Symbolic competence in multilingual interactions in a university setting: A complexity analysis

3.1 Research context

The complex and fluid linguistic situation in Hong Kong has been described in a large number of studies (e.g., Gu 2011b; Bolton and Lim 2000; Li 2009; Morrison and Lui 2000; Tse et al. 2007), all of which have acknowledged the long history of English as the sole official language of the former colony. Cantonese, despite being the language most commonly used by Hong Kong’s indigenous Chinese in the political, social and cultural spheres, did not become Hong Kong’s second official language until 1974. The role of China’s national language (Putonghua/Mandarin) in the school curriculum, and the balance between Chinese and English, became a topic of heated discussion after Hong Kong reverted to China (Kirkpatrick and Chau 2008).

Current policy stipulates that Hong Kong’s educational system should produce citizens who are trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English, and biliterate in Chinese and English. There has been a strong public demand for the teaching of English, not only because of the government’s aim to make Hong Kong a world-class city, but also because of the highly pragmatic attitude towards English held by Hong Kong people (Li 2002), who view it as acrolectal and a path to success. In a 2003 sociolinguistic survey conducted in Hong Kong by John Bacon-Shone and Kingsley Bolton, the proportions of the population claiming to have basic competence in spoken English and Putonghua were 69.1% and 72.7%, respectively (Bacon-Shone and Bolton 2005).

In spite of the high percentage of Putonghua speakers, contradictory attitudes towards the use of Putonghua tend to exist in Hong Kong (Tse et al. 2007). On one hand, those who speak the language realize that mainland China’s growing economic power has increased the standing and popularity of Putonghua throughout the world; on the other hand, they either reject or take a negative view of many aspects of mainland China’s social, political and educational systems. For them, language has become endowed with political and ideological associations. Also, Cantonese–English code-switching, which typically involves inserting individual English lexical items into Cantonese-based sentences, is common among Hong Kong’s younger generation (Chen 2008). Researchers argue that English–Cantonese code-mixing is an identity marker for Hong Kong speakers (Li et al. 2000; Luke 1998). This unique mix of Cantonese, Putonghua and English in Hong Kong’s educational system mirrors a linguistic matrix more complex and diverse than that of mainland China, where Putonghua has always been the medium of instruction for primary and secondary students and, as the official national language, holds strong symbolic power (Dong and Blommaert 2009). Dong (2009) further argues that – similarly to a monoglot ideology described by Silverstein (1996) in a USA context, where regional English accents are disqualified in relation to standard English – linguistic ideology in mainland China marginalizes regional dialects and promotes Putonghua.

Tertiary campuses in Hong Kong are multilingual settings, sites full of struggle in relation and response to governmental ideology surrounding multilingualism, public discourse emphasizing the use of English, and diverse language ideologies held by different language-based and cultural groups (Gu and Tong 2012). As Pennycook (2003) stated, “it is not that people use language varieties because of who they are, but rather that we perform who we are by (among other things) using varieties of language” (528). In a recent exploration of language ideologies and language uses among students in a multilingual university in Hong Kong, Gu (2014) found that some Hong Kong students affected a particular Hong Kong style of code-switching between Cantonese and English (using Cantonese as a sentence base) to present a Hong Kong identity, through which to establish a group boundary. For some Hong Kong students, Putonghua is seen as an irrelevant language; to these students, not using Putonghua terms in daily intra-group communication is a means of establishing a Hong Kong identity, as opposed to a more generic Chinese one. On the other hand, mainland Chinese students were found to have set up a Putonghua-speaking community at university, to resist the marginalized status of Putonghua in the eyes of their Hong Kong peers. Furthermore, maintaining that American- or British-accented English is superior to other versions of the language, they practiced speaking ‘standard’ English in order to establish an international identity, differentiating themselves from their Hong Kong peers, who tended to speak Cantonese-accented English (Gu 2014).

This study is part of a larger project investigating linguistic practices in a multilingual university in Hong Kong. The university has a tradition of bilingual education in both English and Chinese and maintains a bilingual policy that takes into account the nature of the academic subject, professional requirements, and the language habits, competence and cultural backgrounds of the students and teachers concerned. Approximately 94% of the students at the university are from Hong Kong, while slightly more than 5% are from mainland China and nearly 1% are international students. Most of the mainland Chinese students at this university are enrolled in its four-year Bachelor of Education programme (in English Language), which trains teachers of English for primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong, and would thus be allowed to seek employment in such schools on graduation. Of the approximately 450 full-time students on this course at the time of this study (academic year 2011–12), around 70% were from Hong Kong and 30% were from mainland China.

