Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) is one of the most ethnically diverse territories in China, with the Muslim Uyghurs forming the largest minority group. Given its importance in national unity, stability and economic development, as well as its strategic role in the Belt and Road Initiative, the Chinese government enacted policies to integrate Xinjiang with mainland China. As one of such policies, the government implemented a project that aims to use the educational resources in mainland universities to cultivate ethnic minority talents from XUAR. Compared to Uyghur students, students in mainland China have more access to educational resources. This leads to an education inequity between Uyghur and the majority Chinese students. Additionally, Uyghur students are required to learn Uyghur (i.e., mother tongue) as their first language, Chinese (i.e., the dominant language in China) as second language, and English (i.e., a required language for college graduation) as third language. A lack of educational resources and support to learn these languages in Xinjiang results in Uyghur students’ feeling inferior to their Chinese counterparts in colleges. Particularly, Uyghur female students are even more restricted from education opportunities. Against this wider social backdrop, this dissertation explored female Uyghur students’ identity construction, transformation, and negotiation by examining their experiences of multilingual learning and language use from Xinjiang to Nanjing, a socio-economically developed city in the east coast of China. Adopting poststructuralist conceptualization of identity and language learning, this case study explored (1) female Uyghur students’ perceptions of learning Chinese and English and their level of investment in learning these two languages; (2) the way multilingual practices shape Uyghur women’s identity construction in the host community; and (3) how they negotiate positioning by drawing upon multiple resources afforded.The fieldwork was conducted at Forest University, Nanjing, between January and December 2017. Multiple data sources, including semi-structured interviews, observations, documents, field notes, and social media data, were collected, transcribed, translated, and analyzed. Findings revealed that moving from their less developed hometown to a major city, my female participants expanded and enriched their repertoire of symbolic and material resources on which they could rely to effect more powerful social memberships and negotiate their educated Uyghur identities. Their Chinese and English language learning journey and the educational experiences in the host community hence changed the way Uyghur women ‘understand their relationship to the world ..., and how [people] understand their possibilities for the future’ (Norton, 1997, p. 410).The study contributes to the understanding of intersections between ethnic minorities’ identity construction and language learning in the intranational migration process. It advances the knowledge of identity construction through language by bridging the gap between the meso-level of institutional practices, the micro-level of individual learners’ investment, and the macro-level of the national language education policy and ideology. The findings bear significant implications for policy makers, host institutions, and ethnic minority students.
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