Year 2016

Happy new year!

Really thankful to God for letting me in this year of the Lord.

It's been a semester past. Right now, I'm doing a class for Interterm and it's rather an intense, engaging, and interesting one. It's a class to cover for my lack of Bible class credits. I will definitely post some reflections I had on what we have read on that class, soon.

I'm on the process of registering for Spring 2016 but I already secured classes including: Discourse & Text Analysis, Phonology, Seminar in AL, and FM in L2 & Culture Learning. Lot of things are happening but I don't think this blog will serve that purpose. What I'm sure is that discussions with regards to these courses, or topics from them, are welcomed. I might post an item for each class, or whatnot, and maybe we can start discussing from there.

For my next post, I will divide by sections a paper that I did in my AL class. Just to give you a glimpse: the first paper is about Orthography and Literacy, and the second one will be about Mobile Assisted Language Learning. I will also welcome discussions about them, and let's try to see what good we can get out from our discussion, at least for Applied Linguistics.

Cheers!

On the Need to Broaden the Concept of Ethnic Identity by van de Vijver, Blommaert, & Stogianni (2015)

van de Vijver, F. J. R., Blommaert, J., Gkoumasi, G., & Stogianni, M. (2015). On the need to broaden the concept of ethnic identity. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 46, 36-46. doi:1016/j.ijintrel.2015.03.021

            The researchers identified several constraints in the existing concepts on studying ethnic identity (pp. 36-37) particularly in a highly dynamic and multi-allegiant setting. They then proposed (p. 38) and constructed a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative survey instrument. This is an attempt to accommodate a particular “superdiverse” case, i.e., communities with observable social restratification, cohesion and conviviality, and psychology (pp. 38-40), in a given locality, Oud-Berchem as in this research.

            It is worth noting that the construction of the instrument in this particular study is novel (pp. 40-42). In its context, the instrument showed correlations across Ethnic, Belgian, Familial, Religious, and Cosmopolitan identities (p. 43). It implies that all these identities are correlated in a positive and significant fashion. Evidently, as the researchers argued, this may not be revealed in the traditional structuralist and dichotomy-based approaches (p. 45). The results provide basis, which shows that global experiences of identity and belongingness are present in Oud-Bercham (p. 44). Its presence must be accounted for to truly reveal the allegiances individual actors possess in a multilayered community. This, along with other findings, invites attention to future research to better understand communal cohesion in a community with “superdiversity” (p. 45).

            The approach this study took is its highlight and they did expand the concept of ethnic identity in context. Personally, I would agree that mixed methodology (p. 45), rather than a dichotomy, is a practical way to uncover multiple identities of individuals in a community that has its own historicity of immigration and acculturation. The thought of it would definitely excite young researchers. However, I would not encourage others to readily re-conduct the study without looking for opportunities to improve the questionnaire.