Dear Colleagues and Students,
You are cordially invited to the following seminar organized by the Graduate School of Education:
Title: Investigation of English Learners’ Bullying Victimization and Its Effects on Their Identities Through a Mixed-Methods Design Study
Speaker: Dr. Hilal Peker (Teaching English as a Foreign Language Program, Bilkent University)
Date: March 11, 2020
Time: 16:40-17:30
Place: G-160
Abstract:
Bullying is defined as aggressive, repeated and intentional harm doing as a result of imbalance of power among individuals (Olweus, 1993). Both traditional bullying and cyberbullying towards English Language Learners (ELLs), including minorities and refugees, increased immensely as a result of recent political events in the U.S. (Peker, 2016, 2020). ELLs are the most exposed victims of bullying due to language barriers in responding to bullies, which affects their identities, as they adapt to and settle in their new community. However, little research has addressed the bullying victimization of racial and ethnic minority students, although 54% of Asians and 34% of Latinos have been bullied in classrooms compared to 31% of White students (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Therefore, the purpose of this mixed-methods study was to investigate bullying victimization (i.e., cyberbullying and traditional bullying) and second language (L2) identity (i.e., oriented and national identity) among the adult ELLs in the U.S. within Social Ecology of Bullying (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) theoretical framework. The quantitative data were collected from 1464 ELLs through an adapted survey consisting of 72 five-point Likert scale items, five open-ended questions, and a demographics section. The qualitative data were obtained from 312 participants who responded to open-ended questions regarding their lived bullying experiences. The quantitative data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), and the qualitative data were analyzed using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis on NVivo. Results indicated that cyberbullying was a more powerful factor than traditional bullying affecting both national and oriented ELL identities. Emerging themes were otherness, feared selves, L2 avoidance, resistance to using English, and struggles to develop oriented identities despite bullies and language barriers. The implications will be interactively discussed, and the audience will have opportunities to create strategies for ELLs to cope with bullying through three scenarios.