Learning English in Britain: A Journey of Building up the Ideology of 'Chinese National Identity'
Introduction Given the growing population of Chinese students in language schools in Britain, understanding the learning and living experiences of these students in the new academic community and British society has become crucial. When these learners who have already formed a robust sense of ‘identity’ or ‘self-image’ in Chinese culture before coming to Britain move across geographic, linguistic, social, cultural, and ideological boundaries, they will naturally go through intercultural secondary socialisation (Pavlenko, 2001), and their established identities and ideologies will be negotiated and reconstructed through their interactions with the surrounding people. This paper explores the dialectical relationship between ideology and practice by focusing on a Chinese student’s discovery of his national identity during an English language learning sojourn in Britain. Jin’s oral narrative and the data of crosscontext observation provide insights into the development of his Chinese national identity in a mixed-culture environment. His mixed family background makes his story quite different from other young Chinese students who undertake to learn English in Britain.