The Social Organization of High School Sojourner Experiences: At the Intersection between Corporate Transnationalism and Educational Processes.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Despite the urgent need to improve US education for the ever-increasing population of recently-arrived secondary English language learners (ELLs) (Gandara & Baca, 2008; Lazarin, 2006), relatively little attention has been paid to the unique challenges and struggles these ELLs encounter. This three-paper dissertation aims to contribute to the development of scholarly knowledge of transnationalism and secondary ESL education by investigating how the everyday experience of Japanese high school sojourner students---a group of late-entrant transnational ELLs---is socially and institutionally organized. This research uses a sociological method of inquiry known as institutional ethnography (Smith, 1987, 2005).
The first paper examines strategies that Japanese sojourners use to negotiate the institutional demands of US high school life while also calculating how their choices and performance will promote access to higher education in Japan. Despite the temporo-spatial constraints imposed by corporate transnationalism, Japanese sojourners actively carve out their future educational paths across borders through the effective but high-stakes strategy of graduating a year early from US high schools. I call this early graduation scheme a gambit because the sojourners sacrifice beneficial opportunities and even risk their graduation itself in the hope of securing a positional advantage upon their return to Japan. This paper addresses the sojourners' distinctive educational experiences and needs characterized by the involuntary, transient, and precarious nature of their stay in the US.
The second paper examines the realities of high-stakes testing experienced by Japanese sojourners, particularly late-entrant ELLs, focusing on one big risk factor in early graduation gambit---state-mandated high school exit exams---and the sojourners' strategies for maneuvering the academic and linguistic challenges posed by the exams. These Japanese ELLs deliberately flunk the state English language proficiency tests and maintain the ESL status in order to avoid losing ESL accommodations, without which they would have little hope of passing the high school exit exams. This paper highlights the underlying issue of test validity and fairness and the importance of ensuring equitable treatment for transnational ELLs.
The third paper examines how the organizational structure of US public high school education regulates late-entrant Japanese sojourners' second language (L2) interactional opportunities, opportunities which the second language acquisition (SLA) and L2 learning literature has found necessary for successful L2 development (e.g., Long, 1996; Lantolf, 2000). Findings show that late-entrant Japanese sojourners' peer interactions and social lives differ markedly from those of long-term sojourners who came to the US as elementary students, and that American high schools' structural constraints draw social boundaries, and limit interaction, between ELLs and American students. Intertwined with the school organizational structure are ideological discourse on limited English proficiency, marginalizing ELLs and imposing different academic expectations on sojourners who stay in versus those who test out of the ESL program. The three papers together show how the actualities of Japanese high school sojourners' lives in a local setting are translocally coordinated at the intersection of corporate transnationalism and educational policies and practices.