International students' language experiences and identity negotiations : ELF and multilingualism in Hong Kong higher education

This paper investigates a group of international students’ language experiences and identity negotiations in an English-medium university in multilingual Hong Kong, with particular attention to their use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and multilingual resources. By drawing on narratives elicited from interviews with international students, the study revealed that international students recognized the importance of ELF for academic and social integration, which impacted on their identity constructions in both academic and social settings. Moreover, the study found that international students were heavily invested in expanding their multilingual repertoires, including but not limited to English. They not only reported enhanced proficiencies in Chinese as a result of their social interactions with local Chinese students, but also claimed improvements in their competence in their mother tongue(s) through frequent communication with their co-nationals. Their conscious efforts in the expansion of multilingual repertoires, which appeared to be closely related to their ideologies about the value and status of different languages and about the importance of multilingual competences, contributed to the formation of their positive multilingual identities. Furthermore, their frequent engagements in a range of translingual practices on campus enabled them to construct new identities as creative and flexible translingual speakers.