Contemporary Bilingual Life at a Canadian High School: Choices, Risks, Tensions, and Dilemmas

This article reports on a four-year critical ethnographic study (1996-2000) that investigated how immigrant high school students who were born in Hong Kong used Cantonese as well as English to achieve academic and social success in a Canadian school where English was the language of instruction. Working with Pierre Bourdieu's notions of capital, social fields, and markets and Angela Valenzuela's notion of peer social capital, the author argues that immigrant students found a meaningful way to acquire the cultural capital of the dominant society (i.e., good grades, educational credentials, entree into higher education, and access to middle-class and upper middle-class professions) by using ethnic-sociolinguistic resources and channels. However, since these resources and channels were not consistently legitimated by the school, their use created different kinds of dilemmas and tensions for the students and teachers that needed to be negotiated in creative ways.