Journal of Language, Identity & Education

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ESP Reading Literacy and Reader Identity: A

Narrative Inquiry Into a Learner in Taiwan

Beryl Chinghwa Lee & Chiou-lan Chern

To cite this article: Beryl Chinghwa Lee & Chiou-lan Chern (2011) ESP Reading Literacy and
Reader Identity: A Narrative Inquiry Into a Learner in Taiwan, Journal of Language, Identity &
Education, 10:5, 346-360, DOI: 10.1080/15348458.2011.614547

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Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 10: 346–360, 2011
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1534-8458 print / 1532-7701 online
DOI: 10.1080/15348458.2011.614547

ESP Reading Literacy and Reader Identity: A Narrative

Inquiry Into a Learner in Taiwan
Beryl Chinghwa Lee
China Medical University
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Chiou-lan Chern
National Taiwan Normal University

This study aims to investigate whether English for Specific Purposes (ESP) reading relates to English
as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ identity and how they relate to each other if there is a
link between the two. Via purposeful sampling, an experienced Taiwanese ESP reader in her 40s
was recruited and received three life-story interviews. Borrowing Wenger’s (1998) notion of social
identity, the participant’s ESP reading history is examined along (a) mutuality of engagement, (b)
accountability to an enterprise, and (c) negotiability of a repertoire. The results show that ESP read-
ing is tightly interwoven with the three dimensions. It is therefore determined that the two are related.
Moreover, it is found they are highly interdependent and correlated as the participant’s ESP reading
proficiency varies with her positions in the communities of practice. Pedagogical implications relate
to the need for teachers and ESP readers to raise their awareness of the learners’ literate identities.
Key words: academic literacy, social identity, English for Specific Purposes, second language
reading

Coupled with the trend of globalization, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has become an
international phenomenon (Belcher, 2006). One of ESP’s central concerns is to produce linguis-
tically competent students and workers to approach academic or occupational goals. Although
ESP studies focus mostly on surface forms, researchers now begin to understand the relation-
ships among print literacy, learners, and their context, following a cross-disciplinary trend called
a “massive social turn” (Gee, 2000), which moves a focus on individual behaviors and minds
toward a focus on social and cultural interaction. Due to the movement, in recent years, a number
of studies have centered on the interplay of nonnative speakers’ identities and literacy in partic-
ular (e.g., Block, 2007; Hawkins, 2005; Ivanic, 1998; Jimenez, 2000; McKay & Wong, 1996;
Menard-Warwick, 2008; Moje, Luke, Davies, & Street, 2009; Peirce, 1995; Rex et al., 2010). The
development has been recognized as a new paradigm in the TESOL field (Canagarajah, 2006), as
evidenced by the 1997 special issue of the leading journal TESOL Quarterly, edited by Norton
(1997), as well as the more recent publication of Second Language Identities by Block (2007).

Correspondence should be sent to Beryl Chinghwa Lee, China Medical University, 91 Hsueh-Shih Road, Taichung
404, Taiwan. E-mail: [Link]@[Link]
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 347

The conceptualization of identity in the paradigm has been heavily influenced by poststructural-
ist theories, which depict the individual as diverse, contradictory, dynamic, and changeable over
time and social space, a notion opposing many definitions of the individual in SLA (Second
Language Acquisition) research which presupposes that every person has an essential, unique,
fixed, and coherent core identity, say, extrovert versus introvert or motivated versus unmotivated
(Norton & Toohey, 2002).
Research on learners’ identities and literacy has focused more on identities of L2 writers and
speakers (e.g., Ivanic, 1998; Menard-Warwick, 2008; Morita, 2004; Peirce, 1995). Specifically,
Ivanic (1998) contributes a whole volume in order to discuss academic writing and identity.
Although English reading, as argued by Anderson (2006, see also Han & Anderson, 2009), is
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possibly the most powerful role in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context in influencing
the learners’ academic and professional development (see also Chia, Johnson, Chia, & Olive,
1999), little attention has been paid to reader identity. To explore the issue, this study aims to
investigate whether ESP reading relates to EFL learner’s identity and, if they are connected, how
they relate to each other.

