cases, the remarkable rise in the number of new citizens
and PRs was due to rigorous recruitment processes on the part of the Singapore
government to actively attract people who possess high level skills and tertiary
education. The genesis of this recruitment strategy can be traced to a decade earlier
when the government announced its foreign talent policy. Speaking at the 2000
National Day Rally, Goh Chok Tong, the former Prime Minister of Singapore,
underlined Singapore’s agenda to lure talented Asian migrants to Singapore in order
to help the country scale new economic heights:
Globalization and technology have made the competitive environment a tougher one for us
…. Talent and knowledge will decide who will be winners and losers. We must therefore
change out mindset towards foreign talent. If we systematically recruit and welcome talent,
and absorb them into our society, they will raise our know-how and competitive edge …. If
we can absorb a steady inflow of global talent into Singapore, our ideas and outlook will
stay fresh and vibrant, and we can be a competitive global player. (Goh 2000; as quoted in

Wee and Bokhorst-Heng 2005, p. 170, Italics mine)

It is against this backdrop of national social engineering that my study is situated,
as I explore the language learning experiences of five Grade 9 (Secondary 3) immigrant students who were studying in an English-medium school, Oak Girls
Secondary, in Singapore. Following Simmons’s (1999a, b) categorization, I refer to
these students as “designer immigrants” as they were recipients of scholarships
funded by the Singapore government. By using a language identity (De Costa and

1

The birth rate was just 1.29 in 2007 (National Population Secretariat 2008, p. 1).


1.1

Global Flow of Migrants

3

Norton 2016; Norton 2013), language ideological (Blommaert 2010; Kroskrity
2010), and circulating ideological (Wortham 2006) framework, I explore the struggles and pressures they encountered in learning English in my year-long critical
ethnographic case study. The school, as my study will illustrate, became not only a
site of control where the interests of the state were promoted, but also a site of
struggle for these designer immigrant students as they wrestled with a hegemonic
language ideology and a cosmopolitan identity that demanded homogeneity by way
of English language standardization. Language acquisition, as I will demonstrate,
was not a gradual and neutral process of internalizing the rules, structures and
vocabulary of a standard language. Rather, as we will find out, the dynamics of their
language acquisition were entangled with deeper social issues that characterize the
nexus of language identity, ideology and migration, resulting in what I describe as a

designer student immigration complex.

1.1

Global Flow of Migrants

The issues surrounding the growing “global flow” of migrants across borders today
is very much a contemporary concern that has not often been recognized in applied
linguistics, much less studied. Such a flow needs to be addressed and investigated
because, increasingly, the complexion of migrants is changing. While the vast
majority of migrants in the past was comprised of refugees who fled their countries
in fear of strife and war, or immigrants with interrupted education who left their
home countries in search of a better life, there is a growing number of mobile and
highly educated migrants who respond to new opportunities and lifestyles in different cities and countries across the world (e.g., Shin 2012; Vandrick 2011). The latter
group of migrants is generally welcomed by the governments of their host countries, such as the Singapore government, and many are often invited to take up citizenship in these countries after being courted or recruited by their governments.
Such a rigorous and carefully engineered process of immigrant selection has resulted
in a new breed of “designer immigrants” (Simmons 1999a, b). The expanding presence of this special group of immigrants consequently destabilizes the traditional
conceptualization of the canonical immigrant, that is, one who is impoverished,
poorly educated and turned away by the governments of the countries to which they
migrate. I would add that the rise in the number of such immigrants also enriches
the “discourses of the (relatively affluent) Global North and (less affluent) Global
South, center vs. periphery … [that] factor into the experiences and reception of the
newcomers as well as … how they are positioned and accommodated” (Duff 2015,
p. 59). And while “South-North” (i.e., movement from developing to developed
countries) migration of talent predominates, the notion of the “global flow” of
migrants is further complicated, as Yeoh and Lai (2008, p. 237) point out, by the
reverse and new flows of such mobile migrants in various directions, thereby resulting in circulatory and not just linear migration. This phenomenon of talented mobile
migrants, or designer immigrants, is examined in greater detail next.

