Stories of names: exploring Chinese high school language-other-than-English learners’ foreign name(s) usage and its role in multilingual identity construction

Abstract

Names serve as a rudimentary bond that connects us to the world. The relationship between language learners’ foreign names adoption and their identity construction has been receiving increased attention. With most studies conducted in English-learning contexts, this study contributes to this line of research by adopting a multilingual framework to explore the role of name choices in the construction of Chinese high school language(s)-other-than-English learners’ multilingual and linguistic identities. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten students who studied multiple foreign languages, focusing on their self-perceptions in relation to different names and their stories of identity negotiation through name usage in various social and linguistic settings. Findings show that names are vehicles of meaning that transmit messages to both the bearer and the people around them. The learners adeptly navigated among names of different linguistic origins, which enriched their identity as multilinguals. The choice, creation, adoption and rejection of foreign names reflected learners’ agency along with their struggles as multilingual learners and users on various sociocultural levels. It is argued that learners’ usage or non-usage of foreign names and their multilingual identity share a co-constitutive relationship and that names reflect, perform and shape the bearers’ multilingual identity.