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Adult Immigrant English Learners’ Perceptions Of Their Multilingual And Multicultural Identities, Greta Mcelvain

School of Education and Leadership Student Capstone Theses and Dissertations

Adult immigrant English learners (ELs) must navigate living in a new country while also learning a new language. These immigrants are becoming both multicultural and multilingual. It has been established in prior literature that as immigrants adjust to living in a new culture with a different language, they experience both a language (Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015) and cultural (Gibson, 2001, as cited in Schwartz, 2006, p. 2) shift. These shifts can sometimes result in immigrants losing connection to their first languages (Zhang, 2010) or their home cultures Gu and Lai (2019). Self-reflection activities have been shown to allow individuals to …