Learning global languages compels learners to thrive in today's neoliberal society. It also brings emotional struggles, desires, and ambitions, forming an integral part of learner identity and life trajectory. Mark Seilhamer achieves distinction by vividly narrating the life stories of four young women at a prestigious junior college in Taiwan.
* Ryuko Kubota, University of British Columbia, Canada *
Four affectionate portraits of young Taiwanese women lie at the heart of this warm-hearted yet incisive ethnography of identity, distinction, and language learning. The intimately narrated dreams, struggles, and accomplishments of these women as they travel towards adulthood in globalizing Taiwan offer a much-needed human face to the theory of language as symbolic capital.
* Joseph Sung-Yul Park, National University of Singapore, Singapore *
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of distinction, Seilhamer masterfully takes his readers through the distinction-making processes of four young Taiwanese women situated at the intersection of gender and social class. Their narratives of strategy and struggle in pursuit of linguistic resources are an apt reminder of how language indexes power and stratifies individuals in a neoliberal world.
* Peter De Costa, Michigan State University, USA *
Seilhamer indeed is a talented storyteller [...] Not only has he convincingly retold the stories of his participants in a manner that truly allows the reader to get to know each of them (p. 50); he has also impressively parsed
out the underlying motives, desires, and insecurities of these individuals to want to be distinctive. [...] A wide range of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological courses featuring symbolic capital and world Englishes would find the book a valuable resource.
-- Spencer C. Chen, University of California, Los Angeles, USA * Journal of Sociolinguistics, November 2020 *
[This book] delivers in-depth individual narratives of the life trajectories of four young Taiwanese women, all of
whom have strived to achieve distinction at least partly by cultivating linguistic skills and multilingual selves before, during, and after their studies at a junior college specializing in foreign languages.
-- Feng Ye, The University of Chicago, USA * Language in Society 50 (2021) *
