Racialization and English learning: the experiences of Nepali secondary school students in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT This paper reports on an inquiry that explored how a group of Nepali secondary school students discursively reconstructed and interpreted their English learning in Hong Kong. In the study we collected data from 30 participants through participatory observation, in-depth unstructured interview and taking field notes in two secondary schools. The analysis of the data revealed that the participants generally interpreted learning English as an essential means to construct the racial images they identified with, and otherwise resist being racialized in and outside school. The findings suggest that the participants tended to construct English as their mother tongue with an anti-racist stance. These findings offer insights into the role of racialization in language learners’ learning of English and their pursuit of desirable identities in postcolonial contexts like Hong Kong. They also imply the need to design and adopt an appropriate pedagogy to redress the inequitable distribution of educational resources for minority language learners.