3.2 Data collection

All participants were year 3 students who were trilingual in Cantonese, Putonghua and English. Year 3 students were chosen because the length of their exposure to university life made it more likely that they were engaged in multilingual interaction on a daily basis, both in and out of classrooms. With the students’ consent, five in-class group discussions involving students were video-recorded in five teachers’ classes to capture the linguistic behaviors of the students in a classroom context. In addition, the researcher observed and made four audio recordings of nine students (four from Hong Kong and five from mainland China) working in two groups to prepare for a debating contest, and added them to the database as out-of-class data. The use of two complementary sources of data – in-class and out-of-class – presents a more complete picture of students’ linguistic behaviors in multilingual interactions. Altogether, these recordings comprised around nine hours of conversation. The recordings were transcribed according to the Vienna Oxford International Corpus of English (VOICE) protocols (refer to Appendix 1 for transcription conventions). Table 1 provides demographic information about the four students, mentioned by name in this article, who participated in the in-class discussions. Table 2 introduces the background of the coach and the nine participants preparing for the debating contest. All names are pseudonyms.

In what follows, I focus specifically on multilingual practices in cross-cultural conversations. All examples are taken from transcriptions of the audio-recorded interactions, and are given in Chinese and English orthography. English translations are given underneath the verbatim transcriptions.

3.3 Data analysis

The data analysis process was continuous recursive and iterative, and conducted in tandem with data collection, moving back and forth between the data and the related literature (Talmy 2010). Themes and patterns that might potentially answer the research question gradually emerged from the data, and coded categories were constantly evaluated, re-evaluated and reformulated. Three theoretical categories emerged from the data analysis: ‘symbolic spaces and language choice’, ‘language use in relation to timelines’ and ‘flexible multilingualism’. The data extracts representative of the corpus were chosen to illustrate the themes. An analysis of the data extracts, informed by complexity theory, was conducted to gain insights into linguistic practices in the cross-cultural interactions, and to reveal how language choices and uses index the various ways in which the protagonists’ rehearsal of potential identities, language ideologies, histories, and cultural memories are realized in the ongoing discourse. Additional analysis revealed that interlocutors subjectively perceived the shifting dynamics within their interactions, rather than simply viewing language choice as being dictated by some pre-existing and permanent value assigned to each of the languages.

4.1 Symbolic spaces and language choice

Different languages can position their speakers in different symbolic spaces (e.g., Weedon 1987). When using different languages, speakers recognize the symbolic power and social value of this language versus that language in terms of different topics, and take up different subject positions. This is reflected in Excerpt 1 below, in which students preparing for a debating competition with a team from mainland China discuss the debate’s resolution, that “the retirement age should be lowered to create more job opportunities for the young”. Qing, Yuan, and Ying are from mainland China, Tracy and Chrystal are from Hong Kong. The coach is monolingual in English and all the students in the conversation are trilingual in English, Cantonese and Putonghua. This excerpt is representative of the other three in the data corpus of this study, exemplifying how the multilingual students change the immediate interactional context and symbolic balance of power, drawing on the social value of different languages.

In the above excerpt, from Turns 1 to 3 the coach and the Hong Kong student Tracy talk about arguments the affirmative (team or speaker) could possibly make (i.e. making the system more flexible to create more employment opportunities), in English. In Turn 4, Qing suddenly switches to Putonghua; since this is a training session for an English-language debating contest, and since the coach is a monolingual English speaker, it may be assumed that the legitimate or unmarked language to be used in this context would be English; however, the excerpt presents a different story. Putonghua, used by Qing as a language of intimacy, creates a ‘we-language’ context in which her doubts about the argument suggested by the coach and a Hong Kong peer are discussed with her mainland peers. In Turn 6, Ying uses an English insertion (“create unemployment”) in her Putonghua sentence and gives “unemployment” a particular emphasis, which may have been a way for her to convey her key message to her English-speaking coach, while still staying connected to the inner-group discussion. In Turn 7, Tracy, a Hong Kong girl who can speak Putonghua, switches to English, thus inviting the coach to join the discussion; this may be seen as an attempt to wrest control of the conversation from the Putonghua speakers.

