This study advances the knowledge of identity construction through language by bridging the gap between the meso-level of institutional practices, the micro-level of individual learners' investment, and the macro-level of the national language education policy and ideology. The findings bear significant implications for policy makers, language teachers, and ethnic minority female students.
"Multilingual learners confront challenges not only in mastering new languages but also in forming new identities. Guided by Darvin and Norton's (2015) investment model, which looks at the intersection of identity, capital an ideology, and Miller and Kubota's (2013) conceptualization of 'gendered identity,' we traced the learning of Chinese and English of four Uyghur women from Xinjiang who attended a coastal Chinese university. We adopted an ethnographic approach (McCarty, 2015) to investigate how these Uyghur women navigated the Chinese education system up to university level. Our findings revealed that moving from their less developed hometown to a major city, participants expanded and enriched their repertoire of symbolic and material resources on which they could rely to effect more powerful social memberships and negotiate their educated Uyghur identities. Their Chinese and English language learning journey and the educational experiences in the host community hence changed the way Uyghur women 'understand their relationship to the world …, and how [people] understand their possibilities for the future' (Norton, 1997, p. 410). They viewed their linguistic capital (Bourdieu, 1991) as crucial to their success in school, and the education they received empowered them to act as elites to better promote the development of Xinjiang upon their return to their home province. By taking a bottom-up approach to language policy (Canagarajah, 2015), we demonstrate how the struggle and agency in their journey further highlighted the necessity to cultivate talents, particularly women, from ethnically diverse areas, to facilitate their upward social mobility.This study advances the knowledge of identity construction through language by bridging the gap between the meso-level of institutional practices, the micro-level of individual learners' investment, and the macro-level of the national language education policy and ideology. The findings bear significant implications for policy makers, language teachers, and ethnic minority female students."
