bsp;a being’s knowledge and understanding about himself or herself. This concept can be expressed as “Shen Fen” in Chinese, as there are some words as “Shen Fen”, “Gui Shu”, “Zi Wo Ren Tong” in Chinese translations of Identity. On the other hand, identity can refer to the process of construction in which people explore, pursue and confirm their identification. This concept can be expressed “Ren Tong” or “Shen Fen Ren Tong” in Chinese. “Identity with the meaning of process could also be called identification” (Wei, 2011:46). The definitions of identity vary a great deal in various fields. People have multiple identities and ways of defining themselves, for example, a man might see his own identity as a boss before his employees; while at home with his parents, wife and children, his identity as the son, the husband and the father could be salient. According to Sun (2010:405), “the types of identity vary. Each of these identities carries a series of meanings and entails a set of behaviors as well as actions that express the identity.” The meaning of identity, however, is not the same for all the people who share the identity. Moreover, identity is also widely used in a diversity of fields like philosophy, psychology, sociology, mathematics and linguistics. In the field of SLA, the definition of identity can be placed on a continuum of “structuralism and constructivism” (Gao, 2007: 104). The structuralists emphasize the given social group membership, such as race, gender, nationality, and class; from a structuralist perspective, L2 identity is typically defined as group membership in a target culture at an ethnical level. While the constructivists focus on identity as the interaction between individual and social environment and is situationally constructed. “Identity concerning ‘who a person is’, is a constellations of construct, situated in specific communicative events.
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2.2 Previous Studies on Cultural Identity Abroad
The Social Psychological approach of L2 learning began to be given concerned research attention in the late 1970s. Lambert (1974) is the first one that involves the change in learners’ self-identity. Through distinguishing subtractive and additive bilingualisms, he focused his research on the self-identity change. Subtractive bilingualism is defined as the acquisition of a second language at the expense, or ultimately at the expense of the first (Matthew, 1997); with subtractive bilingualism, the learner’s native language and native cultural identity are replaced by the target cultur