In the following two turns, Tracy and the coach make prolonged statements and Tracy mentions that unemployment exists despite employment opportunities. In Turn 10, Yuan uses Putonghua with keyword English insertions to indicate that unemployment is a social problem in China, in hopes of establishing her authority when talking about China. It is interesting to see that, in the following turns, Tracy switches between all three languages. At first she replies to Yuan in Putonghua, and then expands on her explanation in Cantonese. When she criticizes the tendency in China to “label everything different as a problem”, Tracy does so in English (rather than Cantonese), thus distancing herself somewhat from the negative statement. Tracy is linguistically at a disadvantage in Putonghua, and at a disadvantage when it comes to knowledge about the situation in mainland China; however, she avoids getting into details and tries to associate herself with her mainland Chinese partners’ views on social tendencies in the mass media in China, which can be seen in the emphasis she places on “mass media” in Turn 11.

In Turn 12, Ying states her disagreement in English, then switches to Putonghua to introduce the ‘problem’ in mainland China. This may be understood as her intent to invite support from her mainland Chinese peers for her points of view, which differ from those of her Hong Kong peers. Our interpretation could be somewhat confirmed by Tracy’s use of Putonghua in the following turn, which may be seen as Tracy’s acknowledgement of Yuan’s knowledge of mainland China. In Turn 18, after Yuan uses Putonghua to introduce the situation in mainland China, Tracy responds in Cantonese to point out a conceptual difference between mainland and Hong Kong ways of thinking, thus demonstrating her Hong Kong identity, then changes back to English to talk about the current situation. Without responding to Tracy’s point, Qing changes the topic to another problem faced by mainland China: the shortage of professionals (ren cai que kou) in the computer industry. She uses Putonghua jargon that frequently appears in newspapers to indicate her legitimate position vis-à-vis mainland issues. In Turn 23, Tracy uses “OK” to respond to Yuan’s question in Putonghua and then switches to Putonghua. A possible interpretation of this “OK” may be “OK, I also use Putonghua and I acknowledge the legitimacy of Putonghua when talking about something happening in mainland China”. In Turns 23 to 29, all conversations are conducted in Putonghua because of its high symbolic value for topics related to the current situation on the mainland. So, mainland Chinese students use Putonghua to practice their mainland identity and to anchor their information sharing, while Hong Kong students use Putonghua to show solidarity.

The analysis of the above excerpt indicates that the interlocutors adopt re-framing to change the immediate interactional context and regain authority. In this excerpt, when mainland Chinese participants find they do not have an advantage in terms of conceptual reasoning (in which they have received less training than their Hong Kong counterparts), and when their views are labelled by their Hong Kong peers as reflecting common mainland Chinese social tendencies, which are therefore less trustworthy, they make several attempts to refocus the topic on actual extant situations in mainland China, such as employment, job preferences and the shortage of professionals in certain fields. The Hong Kong participants, who wish to gain more knowledge about real events in mainland China, reframe their relationship with the mainland participants by using Putonghua and by seeking more information from them.

The analysis also alerts us to the fact that the marked and unmarked dichotomy in code choice may not explain what happens among multilingual interlocutors. One might expect that, in such an interaction where the more powerful party (the coach) is a monolingual English speaker, choosing to converse in English would be the routine linguistic behavior of the less powerful participants (the students); however, excluding the coach’s five turns in English, only six out of the remaining 24 turns are in English and five of those are uttered by Hong Kong students. Quantitatively, Putonghua and Putonghua–English mixing is accepted in this conversation as an unmarked choice. A closer look indicates that the code-switching seen in multilingual interactions is discourse- and participant-related. The participants strategically draw upon their own linguistic resources, making goal-driven choices to pragmatically express their intentions. In this excerpt, some unexpected code choices (i.e. marked choice) take a dominant role.

This echoes Myers-Scotton’s (1998) view that perceptions of markedness and unmarkedness in multilingual interactions are not categorical, but gradual; they may differ depending on the topics, participants and even the power interplay in the society at large. Complex interplay was involved across contexts, and the indexed meanings of the three languages changed for the trilingual, culturally diverse participants as the context and their positioning changed. In the above excerpt, when the topic is focused on China, Putonghua is used by the mainland Chinese students to establish and legitimize their authoritative knowledge of mainland China. It is also adopted by Hong Kong students, who generally hold a rather instrumental attitude towards Putonghua and associate it with a less civilized social image, perhaps to show their mastery of relevant knowledge about mainland China. This is in strong contrast to local interactions, in which Cantonese or Cantonese-English code-switching is normally used by Hong Kong people as an identity marker and indicator of in-group solidarity. Also in Excerpt 1, when discussing anything not directly related to factual happenings in mainland China, the Hong Kong students revert to English or Cantonese–English code-switching. Although English has long been regarded as a highly prestigious language in Hong Kong and is the lingua franca in this interaction, it is not extensively used. Again, this reflects that a given language may have different indexing meanings in different contexts.

