Multilingual Construction of Identity: German-Turkish Students at School

Abstract

This book focuses on multilingual identity construction across language
classrooms at a multiethnic downtown high school (Gymnasium) in Berlin. Through linguistic ethnographic lenses, the analyses center on five multilingual students of Turkish descent in their interactions in German, Turkish, and English classes throughout three academic semesters. Besides a total of 130 lessons observed and more than 300 pages of handwritten fieldnotes taken in these observations, a total of 11 interviews with the participants and 10 interviews with the teachers have constituted the data set for the study. The microethnographic analyses of these data have been conducted through the lenses of timescales (Wortham, 2006). Findings illuminate how multilingual identities are constructed through linguistic performances on multiple timescales, how these performances cross-linguistic boundaries, and how linguistic performances within each timescale relate to each other across the
three language classes.
In addition to presenting a book-length treatment of scalar analysis of
classroom interactions, this volume is distinctive in terms of attending to the everyday linguistic practices of a single group of multilingual students with immigrant background in the context of mainstream schooling in Europe. Besides, by focusing on Turkish students enrolled at a Gymnasium type of high school, the book depicts a much-understudied group, namely, higher achieving students of immigrant descent.

Full text

Erduyan Multilingual Construction of Identity
ISBN: 978-3-8382-1201-2
Reporting on a linguistic ethnographic study, Işıl Erduyan explores
multilingual identity construction of high school students with Turk-
ish descent enrolled in a downtown high school (Gymnasium) in
Berlin. She focuses on naturally occurring classroom interactions
across German, Turkish, and English classes and attends to the
complex relationship between identities and multilingual repertoires
through a scalar analytical perspective. Her ndings demonstrate
how multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires are bound by lin-
guistic performances within and across multiple timescales. The
study takes an innovative path by attending to the everyday linguis-
tic practices of a group of multilingual immigrant students with the
same national background through linguistic ethnographic lenses
in the context of mainstream schooling in Europe, and by focusing
on a much-understudied group, namely higher achieving students
of immigrant descent enrolled in a German high school.
Dr Işıl Erduyan is an assistant professor at the Department of
Foreign Language Education, Boaziçi University, Istanbul. Her
research interests include multilingualism, identity, classroom pro-
cesses, and qualitative methodology. She has completed her PhD
in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Wisconsin-
Madison and published several papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Vol. 16
MULTILINGUAL CONSTRUCTION
OF IDENTITY
GERMAN-TURKISH ADOLESCENTS
AT SCHOOL
ibidem
ibidem
Vol. 16
Işıl Erduyan
An Interdisciplinary Series of the
Centre for Intercultural and European Studies
Fulda University of Applied Sciences