Korean Immigrant Women’s Identity Negotiation: Language Learning from a Post-Structuralist Perspective

This research project examines how twelve immigrant women from Korea practice literacy, and develop their identities in a new context in the United States, taking into account cultural and historical perspectives. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of Korean immigrant women’s sense of identities. This study uses the framework of post-structuralism in which language is treated as the site of identity construction. With the post-structuralist arguments, this study researches the relationship between the language learner and the social world, and integrates the language learner and the language learning context, developing a theory of identity. This is qualitative research that includes case study methodology and narrative analysis. This study shows how Korean immigrant women negotiated their mother identity at the level of their daily lives within the larger process of immigrant lives while living in the English dominant context. That addresses where they invested themselves and what made them focus on it. This research also studies how the Korean immigrant women’s literacy practice influenced the formation of a new identity and the formation of their social network. It also describes how the literacy practices helped to link the shift from one culture to the other. It argues how the Korean immigrant women accounted for their identity within the larger social contexts of their workplace, focusing on their language practices. Many of the findings in this study are associated with the relationship between language and power. Finally, this study concludes that the immigrant women’s migration was an on-going process in which their settlements in the United States are linked to their life patterns and social relationships. Their identities should be looked at not only as socially constructed and situated but also as dynamic, contradictory, and constantly changing across time and space. The immigrant women as second language learners have various cultural experiences and should be considered from a multi-lingual and multi-cultural perspective.