Social capital

The first external reason, and one which has been discussed extensively throughout this thesis, is the participants’ social capital. In a large part, due to the age of the participants in the study, this is determined by their parents’ social capital. Another determinant is their geographic location and the perceived benefits that English can have in their immediate context. “[L]earners invest in particular practices not only because they desire specific material or symbolic benefits, but also because they recognize that the capital they possess can serve as affordances to their learning”

(Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 46). But as we see in this data, this can be extended to include potential affordances to work life as well. It has been found that the participants experienced changes –in some cases profound changes- in their attitudes towards English after they graduated from college.

The participants who realized English could not offer any substantial help for their work share one common factor: they had all settled in a small city/ town in or near their original hometowns. This implied that there are few foreign companies and foreigners so they seldom have opportunities to use English in their work places.

Bourdieu uses social capital to explain the cold realities of social inequality. Here, social capital reflects the very worst side of the saying, ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ (Keirl, 2011, p. 592). In other words, as Darvin and Norton (2015) explain, the desire to engage and invest in international communities of English speakers may be seen as a way to increase their social capital, but these perceived benefits may not necessarily become actual ‘controvertible value’.

As mentioned above, it appears that the key feature of their social capital is related to their family background. This is illustrated, for instance, by Cherry’s story. Her social

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capital, linked to her parent’s civil service background and her uncle settling in the USA, results in specific advantages for her academic achievement compared with her peers. Her story reinforces Liu’s (2012) examination of the factors that motivated middle school students from different social classes to learn English in China.

According to the study, investment in English education varied significantly across distinct social classes. Based on the data from the participants, this study corroborates the notion that with growing social inequality in China, English education is increasingly becoming a site for the reproduction of social-class differences (Butler, 2013; Zou & Zhang, 2011).

As it has been discussed in chapter 2, social capital is the sum of the actual as well as potential resources that can be mobilized or used to advantage oneself through membership in social networks or social connections and organizations. For the participants, their parents and their social network occupy the main part of their social capital.

Indeed, the participants’ parents’ involvement has had significant effects on their lives, ranging across school selection, leisure activities, establishment of values, even having an impact on their choice of jobs and marriage. The interviews indicate that the participants place importance on their parents’ active involvement in the English learning process. For instance, Cherry’s father paid considerable attention to her development and tried his best to keep her engaged in her English learning, including buying her books and discussing the book with her and watching English movies together. In contrast, Ding’s parents were less involved (or at least their participation was not highlighted in the interview). For Ding, his parents –in particular his mother- were seen more as a burden than an affordance and he explicitly discouraged his mother from participating in school activities due to her handicap, thereby avoiding teasing from his classmates. At the same time, these contrasting stories highlight the agency of the learner. Ding, who has more limited economic and social capital and

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comes from a poorly resourced learning environment, eventually becomes highly invested (and continues to invest) in the English-spoken community in order to overcome the “systemic patterns of control” (Darvin & Norton, 2015) in the job hiring process in China.

The deployment (or not) by the participants’ parents of their social capital is also indicative of whether they align themselves to the perpetuated ideologies concerning the affordances of learning English in China. Darvin and Norton (2015) argue that

“ideologies are dominant ways of thinking that organize and stabilize societies while simultaneously determining modes of inclusion and exclusion, and the privileging and marginalization of ideas, people, and relations” (p. 44). However, as they also point out, and following Blommaert’s (2005) argument, individuals may act according to dominant “hegemonic practices” (…) “without necessarily subscribing to the ideology that informs them” (Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 44). This underscores a greater recognition of individual agency (as seen in the previous example of Ding).

The study also foregrounds a “relatively neglected problem [that] is how individuals derive social capital from more than one context and the extent to which they benefit from the capital in each” (Dufur, Parcel, & Troutman, 2013, p. 1). As these same authors explain:

There are theoretical reasons to distinguish between the capital created in the family and that created at school. The ties created between parents and children are strong, the result of repeated and frequent interactions; because the parent–

child bond is one of the most intimate relationships in early life, we would expect the social capital created in families to exert a heavy influence on child academic outcomes, even into adolescence. (p. 3)

At the same time, these researchers do not dismiss the notion that “social capital

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created in disparate contexts may still be interrelated” (p. 6). And while this study cannot deem to provide the in-depth analysis that the aforementioned study undertakes, it does corroborate their arguments “that investments in different social sites may potentially lead to different returns” and “social capital is site-specific” (p.

