This diploma thesis deals with the process of acculturation of immigrants in the Czech Republic. The aim is to analyze the process of acculturation and its particular phases in case of foreigners with different nationalities and identify a possible tendency in ways they are able to integrate into the new society, including factors, which can possibly affect this process. Outcomes of the thesis are concrete recommendations for immigration authorities in the Czech Republic and determination of acculturation strategy, which is characteristic for immigrants.

This dissertation reports on the narrated experiences of nine adult ESL learners enrolled in an Intensive English Program (IEP) as they negotiated a sense of belonging to new linguistic communities of practice outside of their home countries. In this qualitative multiple-case study, I analyzed first-person accounts of the language socialization process by which the learners’ participation in new social communities resulted in shifts in their social positionings and changes in their self-concept. In my analysis, I drew upon theoretical frameworks that view learning as a situated social practice in which individuals form new identities as a result of their (non)participation in communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998). In order to investigate the research problem, I conducted ethnographic forms of data collection over a six-month period. I became a participant observer in an advanced level Listening and Speaking course during one semester and conducted regular formal classroom observations. In addition to observations, I conducted individual in-depth interviews with the learners, and they participated in a photo-narrative assignment in which they documented their experiences through photography. This camera project culminated in a formal, narrative presentation to the class, which was recorded and used for analysis. The five women and four men who became the focal participants of the study were diverse in age, academic and professional ambitions, and cultural and linguistic background. The findings of the study presented in this dissertation represent my interpretive analysis of the participants’ narratives of departing their home countries and negotiating a meaningful sense of self vis-à-vis the host community as well as the various transmigrant communities that were important to them. The findings show that, through the process of L2 learning and transmigration, the participants constructed migrant identities (Block, 2007), and these identities could be both expansive and restrictive. Additionally, the findings show the ways in which these language learners were agentic in accessing L2 communities and forging attachments within them, and how these moves were designed as “answers” to how they were discursively positioned within the worlds that were important to them. / text

The article addresses the prospective responsibility of states to protect citizens from emigration pressures. After establishing the moral weight of theinterest in staying, the article proceeds to explain why the interest to stay is comparatively more resistant to restrictions than the interest in exercising freedom of movement across borders. On this basis, the argument is then advanced that immigration fees can be charged on (well-off) immigrants as a means to protect economically vulnerable residents in recipient countries from emigration pressures. The argument that I will advance is in at least one sense nonconsequentialist: it accounts for the need for immigration fees without relying on (problematic) assumptions about the consequences of immigration. Furthermore, the argument is also realistic in so far as it accepts that states have the right to restrict immigration.