4.2 Language use in relation to timelines

The multilingual speakers’ symbolic competence – their ability to perform and construct various historical perceptions and imaginations – can be seen in the following excerpt, in which four students who are preparing for a debating competition discuss a debate resolution, “university students should take fewer part-time jobs, so as to be more focused on systematic learning”. Jan and Shuang are from mainland China, and Ivy and Fion are from Hong Kong; all are trilingual in English, Cantonese and Putonghua. This excerpt represents two other excerpts from the study’s data corpus that illustrate how space shapes the ways in which people connect and interact with one another and make language choices. The transcript of this audio-recorded conversation is presented and analyzed below.

The participants’ language choices draw on multiple timelines of experience; for example, Fion’s memory of her immersion experience in Australia, Shuang’s emphasis on the ‘good student’ identity in mainland China and her memories of primary and secondary school life, and Ivy’s image of a good teacher. We can see that social capital changes, to a great extent, across different contexts and timescales. In mainland China, Jan and Shuang used to be ‘good students’ with fine academic achievements and high scores on university entrance examinations; in Hong Kong, however, their ‘good student’ identities are challenged by local students because of their lack of knowledge of Hong Kong society and their lack of work experience. They are positioned in this conversation as “bookworms”. Furthermore, in mainland China, Jan and Shuang used to be positively perceived as coming from good families with high economic and social status, while in Hong Kong they are labeled as not being sufficiently able or independent to help their families financially and become financially self-sufficient. While Ivy imagines becoming a teacher who has a wealth of teaching experience from trying different teaching strategies in practice, Shuang imagines being a teacher who has a solid knowledge base built up in university. Imagination is found to be involved – for Ivy, more practice and knowledge of real life can help them to adjust more easily to the work environment; for Shuang, solid knowledge is the basis for pursuing higher degrees and becoming a professional. Therefore, in addition to portraying themselves, the participants in these exchanges are representing their families and their places of origin, or the historical memories of their past experiences and lives. Their utterances in different languages represent the whole repertoire of features comprising their identity, including their family backgrounds, hometown, memories, past experiences, future expectations and current practices; this is converted into “complex and subtle moment-to-moment positions” (Blommaert 2005: 232).

The use of language as a device for group cohesion can be found in Turns 1 and 2, when Jan and Shuang use Putonghua to exchange ideas about the topic – they both think this is a sensitive topic, because Hong Kong students and mainland Chinese students have always had different views about taking part-time jobs (Gu 2011b). In Turn 3, Jan takes the floor to state her negative view about taking a part-time job while in university. In Turn 4, Fion attempts to gain the floor and state her ideas, which may be in opposition to what Jan has said, reflected in such utterances as “but” in English; however, Shuang supports Jan by indicating the potentially negative influence of part-time jobs on students’ assignments and GPA, in Putonghua. Ivy indicates her opposing opinion in English. Fion uses the word “bookworm” in Cantonese, in a soft voice, to describe those who she sees as dull and who spend most of their time studying. We may infer that, by using Cantonese, Fion is not only expressing her own idea, but inviting her Hong Kong peers to share her opinion, because it is common among Hong Kong students to take numerous part-time jobs to support themselves financially. By speaking in a soft voice, Fion may be attempting to lessen the negative meaning of “bookworm”. In Turn 8, Jan argues that the nature of some part-time jobs is quite repetitive but, when she refers to the tutoring jobs popular among Hong Kong students, she lowers her voice. The whole sentence is spoken in English, which may be an effort to set up a professional or official genre and avoid sounding personal.

