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The Scale of Modernity in the Heritage Language Classroom

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Abstract

Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received significant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within which social identification and learning take place. This paper problematizes modernity as a scale of its own and investigates it in the context of the heritage language classroom discourse at a German high-school in Berlin. Microethnographic analyses of 10th-grade classroom interactional data reveal how Turkish heritage language students appropriate Turkish modernity and debate identity models around it while at the same time bring to the table German/Western modernity and its contents. The article sheds light on the multiplicity of heritage language identities and situates scales as an important determinant in their construction.
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Journal of Language, Identity & Education
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hlie20
The Scale of Modernity in the Heritage Language
Classroom
Işıl Erduyan
To cite this article: Işıl Erduyan (2020): The Scale of Modernity in the Heritage Language
Classroom, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, DOI: 10.1080/15348458.2020.1791712
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2020.1791712
Published online: 07 Oct 2020.
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The Scale of Modernity in the Heritage Language Classroom
Işıl Erduyan
Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey
ABSTRACT
Discourse and identity practices in heritage language contexts have received
signicant attention in applied linguistics in recent years. One line of research
in this realm has sought to adopt scales, the spatiotemporal niches within
which social identication and learning take place. This article problematizes
modernity as a scale of its own and investigates it in the context of the
heritage language classroom discourse at a German high-school in Berlin.
Microethnographic analyses of 10th-grade classroom interactional data
reveal how Turkish heritage language students appropriate Turkish moder-
nity and debate identity models around it while at the same time bringing to
the table German/Western modernity and its contents. The article sheds light
on the multiplicity of heritage language identities and situates scales as an
important determinant in their construction.
KEYWORDS
Classroom discourse;
identity; microethnography;
scales; Turkish as a heritage
language
Introduction
The inherent relationship between heritage language (HL) and identity has long been acknowledged in
relation to the various definitions of the term “heritage” and their implications for policy and
pedagogy (e.g., Hornberger & Wang, 2008; Valdés, 2005). Meanwhile, HL identity as a construct of
its own has received increasing attention both in HL research and in the context of the identity turn in
SLA (De Costa & Norton, 2016). Although much of this work has centered on northern American
settings, an array of ascriptions and definitions, and, in turn, approaches to HL identity have been in
circulation across Europe, too (De Bot & Gorter, 2005). In the case of Germany, the focus of this
article, alongside a number of terms including mother tongue (Muttersprache), heritage language
(Herkunftssprache) has been used in research and practice more often (Pfaff et al., 2017). This
preference bears a range of implications for identity, as the term heritage grants more agency to
speakers (Hornberger & Wang, 2008), and this agency is more relevant today with increasing numbers
of 3
rd
and 4
th
generation students having looser connections with Turkish, and those with bi-national
parents learning Turkish for more practical purposes (Küppers et al., 2014).
Turkish as an HL is spoken by the largest group of post-World War II immigrants in Germany. Yet,
against the high visibility of Turkish students in German schools, and the continuous existence of
Turkish taught as an HL in some form or another in mainstream education, research focusing on the
identity practices in the Turkish HL classrooms is still far from satisfactory. Particularly compared
with the case of Chinese or Spanish HL in the United States, Turkish in Germany, or Europe at large,
has not received any comparable attention in research in terms of linguistic identity practices in
instructional settings. In an effort to partially respond to this gap in literature, the present article
problematizes Turkish HL identity as a construct of its own by focusing on a 10
th
grade Turkish HL
classroom discourse at a Gymnasium type of high school in Berlin. In order to do so, the article focuses
on scales as an analytical unit, “the spatiotemporal envelopes,” within which developmental and social
identification processes take place (Wortham, 2006). A scalar focus aligns well with the analysis of HL
CONTACT Işıl Erduyan isilerduyan@gmail.com Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey.
JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY & EDUCATION
https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2020.1791712
© 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
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