THEORIZING LITERACY AND IDENTITY

Literacy is a fairly recent English word (Barton, 1994); it was not highly noticeable until the
1990s. For centuries, literacy had been believed to lead to higher-order cognitive abilities. The
assumption gives rise to the Great Divide theories, which presuppose that fundamental cognitive
differences exist between literate societies/individuals and non-literate ones and that literacy
was the sine qua non of sophisticated and complex cultures (Gee, 1996). As a result, primitive
societies had been characterized as non-literate, incapable of abstract thought, and thus inferior
to modern or civilized societies.
In the early 1980s, the Great Divide theories confront many attacks, not least of which is post-
structuralism, which criticized that the differences between types of societies, modes of thought,
and uses of language made by the dichotomies are simplistic and exaggerating. Moreover, ample
empirical evidences called into question the causality of literacy in social development and in
individual cognition. For example, Heath’s (1983) classic study Ways With Words indicate that
school kids’ failure/success with respect to academic studies depends largely on their home lit-
eracy practices in their own communities. Most importantly, Scribner and Cole (1981) point out
that what matters to literacy is the social practices into which people are apprenticed as a part of
social group but not literacy as some decontextualized ability to write or read. They reframed lit-
eracy by the new concept of literacy practices, which views literacy as a set of socially organized
practices. Literacy practices are more than observable episodes, activities, or behaviors as they
involve values, attitudes, feelings, social relationships, and the others. To be more specific, they
are a cultural conception of particular ways of thinking about and doing reading/writing in cul-
tural contexts (Street, 2001). Barton and Hamilton (2000) regard literacy practices as basic units
of a social theory of literacy, which offer a powerful way of conceptualizing the link between
reading/writing and the social structures which they are embedded in and help to shape. They
also emphasize that literacy practices are “more usefully understood as existing in the relations
between people, within groups and communities, rather than as a set of properties residing in
individuals” (p. 8).
348 LEE AND CHERN

The research interests mentioned above are sometimes called “vernacular literacies” (Barton
& Hamilton, 1998, p. 4), as they focus mostly on everyday literacies. However, differences
between everyday language and academic language have long been noticed. To distinguish the
two, Cummins (1986) coins the terms Basic Interpersonal Communicative Skills (BICS) and
Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP) to draw educators’ attention to the timelines
and challenges that L2 learners encounter as they attempt to keep up with their peers in academic
aspects of the school language (Cummins, 2008).
To cater the need of students’ academic language learning, Johns (1997) proposes socioliter-
ate views of academic literacies. She advocates a shift away from the learner-centered approach,
which she believes carries insidious benevolence by overemphasizing individual and creative
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reading/writing (Johns, 1997). It is also pointed out that discourses are socially constructed and
that students are quite aware that they are under the influences and judgments of the cultures
from which they come and into which they hope to enter. On this account, Johns suggests equip-
ping learners in the literacy classes with strategies to cope with their future rhetorical situations.
Nonetheless, Johns admits that the full impact of the complexity of academic literacy cannot be
fully experienced unless the learners go outside and witness how literacy is practiced in the real
world.
Like literacy, identity was not perceived as a social phenomenon until very recently. Identity
used to be understood primarily as referring to individuals belonging to the province of psychol-
ogy (e.g., Erickson, 1959). In the late 1960s, traditional and modern forms of authorities began
to be challenged. As the self ceases to be taken for granted, identity becomes an issue (Delanty,
2003). Individuals’ self-constitutive capacities to face social fluidity and disorder bring out the
concept of multiple identities, which features in the postmodern era (Bauman, 1997). Under the
impact of post-structuralist inquiry, SLA researchers re-conceptualize their views of the learn-
ers: L2 learners are perceived as individual agents with multiple identities, which are subject to
change over time (Pavlenko, 2002). Notably, Peirce (1995) foregrounds the shift by her widely
referred longitudinal ethnographic study. On the basis of Bourdieu’s (1977) metaphor of capital,
Peirce displaces motivation by the concept of investment, which renders her able to depict the
L2 learner as one bearing multiple dimensions, conceptualize L2 learners’ social identity as a
site of struggle, and therefore capture more effectively the complex relationship of the learners
to the target language.
Peirce’s approach moves to the fore the learners’ inequitable power relationships and oppor-
tunities to interact with L2 speakers to practice the target language. It also moves SLA research
from the structural to the interactional perspective of social context (Siegel, 2003). The structural
view sees a person’s social identity as the result of the particular social group, in which power,
prestige, and other aspects of social context are determined by the social structure as well as the
historical forces that shape this structure. In contrast, the interactional point of view sees a person
as one with multiple social identities, and the one identity that emerges in a particular situation is
determined not only by the person’s group membership but also by the social interaction, during
which social identities and relationships may undergo continuous change and renegotiation.
A recent SLA research study on identity and academic literacy is Morita’s (2004) multi-
ple case study, which explores the academic discourse socialization experiences of six female
Japanese graduate students in Canada and indicates that in the higher education setting, the
negotiation of entry into the discourse is full of challenges. Likewise, access to its legitimate
membership is difficult to obtain. However, despite the initial appearance of noncompliance
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 349

or nonparticipation, the participants of the study, in effect, negotiated their multiple identities
actively. The participants’ silence, for example, is often context-specific, not a phenomenon
attributed solely to gender, culture, or language. The participants’ co-construction of learner
agency and positionality is full of complexities, evolving closely with a web of power relations
and competing agendas.
The bond between reading literacy and social identity is linked by Gee’s (2001) sociocognitive
perspective on reading. Central to the reading model is the notion of Discourse with a capital D.
Gee (2001) argues that discourse is not just language in use. Rather, it is heavily involved with
being a social role (i.e., identity) as well as doing a social role (i.e., practice) and the interplay of
the two makes a Discourse. Gee (1992) suggests considering Discourse as identity kits in which
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specific devices (e.g., ways with words, thoughts, values, interactions, tools, etc.) enable us to
enact a specific identity and to engage in specific activities related to the identity. To learn to
read about “light” in physics, for instance, one has to be immersed in a specific community to
experience the way of “light,” say, as a bundle of waves of different wavelengths (Gee, 2001).
According to Gee (1996), there are primary Discourse and secondary Discourse. The former
refers to the first identities acquired during the primary socialization as members of particular
families, while the latter is about the identities acquired in public worlds beyond families. On this
account, ESP reading belongs to the secondary Discourse.

