CHOOSING TO USE CANTONESE AT SCHOOL 1
Following the work of the interactionist sociolinguists just mentioned, I begin this analysis of language choice with the belief that people associate particular languages with membership in particular social groups. Put a little differently, I work with the idea that particular languages symbolize particular social identities. At Northside, most Cantonese-speaking students bora in Hong Kong used Cantonese to speak to other students born in Hong Kong. The use of Cantonese was associated with membership in the Cantonese-speaking community at the school. It symbolized a Hong Kong Canadian identity. The choice to use Cantonese to seek and maintain member ship in the Cantonese-speaking community was related to the students' goals of academic and social success at school. To illustrate, research in a finite mathematics class revealed that the use of Cantonese allowed students to gain access to friendship and assistance that helped them achieve good marks in the course. Having friends in the classroom (achieving social success and collecting social capital) was related to the goal of a getting high or passing mark (achieving academic success and collecting cultural capital) in several ways.
First, friends explained things you didn't understand, for example, an explanation the teacher had given of a math concept, or the reason an answer to a math problem was not correct. Second, friends encouraged you to contest a mark a teacher had given you on an assignment, quiz, or test if they thought the teacher had made a poor evaluation judgment. This is illustrated in the following exchange where one of the students, Lawrence, was trying to figure out why the math teacher, Mrs. Lo, had taken three marks off an answer he had given in one of the problems on a quiz. He didn't think his answer was completely wrong and wanted to ask Mrs. Lo to reconsider the mark she had given him. Eddy and Cindy were helping Lawrence figure out why his answer was not completely wrong when Cindy realized that Eddy had also correctly answered one of the questions that had been evaluated as partly incorrect.
1 Some of the ideas were first discussed in Goldstein (1997).
