Korean ESL Students’ Ambivalence: Desire to Have and Desire to Avoid Communication with American Friends
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This article reports on a qualitative case study exploring how Korean students studying ESL in an intensive language program in the US perceive American friends. The findings of this study reveals that the Korean ESL students tended to have ambivalence between (a) the desire to have American friends and communicate with them and (b) the desire to avoid communication with Americans. Drawing on cultural and educational contexts in Korea, I provide an in-depth interpretation of the first desire. As a way to understand the second desire, I present various aspects of the identities they enacted in their real or imagined communication and friendships with Americans: being sensitive to age in friendships, being sexually conservative, being a benefit-taker, being an out-group member, being powerless, and being disrespected. As these identities contrast with their desired self-images, they felt a sense of identity vulnerability, which appeared to make them develop the second desire and feel reluctant to approach Americans. I argue that their identities and these resulting consequences account for, at least in part, the discontentment of the first desire. Drawing on its potential to provide opportunities to practice the target language, I suggest that SLA researchers and ESL/EFL professionals should give more attention to intercultural friendships between ESL students and native speakers.
Abstract
This article reports on a qualitative case study exploring how Korean students studying ESL in an intensive language program in the US perceive American friends. The findings of this study reveals that the Korean ESL students tended to have ambivalence between (a) the desire to have American friends and communicate with them and (b) the desire to avoid communication with Americans. Drawing on cultural and educational contexts in Korea, I provide an in-depth interpretation of the first desire. As a way to understand the second desire, I present various aspects of the identities they enacted in their real or imagined communication and friendships with Americans: being sensitive to age in friendships, being sexually conservative, being a benefit-taker, being an out-group member, being powerless, and being disrespected. As these identities contrast with their desired self-images, they felt a sense of identity vulnerability, which appeared to make them develop the second desire and feel reluctant to approach Americans. I argue that their identities and these resulting consequences account for, at least in part, the discontentment of the first desire. Drawing on its potential to provide opportunities to practice the target language, I suggest that SLA researchers and ESL/EFL professionals should give more attention to intercultural friendships between ESL students and native speakers.
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