17). Similar to the findings of Dufur, et al. (2013), this study also demonstrates that investment may be “best considered as being created across multiple contexts” (p. 17), co-created by both school and parents. For instance, extracurricular activities involve investment of both the school (creating, administering and monitoring of activities) and the parents (payment, transport, emotional support to join and continue the activities).

The data in this study show that local factors may affect the parents’ abilities or willingness to invest in English language learning. In some cases the parents lack the interactional strategies to successfully deploy their social and cultural resources (e.g.

Serena, Ding) whereas both Lily and Cherry’s families went out of their way to provide resources and opportunities for their daughters to have access to English.

Ding’s resistance to his mother attending the parents meeting because he felt ashamed of her disability resulted in the lack of communication between family and school, and presumably affecting his English learning to a certain extent. In a similar manner, Serena’s parents worked in a factory far away from Bright Secondary School resulting in infrequent contact between Serena and her parents, and it was obvious that the communication between her parents and the school was not very regular.

In contrast, Lily and Cherry’s parents made use of the social capital, including their social network to support their daughters’ learning. The families of these two English learners tried their best to maintain and enhance their daughters’ social positions by converting useful resources into forms of cultural, social as well as economic capital and tangible advantages, including relocation to gain access to better schooling and

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better conditions for university entrance exams (Cherry) as well opportunities to speak and learn English due to their status as civil servants (Lily). It can be assumed that this is indirectly related to an acceptance of prevailing ideologies, which has predisposed them to think and act in certain ways (Darvin & Norton, 2015) –in particular the acceptance of the need for English for social and economic mobility in China. Or as Block (2017) puts it, “how the English language is a key element in increasingly instrumental conceptions of the ideal citizen in different countries around the world” (p. 43)

As discussed in chapter 2, guanxi, whose literal meaning is “connections” or

“relationships”, has an actual meaning far beyond this, as sometimes relationships are not necessary to produce guanxi. Coming from rural areas, most of the participants’

parents were unlikely to have relatives or acquaintances in powerful or influential positions as “parental networks tend to be homogeneous with respect to class (…).

Working class and poor networks do not encompass middle-class parents” (Horvat, Weininger, & Lareau, 2006, p.465). Seven of the ten participants (in the initial research cohort- only four have been analyzed in detail here) asserted that if they could have gone to a better school or class, their English grade would be much better than now. Their assertions may not be that far off the mark. As Block has argued, studies support this:

[…] it is also evident wherever English medium instruction has been integrated into mainstream education, a process engendering situations in which it is children and young adults from middle- and upper-class positions in society who have the most and best quality access to English (Block, 2017, p. 49).

And similar to Dufur et al. (2013), this study’s findings also “suggest the need to study the effects of social capital in other contexts [not just inequality in school settings], particularly when studying inequality among adults” (p. 19). All the college

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participants were raised in working-class peasant families. Their parents’ cultural, economic and social capital were limited enough to create barriers for the participants’

access to university and subsequent job choices. As a consequence, it turns out that English is unable to serve as a valuable form of cultural capital as they had expected:

in the end, it does not bring them economic as well as social capital, at least not for all of them.

Still, there are unanticipated affordances that they had not perceived previously and which allow them to engage with English speaking communities such as Ding’s possibility of learning about exported mechanical parts (and perhaps eventually leading to participation in larger international communities of airplane mechanics via Internet), or his chance to talk to his ‘near-native’ English teacher who has studied in Australia, Cherry’s use of English with her friends to keep secrets from their parents and eventual acceptance at her school as a ‘popular girl’, Serena’s role as language broker at both an urban hospital and as translator for the factory where her parents’

work, and Lily’s job as an English teacher in a private school.