Lee Su Kim is Associate Professor of English at the School of Language Studies and Linguistics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. She is the author of eight books including three bestsellers, Malaysian Flavours : Insights into Things Malaysian (2004), Manglish: Malaysian English at its Wackiest (1998) and A Nyonya In Texas: Insights of a Straits Chinese Woman in the Lone Star State (2007). She has authored textbooks and resource books on writing, grammar and short stories. She is the chief editor of three books including Border Crossings: Moving Between Languages and Cultural Frameworks (2007). She was a columnist for The Star, a leading English language newspaper in Malaysia for 3 years.
Her research interests are in Language, Culture and Identity, World Englishes and Intercultural Communication. She lectures on Language, Culture & Communication in the Masters programme at the university. Dr. Lee has presented at numerous local and international conferences in the United States of America, Europe and Asia. She is the first woman President of the newly formed Peranakan Baba Nyonya Association of Kuala Lumpur and Selangor.
English is today the world global language. It has overtaken all other languages and hence all other cultures because it is propped up by the formidable panoply of the mass communications industry ( Arnold, 2006). Terms such as ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native speaker ‘ have become problematical as people from many language groups speak English as well as their mother tongue, or in a repertoire of languages. The implications of this for a sense of identity are enormous.
Examining the identity of second language learners is a relatively recent interest in second language acquisition research (McKay and Bokhorst-Heng, 2008). Studies by Lee Su Kim (2001, 2003), McKay and Wong (1996), Norton (1997), Peirce (1995) and Rampton (1995) have examined identity negotiations in the acquisition of English and how educational institutions position students in particular ways.