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

The main theoretical framework of the study is Wenger’s (1998) notion of social identity, which
has roots in the theory of situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) known for the idea of
Communities of Practice (CoP), which is defined as “an aggregate of people who come together
around mutual engagement in an endeavour” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 464). As for
“practice,” it is about “doing in a historical and social context that gives structure and mean-
ing to what we do” (Wenger, 1998, p. 47). Accordingly, practice is always social. For instance,
preparing for a presentation in a hotel by oneself is social as the activity implicitly involves, for
the least, the audience to whom the presenter attempts to get his ideas across (Wenger, 1998).
Practice has the potential for enabling learning and changing identity. As a result, “community”
can be defined by practice through three aspects: (a) mutual engagement, (b) a joint enterprise,
and (c) a shared repertoire. Simply put, the three are respectively about (a) how a CoP functions,
(b) what it is about, and (c) what capability it has produced (Laat, 2001, as cited in Rock, 2005).
In the same vein, a member’s identity of CoP is demonstrated through the dimensions of
(a) mutuality of engagement, (b) accountability to an enterprise, and (c) negotiability of a reper-
toire (Wenger, 1998, pp. 152–153). Engagement refers to “active involvement in mutual process
of negotiation of meaning” (Wenger, 1998, p. 173). In CoP, we learn certain ways of engaging in
action with other people; we develop certain expectations about how to interact, how people treat
each other, and how to work together. To put it a different way, we become who we are by being
able to play a part in the relations of engagement that constitute our community. In addition,
the full complexity of mutual engagement is reflected as a result of a joint enterprise in the CoP.
Negotiating a joint enterprise gives rise to relations of mutual accountability among the members
of CoP. That is, they know what matters and what does not, what to do and what not to do, what
to pay attention to and what to ignore. Moreover, a repertoire refers to a set of shared resources,
350 LEE AND CHERN

including words, ways of thinking, speaking, tools, understandings, memories, and the others.
All in all, a repertoire reflects a history of mutual engagement or a history of learning that is
shared among members of the community. A repertoire is useful not only because it is recogniz-
able in the relations to a history of mutual engagement, but also because they can be reengaged in
new situations. That is to say, a repertoire is characterized by its negotiability, which brings with
it the possibility of new meaning (Wenger, 1998, p. 83). According to Wenger (1998), identity
formation is composed of the dual process of negotiability and identification. On the one hand,
identification is defined with respect to communities and forms of membership in them; on the
other, negotiability is shaped by the degree to which we can make use of, control, or modify
the meaning that we negotiate and then assert as ours. To sum up, identities of CoP are demon-
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strated by (a) knowing how to engage with others (mutuality of engagement), (b) understanding
why others do what they do (accountability to an enterprise), and (c) sharing the resources other
members use for their activities (negotiability of a repertoire).

THE STUDY

The study was part of a larger project using a narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990).
We follow in the tradition of life-story research, which presupposes that the stories told about
experiences are not only the result of but also a window into “a confluence of social influence on
a person’s inner life, social influences on their environment and their unique personal history”
(Clandinin & Rosiek, 2007, p. 41).
Purposeful sampling was employed in the study to select “information-rich cases whose study
will illuminate the question under study” (Patton, 2002, p. 230). Participant recruitment began
from October of 2007. In 3 months, six participants allowed the researcher to walk into the midst
of their stories. Each participant conformed to the following preset criteria, that is, he/she was (a)
a Taiwanese in his/her middle adulthood, (b) one who receives primary and secondary education
in Taiwan, (c) a professional who is experienced in ESP reading, and (d) one who acknowledges
that ESP reading is of great importance to his/her career development. The focal participant of
the present study was one of the subjects who met the selection criteria. The participant was
recommended to one of the researchers by a common friend who had noticed the participant’s
heavy involvement with ESP reading. Notwithstanding her initial doubts, the participant agreed
to join the study when given the guarantee of the confidentiality of her identity. For the very
purpose, the participant agreed to use a pseudonym, Hue-Zhen.
Hue-Zhen was born in 1968 in a middle class family in a small town in Southern Taiwan.
She received her education in Taiwan all the way from primary school to her doctoral pro-
gram. When this study began, she had worked as a university teacher for 15 years and had been
involved in ESP reading for 20 years. She was interviewed three times between November of
2007 and February of 2008. The audiotaped interviews were conducted mainly in Mandarin,
with occasional code switches to English and Taiwanese.
Before the first interview, Hue-Zhen was forwarded the interview protocol, which was
informed by Belcher and Connor (2001), Ivanic (1998), Lu (2005), and McAdams (1993).
Among the six core parts of the protocol, the most relevant ones are A Profile of a Profession,
Landscapes of English Reading for Professional Purposes, and Themes of the Life Stories. The
main data source was the verbatim transcribed from the audiotaped interviews. The data analysis
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 351

