This paper investigates the language fluency problems of skilled immigrants from mainland China to Canada. It capitalises on interview data to explore the relationships between Chinese immigrants' identities, second language practices, and language skills. It reports the informants' difficulty in integrating into their workplaces and their unwillingness to make considerable investments in learning English. Drawing on Bourdieu's (1984) theory of practice and linking it with the issue of identity, this paper explains how the habitus of the informants interact with their milieux, how a marginalised identity emerges, and how this identity negatively impacts on their oral proficiency in English.