4

1.1.1

1

Foreign Talent and Singapore

Designer Immigration: A Worldwide Phenomenon

The term “designer immigration” was coined by the Canadian sociologist Alan
Simmons to describe this phenomenon of selecting highly-skilled migrants
(Simmons 1999a). Designer migrants, as Simmons notes, are “migrants who are
selected as if they were ‘made-to-order’ to fill perceived shortages in the current
Canadian labor market and business community,” with the ideal migrant being “a
person with very high-level job skills or capital and entrepreneurial experience”
(p. 53). To facilitate the successful procurement of these migrants, several measures, including giving bonus points for occupational skills in areas of current need
and speeding up the processing time for applications, were introduced. Overall, the
shift to a more entrepreneurial immigration policy was part of a broader neoliberal
agenda adopted by Canada as it sought to “reinvent itself as a sophisticated niche
player in a competitive global economy” (Simmons 1999b, p. 45). Indeed, since the
1990s, Canada’s policy on designer migrants has only gained greater depth and
definition. In the spring of 2007, for instance, the Foreign Credential Referral Office
(FCRO) was launched to help internationally trained individuals obtain information
on how to enter the Canadian labor market (OECD 2008, p. 234).
However, Canada has not been alone in orchestrating a designer immigration
policy. According to International Migration Outlook 2007, an annual report published by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
which comprises developed countries in Europe, Asia, Oceania and North America,
over three-quarters of OECD countries would be showing declines in their workingage population between 2010 and 2015 without immigration (OECD 2008, p. 54).
To avert this problem, which threatens to lower the GDP per capita of these countries, several other governments have announced shifts in their immigration policy

towards a more proactive and selective approach to attracting high-skilled migrants.
Germany, for instance, has implemented new legislation to attract highly qualified
persons, especially those needed to promote economic development. A review of
the economic benefits of educating international students revealed that providing
post-study work opportunities would not only help Germany recoup the cost of
education for all international students but would also stem its aging population
trend (O’Malley 2015). In the United States, a Committee for Economic
Development was formed during the Bush administration. The Committee’s report
Reforming Migration: Helping meet America’s need for a skilled workforce called
for a doubling of the number of highly skilled permanent foreign workers admitted
to the United States. The need to create more high-tech visas, in particular, was
highlighted in the report (Committee for Economic Development 2001). This
request has been well heeded, if the steady rise in the number of H-1B visa holders,
which reached a record 315, 857 in 2014, is an accurate measure (UCIS 2015, p. 4).
In describing these social engineering measures, I would like to emphasize that (a)
organizations like the OECD are neoliberal institutions, and (b) many governments
today are also guided by neoliberal impulses that constitute the primary motivation
behind such global moves to attract immigrants. Further, that this global talent war


1.1

Global Flow of Migrants

5

for designer immigrants is not restricted only to Western countries is demonstrated
by Yeoh and Lai (2008), who in their review of “talent” migration in and out of Asia
point out that countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Japan are aggressively
attempting to attract highly skilled workers. For instance, South Korea has implemented its Brain Korea 21 policy to steer the country towards knowledge economy

status through building world-class universities, by increasing emphasis on global
connections and scholarly exchanges. Even Japan, a country that traditionally has
not encouraged immigration, amended its immigration Control and Refugee
Recognition Act in 2006 in order to “increase the opportunities for immigration of
researchers and engineers specializing in information systems” (OECD 2007,
p. 98).
Hence, while efforts have been made to capture select sections of the global
labor force with the requisite skills, competition for skilled migrants has heated up
as many of these potential migrants are targeted even before they complete their
tertiary education. In fact, many countries are competing aggressively to attract and
retain international students who are often viewed as “unfinished” or future talent
(Yeoh and Lai 2008).

1.1.2

Language as a Filtering Tool

Membership into this exclusive club of cosmopolitan citizens (De Costa 2014;
Kenway and Bullen 2005), however, is determined not only by one’s qualifications.
Language often plays a pivotal role in securing membership, and prospective candidates are often evaluated, among other things, according to their competence in the
dominant language of their host country (Extra et al. 2009; Slade and Mollering
2010). In October 2007, for instance, in keeping with a change to the Citizenship
Act, Australia introduced a mandatory test of English ability (OECD 2008, p. 226).
Similarly, in line with the new points-based immigration policy introduced in the
U.K., points are awarded for a migrant applicant’s English language capabilities
( />That language is a factor to sort and sieve future citizens is a primary concern
among applied linguists (e.g., Blommaert 2015; De Costa 2010a; Kanno and Kangas
2014; Norton 2013) investigating issues related to language learning because they
address the fundamental question of who gets included and who gets excluded in
the learning process. Common among this set of critical applied linguists in the

belief that language bears linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991) and the amount of
power an individual can claim in the social world is contingent on his or her linguistic ability and use. In Singapore, the process of abjection, in particular, is amplified
because sorting is done at an early age through its designer immigration program
which targets high ability students from neighboring Asian countries who are as
young as 15. Crucially, there has been a jarring paucity of research worldwide on
designer immigrant students at the high school level. In the United States, much of
the recent research concerning ESL learners has focused on how Generation 1.5