process was discursive, involving repeated reading, open coding, and data reduction. Via dialogi-
cal listening to the voices of the participant, the theoretical framework, and reflections (Lieblich,
Tuval-Mashiach, & Ziber, 1998), Hue-Zhen’s life story was first organized into two categories,
that is, literacy experiences rooted in primary as well as secondary Discourses. The quotations
were translated from Chinese into English by the researchers. At the end of 2008, Hue-Zhen
received a hard copy of her English written life story and was invited to undergo member check-
ing. After she agreed that her voice was correctly reproduced and her character was appropriately
represented, the story was revisited for further thematic coding. Specifically, the researchers
looked for data that explained the relation—or the lack thereof—of the participant’s ESP reading
and the three dimensions of identity, namely (a) mutuality of engagement, (b) accountability to
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an enterprise, and (c) negotiability of a repertoire. Due to the inherent intimate relation among
the three, the coding relies on the value of salience, that is, what dimension one event represents
more than the other two.

THE LIFE STORY OF HUE-ZHEN

Mutuality of Engagement: “I Cannot Achieve It Totally by Myself”

Hue-Zhen admitted that she relied heavily on Chinese language for her academic studies in her
college days. She reflected, “More often than not, I studied Chinese textbooks, read Chinese-
written test items, and responded to the questions in Chinese” (November 22, 2007). A notable
exception was reading for her immunology course. In this case, approaching the subject matter by
reading a Chinese-written textbook translated from its English version was found unproductive,
notwithstanding all Hue-Zhen’s efforts and attempts. She said:
It was strange enough that I had very little understanding via reading in Chinese [for specific
purposes] in spite of my intimate knowledge of all the characters. In reflection, I determined that
the translator did not have a good command of the domain knowledge to fully explain the phenom-
ena in Chinese. After all, at that point scientists just began to push back the frontiers of immunology.
(November 22, 2007)

As Hue-Zhen had great interest in the new discipline, she asked for help from one of her male
senior schoolmates who was more knowledgeable in this regard. After Hue-Zhen was tutored
in Chinese, she ventured into the English textbook and found that the text became much more
comprehensible. Afterwards, she made frequent use of the bimodal pattern, that is, L1 listening
plus L2 reading. To be more specific, before she processed English textbooks, she managed to
grasp the gist of the domain knowledge by listening either to her peers’ talks or to the subject
teachers’ lectures in L1.
Another revealing example of Hue-Zhen’s mutuality of engagement of ESP reading was a
specific type of laboratory meeting called “the journal club,” which was experienced by Hue-
Zhen in her doctoral program.
Our teachers noticed that we were too occupied by lab experiments to update our discipline-specific
knowledge. Therefore, they organized a journal club for us. In the weekly assembly, the teachers
and the students took turns to report articles from the latest established journals, for instance, Nature
or Science. Journal clubs are different from seminars of the doctoral program in the sense that the
352 LEE AND CHERN

former may cover a broad array of topics while the latter targets at specific research interests. For
example, the one I joined focused solely on virus. (January 10, 2008)

Mutuality of engagement of ESP reading persists even after Hue-Zhen became a university
professor. Assuming the roles of senior members of their CoP, Hue-Zhen and her colleagues
organized laboratory meetings. In the weekly assemblies, they reported to each other their own
research progresses to seek mutual support and comments. They also guided students to engage in
ESP reading and presentation. Hue-Zhen was surprised that some of the students were inadequate
in ESP reading. She noted:
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Weeks ago, one of my colleague’s students presented an article on a certain agent which represses
three substances. Somehow, he mentioned only two. When he was challenged by the listeners for
missing the third, he argued that it was not mentioned in the text. As a matter of fact, the very first
figure of the paper was about it. The figure was there and the legend was short enough for everyone
to understand. It surprised me that he could possibly ignore the most salient facts reported in the text.
(January 10, 2008).