The emerging division between two group identities is now apparent, although each group has given a different meaning to these two identities. From the Hong Kong students’ perspective, “we” are independent, help “our” families financially, and take opportunities to practice teaching strategies, while “they” are reliant on their parents, are like bookworms, and have little knowledge of society. To mainland Chinese students, “we” have a good foundation of professional knowledge, are good students who produce high-quality assignments and have high GPAs, ^[2] and have supportive families with high social status, while “they” are spending too much time earning money, rather than studying. In Turns 9 to 14, the participants debate the pros and cons of practice and classroom learning, as well as library reading. It seems that, when they argue for themselves, they use their mother language, but when they argue against others’ views, English tends to be used. In Turn 14, when Fion refers to her immersion experience to legitimize her view, she does so in English, to indicate that what is being talked about belongs to a wider world. In Turn 15, Ivy, a Hong Kong student, uses Putonghua to talk about “the second generation of the rich or of the officials,” a reference to students with wealthy, politically powerful parents who do not need to worry about how to make a living, demonstrating her knowledge of current social phenomena in mainland China. In Turn 19, responding to Ivy’s comment on unequal wealth distribution in mainland China, Jan replies in English that this is a global problem, rather than something unique to China. It is interesting to note that Ivy uses English when talking about something global. Ivy continues to share facts about mainland China, using Putonghua to indicate the source of her information, but Cantonese to state the content. Not responding to Ivy’s challenge, Jan tries to hold the floor by re-wording her argument that “we need to study hard during the period of schooling” in English; her language choice can be interpreted as an effort to move the topic away from mainland China, in response to the Hong Kong students’ attempts to disadvantage the mainland Chinese students’ argument by using Putonghua to describe current situations in China.

The characteristics of the above conversation reflect how participants’ social and cultural memories, present practices and visions of the future are carried by language use in multilingual conversations. The excerpt also vividly depicts an exchange of symbolic power between the two parties in an effort to gain an equal footing. The participants show their ability to perform, exploit and construct various histories and values in conversation with others.

4.3 Flexible multilingualism

As also illustrated in the above two excerpts, the participants practice multilingualism freely and flexibly. The following exchange, representing two other excerpts in the data corpus, exemplifies how language ideologies and multilingualism are demonstrated and constructed in cross-cultural interaction; it is taken from an in-class discussion between five third-year students enrolled in the university’s English education program. In this transcript, the students are working together to design a role play activity for a Grade 4 English lesson. Two of the students (May and June) are from Hong Kong, while three (Yun, Jing and Lan) are from mainland China. Unless otherwise indicated, the conversations are in English. The transcript of this audio-recorded conversation is presented and analyzed below.

In the above excerpt, the students discuss whether the teacher needs to provide the first language (L1) translation of some key words, the meaning of which their students may have difficulty understanding. Yun (from mainland China) holds a view opposite to that of her Hong Kong peer, June, because of the language ideology she holds: that students should learn and use “pure English”. This corresponds to the ideology of using only one language at a time, which is prevalent in second/heritage language learning environments around the world. Jing supports Yun’s view, recalling that her secondary school teachers emphasized that the students should produce English with correct structure and grammar, with no code-switching. June points out that they are mixing the languages and switching codes frequently, and that this facilitates their discussion. Responding to the popularity and high social prestige of American and British English in Jing’s secondary school, and maybe in many places in the world, May, who did not speak English with a typical Hong Kong accent during the rest of the discussion, says “we have Hong Kong English”, in a Hong Kong accent, perhaps intentionally to legitimate that variety of English. We may regard this as an empowering process for the Hong Kong students. All the students laugh and Jing responds with “OK”; this can be interpreted as, ‘I agree to use L1 translation in teaching’, but also as ‘I recognize the convenience and efficiency of using three languages in discussion’. Yun further extols the advantages of using Chinese in some circumstances, because “sometimes Chinese is much simpler!” It should be noted that she uses the term ‘Chinese’, which embraces both Putonghua and Cantonese in this context and invites solidarity between the two groups.

We can see the transformation of the participants’ language ideologies in the local context of conversation. For example, Jing becomes more flexible about language use by both teachers and students in English lessons, and all participants agree that, rather than sticking to a rigid English-only view of teaching and learning, L1 can be used to make teaching more effective. Their awareness of different versions of English also emerges, and the students appear to employ their linguistic repertoire to empower themselves and position themselves as trilingual speakers, rather than second language (L2) speakers/learners. The students’ linguistic behaviors may have failed to comply with the ‘English only’ policy in English lessons; however, multilingual communications enable them to construct a multilingual identity, and to develop communication skills that can accommodate linguistic and cultural differences in cross-cultural interactions.