6

1

Foreign Talent and Singapore

Asian students have been stigmatized and the acts of resistance engaged by them in
reaction to being framed in negative, deficit terms. In her study of Vietnamese high
school students, Harklau (2000) examined how their representation as “bad” students resulted in their poor academic performance. By contrast, Talmy (2004, 2008)
focused on the enactment of “linguicism” (Phillipson 1992) on the part of Generation
1.5 Asian students in a Hawaiian high school as a means of distinguishing themselves from newly arrived Asian immigrant students (labeled derogatorily as
“FOBS”, or “Fresh Off the Boat”). Attempts to distinguish themselves from their
newly arrived classmates by refusing to do work in the ESL classroom in turn had
detrimental effects on their academic careers, reminiscent of the fates of the rebellious “lads” in Willis’s (1977) seminal study. Similar fates were met by the participants in studies outside the United States. Findings from Miller’s (2003) Australian
high school-based study, for instance, revealed that Tina, John, and Alicia, who
hailed from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou (China), respectively, were rendered “inaudible” by their classmates and teachers. Overall, while these studies that
are embedded in a critical perspective have examined how power relations influence learning, they do not focus on the challenges that designer immigrant students
at the high school level have to negotiate. In fact, there are hardly any studies on
learners at this level. One exception is De Costa (2007) who, in a different study
involving older students, worked with Grades 11 and 12 designer immigrants from
China in a Singapore high school. The closest studies to date are those that have

interrogated issues surrounding model minority students in the United States.

1.2

Critically-Oriented Research on Model Minority
and Immigrant Youth

The notion of the “model minority” first emerged in the 1960s in association with
Asian Americans who were lauded for their high level of education, economic selfsufficiency, low crime rates, and positive contributions (Lee 2005). Within educational anthropology, Lee (2005, 2009) turned the notion of a model minority on its
head by addressing issues of racism encountered by Asian American students in a
U.S. high school, while Lew (2004) examined how the lack of social capital and
ethnic networks negatively impacted the academic futures of working class Korean
American high school dropouts in Queens, New York. Working with a similar
agenda to investigate model minority youth, sociolinguists Bucholtz (2004) and
Reyes (2007) examined how teens engage in a linguistic negotiation of identity in
relation to stereotypes surrounding Southeast Asian American adolescents.
However, within SLA, researchers have remained conspicuously silent on the issue
of model minorities, with the notable exception of a California-based study conducted by McKay and Wong (1996). Taking up and extending Peirce’s (1995) concept of “investment,” McKay and Wong examined multiple discourses surrounding
their four Mandarin-speaking junior high focal students. Particularly interesting


1.2

Critically-Oriented Research on Model Minority and Immigrant Youth

7

was their analysis of how the model minority discourse circulating in the school and
society produced conflicting results. On the one hand, it positively influenced the
English language development of Jeremy, a student from Taiwan, who constructively used the resources made available to him through this discourse to enhance

his linguistic development. On the other hand, it stirred defiance in Michael, another
Taiwanese student, who assembled his own counter-discourse that subsequently
depressed his linguistic development.
As significant as the insights from McKay and Wong have been in furthering our
understanding of how a model minority social identification of immigrant students
can affect their learning, McKay and Wong did not explicitly underline how the
stratification of the linguistic resources that the students brought with them, along
with the circulating discourses surrounding them, affected their language development and general educational outcomes. Also, the profiles of McKay and Wong’s
focal students and those in the studies identified earlier do not represent another
type of learner whom we are increasingly encountering in our educational institutions today. As noted earlier, much of the educational and SLA research to date has
focused on students of the Generation 1.5 variety, that is, children of first generation
immigrants who may have spent some time being educated in their countries of
origin before starting school in their new home countries. The keen interest in this
group of immigrant students may stem in part from the fact that they constitute, “a
surging demographic in high schools and universities in many immigrant-receiving
countries that tend to be ill-equipped and under-resourced to attend to their specific
needs, abilities, and histories” (Duff 2014, p. 243). Much of the language identity
work on Generation 1.5 students to date has emphasized learner agency and how
these learners overcame odds stacked against them. In his work with an Azeri student, Nasim, originally from Iran, Ronald Fuentes (2012) describes how Nasim
exercised her agency and succeeded at university. Harklau and McClanahan (2012)
and Varghese (2012) also report on the successes of the Latina and Somali students,
respectively, with whom they worked. The agency of Bloch’s (2007) Somali focal
student and Riantseva’s (2012) Russian case participants were also instrumental in
helping them achieve academic success. By contrast, designer immigrant students,
who come to their host countries without their parents, embody a different segment
of the “global flow” of peoples. While this group of learners is also fast populating
academic institutions in developed countries, they are, however, underrepresented
in the SLA literature and other literatures as well.
To date, much of the research on immigrants in SLA has fallen into two broad
categories: refugees or voluntary immigrants, both in search of better lives (for a

detailed discussion of language and migration to the United States, see Dick 2011).
A refugee, according to the United Nations, is someone who “has left their country
of origin or habitual residence and owing to a well-founded fear of persecution for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or
political opinion is unable or unwilling to return” (United Nations 1951/1967,
p. 16). Early SLA work on refugees looked closely at their grammatical development. In his work with a Hmong-speaking Laotian refugee in Hawaii named Ge,
Huebner (1979), for example, focused on Ge’s evolving nominal reference system,