Hue-Zhen was confident that her own students would not miss textual information like the
presenter. She noted, “I told my students to accord the text with the figure or diagram so that they
hold tight of the relationship between the experiment purpose and result” (January 10, 2008).
The dimension of mutuality of engagement of ESP reading is also involved with ESP writ-
ing. As publication features in Hue-Zhen’s workplace, over the years, Hue-Zhen had developed
certain compensating writing strategies, which in one way or another were related to ESP read-
ing. For instance, she was in the habit of building her own corpus by taking down useful English
expressions while engaging in ESP reading. Hue-Zhen also worked with her peers to boost up the
quantity of her publications. In the past few years, Hue-Zhen had worked closely with a postdoc-
toral researcher from India, who was good at chemical analysis and English writing. Hue-Zhen
and the foreign researcher split the responsibility of writing for publication: Hue-Zhen reported
the functions of the substances under investigation while her partner described their chemical
structures. Although the two were in different disciplines, surprisingly, after a period of close
cooperation, the foreign researcher could sometimes write from Hue-Zhen’s stance by appropri-
ating the language chunks via reading a number of research articles that center on a certain topic
of Hue-Zhen’s field.
Hue-Zhen’s efforts led to a publication boom in just six years. In the spring of 2006, she filed
for promotion to full professorship. Like many other higher education institutions in Taiwan,
Hue-Zhen’s school quantified teachers’ research performance by their publication and specified
the threshold of minimal RPI (Research Performance Index) score for promotion application.
Hue-Zhen’s academic performance fulfilled the requirement. After a lengthy and strict reviewing
process, her promotion was finally approved. Although Hue-Zhen attributed her success to many
things, she specifically acknowledged the mutual engagement with her peer researchers. She
noted: “I cannot achieve it totally by myself. Although I have my own research trunk, I need
the integrated projects to produce some good green leaves. Without their help, the quantity and
quality of my research could not have been recognized by the reviewers” (November 22, 2007).
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 353

Accountability of the Joint Enterprise: “Science Is Not a Local Matter”

Hue-Zhen admitted that in the graduate school days, she was involved in ESP reading to a rather
limited extent. She employed it mainly for her seminar talks, which took place once a semester
at best. After she finished the masters program, Hue-Zhen started to teach in a private college as
a lecturer. In the classroom, Chinese language assumed a dominant role. She said,
I taught in Chinese and gave students tests in Chinese. I also allowed them to answer the questions
in Chinese. As a result, most of my students studied textbooks which were translated into Chinese
from their English versions, just as how I did in my school days. (November 22, 2007)
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It was not until Hue-Zhen finished her doctoral program in 2000 that she began her wide ESP
reading. In Hue-Zhen’s workplace, her newly obtained degree made it possible for her to be
promoted from a lecturer to an associate professor. The status upgrading imposed new duties on
her. She reflected:
Concomitant with the new position was the responsibility of a PI [principal investigator]. In my field,
a PI is an independent director of a lab. I am expected to come up with research design on my own.
As science is not a local matter, it is essential to learn the worldwide development of the topic that
engages my interest. After I became a PI, I approached the database like PubMed or Medline to
gain access to international science reports. I printed out key papers to study so as to gain an insight
into the universal trend of science. My wide reading was launched at that point for the very specific
purpose. (November 22, 2007)

At the very beginning, Hue-Zhen experienced tremendous difficulties of ESP reading. Her
reading speed was painfully slow. However, during the next three years, her ESP reading pro-
ficiency improved by leaps and bounds. The gain was not disclosed until a telling episode
happened:
I did not realize my change until one day a graduate student came to me to ask about the meaning of a
passage. I browsed the research paper for seconds; then I started to explain the details. In admiration,
the student cried out “Teacher, how come you could read so fast?!” Without the exclamation, I would
not have noticed my betterment in this regard. For me, to read is to do things come next. I had been so
focused on the doing coming after the reading that I totally lost sight of my improvement. (November
22, 2007)

Negotiability of the Repertoire: “One Cannot Grasp the Idea of a Recipe Without
Cooking Experiences”

Hue-Zhen reported that in her graduate school life, in addition to laboratory experiments, sem-
inar presentation was an arduous task. As a routine, graduate students were required to present
English journal articles. The language of the talk was Chinese but the PowerPoint slides were
noted in English. It is in the very first seminar presentation that Hue-Zhen’s inadequacy of ESP
reading was detected. She noted, “After the presentation, my teacher and classmates raised their
questions about the study. At the moment that I attempted to answer the questions, I came to
realize that I hadn’t read the research paper with full understanding” (January 10, 2008). When
looking back, she commented:
354 LEE AND CHERN

The comprehension gap was not so much a language problem as a problem of the subject matter.
Generally speaking, English language of the scientific papers is simple and straightforward; their
surface structures are not difficult to understand. In the case of my first presentation, it was my limited
understanding of the research method of that paper that resulted in my incomplete comprehension.
(January 10, 2008)

The scientific procedures of my research area are rather abstract. A reader cannot fully understand
the text of my discipline without direct participation in experiments, just like one cannot grasp the
idea of a recipe without cooking experiences. (February 19, 2008)

On a teacher-student conference, the limitation of Hue-Zhen’s presentation was commented

