The Semiotics of Trauma: A Review of Trauma and Its Hidden Injuries in ESL/EFL Education

• In Event: Toward Trauma-Informed Care in TESOL: A Multimodal and Multisemiotic Approach

Abstract

Trauma is a prevailing issue in education. Studies have identified multiple challenges, social problems, and consequences associated with trauma and discussed the potential of diversified trauma-informed healing programs. While review studies on educational trauma have been conducted (e.g., Alvarez, 2020), they focused on education in general. There is a lack of attention to the overall research on trauma in English as a second or foreign language (ESL/EFL) education. Filling this gap is necessary given the profound role English plays in perpetuating structural racism and White supremacy, which are believed to have a sustained impact on learners’ wellbeing. Trauma in ESL/EFL education also provides a painful but illuminating threshold to uncover the structural advantages, unequal social relations, racialized status markers, and Western-oriented epistemology/ontology/methodology that are defined and normalized by dominant discourses in education and wider society.

The present study involves a comprehensive overview of the scholarship on trauma in ESL/EFL education. This review specifically focuses on four research questions: What trauma is involved in ESL/EFL education? What could cause trauma? What are its consequences? And what actions are taken to alleviate trauma? To ensure the quality of articles, Web of Science served as the search engine, and a combination of keywords was used, including trauma, linguistic racism, discrimination, immigrants, refugees, and English education. Both empirical and conceptual journal articles were included, and no requirement was set on the publication date, leading to a total sample of 89 articles for further analysis. To understand the ideological construction of trauma, semiotic-based metaphor analysis (Gal & Irvine, 1995; Wee, 2002) was utilized, focusing not merely on the identification of metaphors but also on their semiotic processes of iconization (i.e., certain linguistic features are viewed as icons of social values), recursiveness (i.e., one way of classification repeats at different levels of generality), erasure (i.e., certain social and linguistic practices are made invisible due to simplification), and performativity (i.e., conceptual ideas/beliefs are communicated by engaging the target audiences). To analyze the sampled articles, structural topic modeling was used given its functionality for tracing key topics in a research field and the word clusters that make up those topics (Lindstedt, 2019), thus revealing a comprehensive pathway in the current scholarship on ESL/EFL trauma. The results obtained from the topic modeling were then integrated into the four semiotic processes to demonstrate the intricate interaction of different forms of trauma, influential factors, consequences, and possible interventions.

Based on the initial analysis, one salient metaphor is “Trauma is a Battlefield”, which encapsulates the multifaceted struggles and social pain experienced by ESL/EFL learners and teachers. It is associated with iconized social values like British or American accents that mark certain groups as non-native and, most painfully, as outsiders of a more privileged community. Such trauma is often intensified by erasure practices like standardized certification, forcing non-native learners/teachers to compete to prove their abilities, often experiencing failure and reinforcing the battlefield dynamics. Overall, this review reveals the scholarship on trauma in ESL/EFL education and sheds light on future research and pedagogical directions.

Author

• Chunhong Liu, Simon Fraser University