Shuang Wang

Hi, I am Shuang from the Educational Statistics and Measurement program. This is my third year in the program. I am originally from China where I used to be a linguistic instructor in college. I mainly worked with college students from Mongolia, a minority group in China. They are the Mongolian people living on the Chinese side of the China-Mongolia border. They speak Mongolian as their mother tongue. Besides teaching them the Chinese language, I also enjoyed participating in their conversations about their minority identity and their future plans.

I have been in this program for two years. My current interest in immigrant or refugee children relates to my concern about the future of the minority identity in China. I found that some of them had realized they had a weaker minority identity due to the overwhelming mainstream culture. They have to speak very good Chinese if they wish to earn more working outside their hometown. Therefore, the trend is that fewer of the Mongolian students will be motivated to learn and use the Mongolian language, and it might finally disappear in China. I believe, even though the two are not the same, working with minority identity in China can certainly parallel the experience of working with immigrant or refugee children in the US.

November 2016