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on by her advisor. He noted, “Your report sounds like a shopping list” (January 10, 2008).
To show her an effective way of academic information release, the professor guided Hue-Zhen to
rehearse an upcoming seminar presentation in person. He showed her how to accord the text with
the figure or diagram so that the relationship between the experiment purpose and result could
be understood in a coherent picture. Hue-Zhen said, “Thanks to his tutoring, I learned that there
is a story line of a research article. As long as I grasped the line and followed it, I could read and
present the paper with clarity” (November 22, 2007).
In reflection, Hue-Zhen attributed her proficient reading to multiple factors. For one thing,
her reading competence accrued because of her unremitting efforts. Hue-Zhen reported that on
average she spent about 30 hours a week on ESP reading and that about 90% of the print she pro-
cessed was in English. She boiled down the process of her improvement to a Chinese expression,
“shou neng sheng quia,” meaning familiarity breeding dexterity.
Familiarity arises due in part to her selective reading. For instance, when Hue-Zhen’s ESP
reading purpose was intended to seek a good research design, she perused Materials Methods
but skipped the other sections like Introduction or Discussion. The time and efforts saved were
used to process more papers in greater depth, which in turn accelerated her reading speed and
efficiency.
Nevertheless, she acknowledged that her familiarity comes mostly from her incremental
intimacy with her domain knowledge—the more background knowledge she had, the more com-
petent her ESP reading was. Hue-Zhen depicted the familiarity featuring in her ESP reading as
rowing a boat in a small lake, a metaphor Hue-Zhen initially used to describe her early English
learning experiences: “In junior high school days, English learning was like rowing a boat in a
little lake. I was quite familiar with every detail of the water. I won’t miss anything within my
eyesight” (January 10, 2008).

After I have been involved in ESP reading, the feeling of boat-rowing in a lake came back. However,
in the middle-school lake, the operation was straightforward. In most cases, what I needed to do was
to determine a correct answer on the basis of grammatical rules. However, in the ESP-reading lake,
things become much more complex mostly because it involves the process of information integration
whereby I manage to transform text knowledge into my own knowledge. No matter how effectively
I read, if I fail to turn text knowledge into my own, I read for nothing. (January 10, 2008)

To achieve the purpose of knowledge conversion, she devoted herself to fan fu yue du or
repeated reading. She elaborated, “I have to read again and again to internalize the knowledge of
interest. During the process of fan fu yue du, I am exposed to the same set of knowledge either
from different resources or from the same resource but at different time points. By fan fu yue du, I
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 355

ultimately turn the information into my own knowledge and commit it to my mind” (February 19,
2008).
In spite of her ESP reading competence, Hue-Zhen described the transformation procedure as
painful. She related one of her experiences to illustrate the hardship:
I have just given a Chinese talk on sports and immunology. For the 20-minute speech, I spent about
two months collecting papers, reading them, taking notes, comparing and weighing information,
struggling for what to present and what to ignore, selecting the ideas and converting them from
English into Chinese in my mind, and painstakingly docking them in my mental database. The course
of action was tedious, laborious, and afflictive. (January 10, 2008)
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On this account, Hue-Zhen concluded that the most daunting challenge of ESP reading was
rooted in the transformation process, not in the language itself. She also pointed out that the
knack of integration was difficult to pass down to other learners by languages. Basically, the
process was a habitual self-practice and self-refining course, in which the readers rely on hands-
on experiences to come to an understanding and to advance further in their disciplines.

Coda of the Story: To Move Up One More Step

In looking back, Hue-Zhen divided her ESP reading development into three main phases, that
is, “Awkwardness,” “New Car Break-in,” and “Dexterity.” The first stage referred mainly to her
reading for academic purposes in the school days. After she became a PI, the reading course
steered into the second stages, which joined the third one at some blurry point.
The journey of my ESP reading is like climbing invisible staircases. In spite of its intangibility,
I know the staircases exist. I also know the flights were not steep as climbing did not make me out of
breath. Moreover, between the “New Car Break-in” and “Dexterity” exists a transitory point, which
however is difficult for me to pinpoint. (February 19, 2008)
I am grateful that my academic ladder stretches straight and smoothly from one footstep to another:
I conducted the research, wrote the papers, and submitted them; they were accepted and published;
the publication in turn helped me earn more credits and grants for more research. As the course loops
upward steadily, the success came earlier than I had expected. (November 22, 2007)

Due to Hue-Zhen’s metaphor of staircase climbing, her life story is subsumed under the
Chinese expression: “I intend to move up one more step although I have reached the top of a
one-hundred-meter post.” The expression is commonly used in Chinese society to encourage
people to make further advancement after reaching a relatively high attainment. Hue-Zhen was
pleased that she had reached the apex of the academic ladder of professorship. To her, the joy
deriving from rank promotion was perfect and eternal. As Hue-Zhen reached the top of the aca-
demic hierarchy and became a full professor at the age of forty, she knew very well that she
had to sail more than two decades in the water of academia before her retirement. She predicted
that in the long voyage ahead, English language would maintain its dominant role in her field,
regardless of the increasing prevalence of Chinese language. She commented,
My fellow researchers and I will not read and publish in Chinese unless there are leading Chinese
scientific journals recognized worldwide for disseminating newly developed scientific knowledge.
However, personally, I don’t think the change will come to pass before my retirement. (February 19,
2008)
356 LEE AND CHERN

THEORETICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE STORY

The first attempt here is to find out whether ESP reading literacy and identity are related. What
is notable in the life story is that ESP reading is not an isolated cognitive activity. Unlike what
is held in the common belief, Hue-Zhen’s ESP reading involves ubiquitous mutuality of engage-
ment. For example, in the case of the bimodal learning, Hue-Zhen works together with her senior
schoolmate in pursuit of the knowledge of immunology. There are more instances that reveal
mutuality of engagement: the scaffolding of ESP reading and presentation provided by Hue-
Zhen’s advisor who brings to the fore the existence of a textual “storyline” in a research article;
the seminars in Hue-Zhen’s PhD program; the journal club in which the teachers and students
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help each other to acquire the newly developed scientific knowledge; and the lab meetings in
Hue-Zhen’s workplace in which the learners’ peripheral participation of ESP reading and pre-
sentation are invited, to name just a few. Along her career development, mutuality of engagement
of literacy practice helps Hue-Zhen to build up her membership and make her conclude: “I cannot
achieve it totally by myself.”
Examples mentioned in the previous section not only foreground ESP reading as mutuality of
engagement but also reflect that ESP reading, along with research design, laboratory experiments,
and journal publication, is part of the joint enterprise. As a CoP member, Hue-Zhen has the
accountability of the joint enterprise. Specifically, she admits that her wide ESP reading is driven
by her newly assigned role of PI. A job title, however, is more than a fixed form; it is infused
with congealed human experience and practice (Wenger, 1998). As Gee (1996) contends:
Being a real Indian is not something one can simply be. Rather, it is something that one becomes or is
in the “doing” of it, that is, in the performance . . . .there is no being (once and for all) a real Indian,
rather there is only doing being-or-becoming-a-real-Indian. If one does not continue to “practice”
being a real Indian, one ceases to be a real Indian (p. 129).

In Hue-Zhen’s case, to become a real PI, she devotes herself to tremendous “doing,” not the
least of which is ESP reading initiated by her understanding (or accountability) that “science is
not a local matter.” When Hue-Zhen positions herself and is positioned as a local member, she
counts on Chinese language to read for specific purpose; she also positions her students likewise,
which results in their heavy reliance on L1 for academic reading. However, as CoPs develop
in historical, social, cultural, and institutional contexts, they are not self-contained entities. Once
Hue-Zhen realizes that the locally produced meanings via reading in Chinese have comparatively
low value for a wide range of communities “in the recent forms of globalization,” (Canagarajah,
2006, p. 197) she makes attempts to align with the wider scheme of globalization via the shift
of her reading language to respond to the “distant demands” (Brandt & Clinton, 2002, p. 351).
In brief, Hue-Zhen’s awareness of the enterprise leads to her ESP reading, which renders her able
to move from the peripheral to the core as well as to respond to the local and global interplay.
Furthermore, as observed from the life story, one of the facilitating factors of Hue-Zhen’s
wide ESP reading is the database of PubMed or Medline, namely a communal resource or a
repertoire. However, as argued by Wenger (1998), the most important repertoire of a CoP is its
members’ history of mutual engagement, which over time is able to distinguish the insiders from
the outsiders, namely defining a member’s position in the CoP. In Hue-Zhen’s case, although
ESP reading allows her to participate in the shared learning history of CoP and to obtain access
to legitimate membership, competence of her ESP reading at the same time depends on the
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 357

extent of her participation in the communal history, as shown by the metaphor “one cannot grasp
the idea of a recipe without cooking experiences.” Many researchers (e.g., Freire & Macedo,
1987; Gee, 1996) have referred to experiences as a crucial role in arriving at understanding of
the meaning in language. Gee (1997) uses coffee as an example to illustrate that meaning is
associated with specific patterns of experiences rooted in particular sorts of context in which
one experiences the word differently. As a result, one assembles a different meaning in hearing
“The coffee is spilled, go get the mop” from “The coffee is spilled, re-stack it.” In other words,
reading comprehension relies on negotiation of the written words and the reader’s experiences.
As negotiability of the repertoire plays a vital role in ESP reading, without participation in the
learning history, Hue-Zhen’s L1 reading for the immunology course suffers in spite of her great
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proficiency of the surface forms (i.e., Chinese characters). In the same vein, due to the lack of
mutual engagement in the discipline, Hue-Zhen translates her reading deficiency in the form of
ignorance of the research method, which leads to her problematic ESP reading at her first seminar
presentation.
On the other hand, significance of the negotiability of the repertoire is also brought to the fore
by the event in which Hue-Zhen reads for a Chinese talk on sports immunology. The negotiation
process is termed by Hue-Zhen as “knowledge conversation” and “integration” whereby Hue-
Zhen makes sense of the text, uses the meaning she negotiates, and asserts as hers. As noted
from the life story, in spite of using different names, Hue-Zhen places great emphasis on the
negotiability of the repertoire and highlights that it is labor-intensive and has the most important
role in ESP reading. Noteworthy is that the negotiation of meaning is not an individual cognitive
activity. As it is closely tied to participation in the shared learning history (or familiarity with
disciplinary knowledge), negotiability is social.
As observed from above, ESP reading is connected to mutuality of engagement, accountability
of the joint enterprise, and negotiability of the repertoire. On this ground, suffice is it to say that
ESP reading literacy and identity are related. What intrigues us more is how the two relate to each
other. During the moment-to-moment changes of the ESP reading journey, it is shown that Hue-
Zhen’s ESP reading proficiency varies with her positions of the CoP—at the periphery, she reads
with difficulties while at the core she reads with competence. The movement from the periph-
ery to the core can be translated into the trajectory from the unfamiliar to the familiar. When
Hue-Zhen ventures into the unfamiliar territory, her reading suffers, due in part to the lack of the
competence of her membership, as in the case of her ESP reading for her first presentation in
the master’s program. The initial stage, full of reading inability and non-membership, is labeled
by Hue-Zhen as “Awkwardness,” a term that fully demonstrates the difficulties of not knowing
how to engage with others; not understanding the subtleties of the enterprise defined by the com-
munity, and not having the shared resources (Wenger, 1998). However, after Hue-Zhen becomes
a real PI, the picture of her ESP reading is completely different. A telling example is the event
in which Hue-Zhen’s graduate student exclaims, “Teacher, how come you can read so fast?!”
The exclamation in effect is a token of recognition of not only Hue-Zhen’s ESP reading profi-
ciency but also her membership. As informed by Gee (2001), identities are brought into being
when recognized within a relationship or social contest. As a result, one cannot be a real Indian
unless one “gets recognized as a real Indian in the practices of doing being-and-becoming-a-real-
Indian” (Gee, 1996, pp. 129–130). On the ground, the graduate student’s exclamation congeals
and demonstrates Hue-Zhen’s competent ESP reading and full membership.
358 LEE AND CHERN

