Boundaries and hybrid blends: How one multilingual narrator displays symbolic competence in a college writing class

Literacy scholars and second language researchers have identified ELL writers' border crossing experiences as prime sites of critical literacy, observing multilingual speakers' increased ability to manipulate and inflect language with cross-cultural connotations, including metaphorical blending. Most second language researchers who look at ELL's metaphor production focus on language fluency, rather than symbolic competence. This case study compares one Vietnamese-American writer's unconscious application of conceptual metaphor with her consciously chosen metaphorical blend. This analysis finds that Violet displayed symbolic competence when unconsciously modifying source and target domains of conceptual metaphors as well as when consciously crafting her own metaphoric blend. The difference is that, despite Violet's symbolic competence, the conventional conceptual metaphors are more restrictive than her creative metaphoric blend. Violet's creative hybrid space allows her to imagine reconciliation and potential combinations of selected values rather than wholesale subscriptions to cultural norms.