This inquiry explores six Korean students' personal narratives about their living and learning experiences in their study abroad contexts. My goal is to examine the relationships between learner agency and symbolic power embedded in these six students' second language (L2) sociocultural contexts such as school, home and communities. The theoretical framework is derived primarily from Vygotskian sociocultural theory, Bakhtinian dialogic theory, and Bourdieuian critical approach to language practices. Drawing on an interpretive qualitative approach, I examine social, cultural, historical and political forces that influence the ways these students perceive, evaluate and negotiate their challenges and struggles in their social worlds. In a conventional approach to language studies, students are often seen as passive objects to be controlled by task instructions provided by classroom teachers. A growing number of L2 researchers challenge the artificial distinction between language learners and their social worlds. They emphasize that L2 learning should go far beyond mastery of vocabulary and syntax. However, over-simplified understanding of sociocultural influences on L2 practices can stereotype L2 students from the same cultural background assuming they share similar knowledge, beliefs and values. A reductionistic stance of culture has the danger of neglecting the complexity of L2 individuals' different voices and meaning-making processes. I argue that these L2 learners are far more complex than just 'ESL students' or 'non-native speakers'. I collected the participants' narratives for a six-month period primarily through open-ended interviews, including a variety of documentation such as samples of course work, personal notes, emails, and field notes. The analyses of the data suggests that although all six participants share certain commonalities such as being Korean and being educated in a Korean national educational system, they are quite diverse in the challenges they experience and types of symbolic power they perceive, evaluate and negotiate in their different social worlds. While engaging in various L2 literacy practices, they were consciously crossing different social spaces, taking different positionings, and negotiating among multiple beliefs, values and meanings about social relations of power. Their agency to negotiate the complex social relations of power manifests in the ways they invest in achieving different forms of capital, such as 'cheong' relationships as social capital and searching for meaning in life as spiritual capital. The data implies that L2 students are complex yet active social agents. Thus, these students' struggles in their L2 learning processes should be conceived as a complex process of exercising learner agency in their multiple social worlds, rather than be attributed only to cognitive capability or lack of motivation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.100643 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Lee, Heekyeong, 1971- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Second Language Education.) |
| Rights | © Heekyeong Lee, 2005 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002495631, proquestno: AAINR25192, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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