When comparing Hue-Zhen’s ESP reading at the periphery and that at the core, we have the
understanding that Hue-Zhen’s lack of membership is interlocked with difficulties of ESP read-
ing while her full identity comes with high ESP reading proficiency. As ESP reading proficiency
entails membership and vice versa, it is determined that Hue-Zhen’s ESP reading and identity are
interdependent. Moreover, in the narrative, Hue-Zhen adopts the metaphor of climbing staircases
for the journey of her ESP reading. She claims that her ESP reading ladder is at the same time
the ladder of career development. Via this metaphor, the seemingly horizontal movement from
the peripheral to the core can be translated into a vertical perspective, which allows us to depict
the development of the two as positively correlated: when one is low, the other is underachieved;
when one is boosted, the other is enhanced. In brief, the growth of one entails the development
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of the other. At this point, it is found that ESP reading literacy and identity are not only related,
they are highly interdependent and correlated.

CONCLUSION

The narrative inquiry shows that ESP reading and identity are intimately connected. The find-
ing brings pedagogical implications, especially for educators who work within a sociopolitical
milieu that casts a view of ESP reading as a matter of accrual skills and information. Accepting
the idea that developing academic literacy involves shifting identities calls for the acceptance
of the idea that learning ESP reading literacy is more than simply increasing academic vocab-
ulary size or genre knowledge. As shown in the study, ESP reading is related to participation,
interaction, relationships, and contexts, all of which imply how the ESP reader makes sense
of the self and others, namely how he/she identifies and is identified. The social view of ESP
reading calls for reexamination of current educational practices. In the classrooms, teaching
activities involving mutual engagement should be encouraged to facilitate the accountability of
the enterprise and the negotiability of the repertoire. To move the learners to profound new
identities, ESP readers need to be provided with opportunities to revisit their early L1 and
L2 reading histories and envision the CoP they will enter. At the school or national level, educa-
tional policy makers should be cautious about using the results of standard proficiency tests for
important decisions, for instance, allowing or disallowing entrance or exit of certain educational
programs.
Equally noticeable from the study is that a local ESP learner’s identity work is impressively
tremendous. The reader not only deals with the internal issue of membership by moving from
the periphery to the core but also is in demand to respond to the local-global interplay in the
era of globalization. In Block’s (2007) work on second language identities, issues of identity
are examined in: (a) adult migrant contexts, (b) foreign language contexts, and (c) study abroad
contexts. By “context,” Block refers specifically to “the physical location of language learning
as well as the sociohistorical and sociocultural conditions that accompany that physical location”
(p. 4). The present research fits into the second category as the participant has finished her edu-
cation all the way in Taiwan and has never had a long stay abroad for professional purposes.
However, regardless of how little physical location movement is involved, the identity work
which the learner does in the local context is no less than what is done by language learners in
the other two settings. On this account, we argue that ESP readers or learners in foreign language
contexts are “immigrants in situ.” Although there is an increasing interest in literate identities
ESP READING LITERACY AND READER IDENTITY 359

(Moje et al., 2009), learners of this category have not received due attention. In the age that
English continues to spread as the language of science, technology, and advanced research in non-
English-speaking countries, we call for more literacy-identity research to investigate interaction
between immigrants in situ and their context.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research was supported by a grant from China Medical University (CMU97-158).
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