SECOND LANGUAGE SOCIALIZATION IN A BILINGUAL CHAT
ROOM: GLOBAL AND LOCAL CONSIDERATIONS
This paper considers how global practices of English on the Internet intersect with local practices
of English in the territorial or national sphere in constructing the language experiences of
immigrant learners. Using a multi-contextual approach to language socialization, this paper
examines the social and discursive practices in a Chinese/English bilingual chat room and how
this Internet chat room provides an additional context of language socialization for two teenage
Chinese immigrants in the US. Analysis of discourse, interview, and observational data reveals
that a mixed-code variety of English is adopted and developed among the focal youth and their
peers around the globe to construct their relationships as bilingual speakers of English and
Cantonese. This language variety served to create a collective ethnic identity for these young
people and allowed the girls to assume a new identity in speaking English that doesn't follow the
social categories of English-speaking Americans versus Cantonese-speaking Chinese in their
local American context. This paper makes the case for studying how people navigate across
contexts of socialization in the locality of the nation-state and the virtual environments of the
Internet to articulate new ways of using English.