Identity re-construction in a new habitus: An investigation of the language-related educational experiences of immigrant Mainland Chinese students in a multilingual university in Hong Kong

This chapter presents a qualitative study of the language-related educational experiences of a group of immigrant mainland Chinese students in a multilingual university in Hong Kong. Drawing on interview data, this study explored the construction process of the language ideologies of these students and the social, contextual and interpersonal factors that may influence the construction. This study identified the problems and issues that Hong Kong university academics need to address in order to build a more inclusive learning environment to accommodate the language needs of these Chinese students. Furthermore, this study explored effective ways of maintaining cultural and linguistic diversity in the multilingual universities in an era of globalisation. This study provided implications as to how the immigrant students can employ the multilingual practices as a symbolic resource instead of as a disadvantage constructed by the institutional ideologies. Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.