3.1 Poststructuralist theories of language

Poststructuralist theories of language have become increasingly attractive to identity and language learning researchers (Norton & Morgan in press). Structuralist theories of language, often cited as originating with the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Reference de Saussure and Baskin1966), emphasized the study of the linguistic knowledge (competence) that allowed idealized speakers/hearers to use and understand language's stable patterns and structures. From this perspective, actual instances of language usage (performance), which could be affected by memory lapses, fatigue, slips, errors, and so on, were not seen as revealing of idealized patterns, and thus were of little interest in the scientific study of language. However, poststructuralist theories of language, proposed by many, but particularly by Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin1981, Reference Bakhtin and Emerson1984, Reference Bakhtin and McGee1986) saw language not as a set of idealized forms independent of their speakers or their speaking, but rather as situated utterances in which speakers, in dialogue with others, struggle to create meanings.

For Bakhtin, language had no independent existence outside of its use, and that usage was of course social. He used the metaphor of speech communication as a chain, an ongoing conversation that new speakers (for example, children or newcomers to speech communities) strive to join. While structural theories might see language learning as a gradual individual process of internalizing the set of rules, structures, and vocabulary of a standard language, Bakhtin saw language learning as a process of struggling to use language in order to participate in specific speech communities. Using language meant using a tool others had used before, and Bakhtin saw speakers as constrained by those past usages. However, he also saw speakers as able to use language to express their own meanings (with both custom and innovation characterizing language use). Further, Bakhtin pointed out how social positions outside language might affect any individual's speaking privilege.

More recently, Hall, Cheng & Carlson (Reference Hall, Cheng and Carlson2006) discussed a usage-based view of language knowledge that saw people learning through joint engagement with others in activities, using cultural tools. Recognizing the increasing body of theory and research that points out how using even one language relies on complex sets of understandings of context, they argued that speakers of multiple languages are able to engage in interactions in those languages as a result of their access to participation in the activities in which those languages are used. Unlike those who believe that language competence precedes language performance, Hall et al. understood language competence as proceeding from participation in performance in activities using particular language tools. They also recognized that individuals differ in their access to participation, according to their social and cultural positioning.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's work directly addresses the poststructuralist study of the politics of language (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1977; Bourdieu & Passeron Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1977; Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu, Thompson, Raymond and Adamson1991; Albright & Luke Reference Albright and Luke2008). While poststructuralists are, of course, not the only theorists interested in language and power, Bourdieu explicitly drew attention to the importance of power in structuring discourse, with interlocutors seldom sharing equal speaking ‘rights’. For Bourdieu, ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ speakers were distinguished by their differential ‘rights to speech’ or their ‘power to impose reception’ (Reference Bourdieu1977: 648). For Bourdieu, using language was a social and political practice in which an utterance's value and meaning was determined in part by the value and meaning ascribed to the person who speaks. Recognizing that the ascribed value of a person or group can vary, depending on circumstances or contexts (in Bourdieu's terms, ‘fields’), he saw linguistic discourse as ‘a symbolic asset which can receive different values depending on the market on which it is offered’ (Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1977: 651). He further noted that dominant usage is associated with the dominant class. Heller (Reference Heller, Albright and Luke2008: 50) explicitly paralleled access to language with access to other resources that are also ‘produced, attributed value, and circulated in a regulated way, which allows for competition over access, and typically, unequal distribution’. From this perspective, not only individuals’ but also groups’ ascribed identities structure access to and opportunities for language use and learning.

3.2 Poststructuralist theories of subjectivity

Christine Weedon (Reference Weedon1987/1997), one of the best-known scholars working in the feminist poststructuralist tradition, understood, like Bakhtin and Bourdieu, the importance of ascribed individual and group identity positions in structuring the extent to which language practices are valued. However, she also argued that it is in language that the individual constructs her ‘subjectivity’, which she saw as ‘the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself, and her ways of understanding her relation to the world’ (1997: 28). Her use of the term ‘subjectivity’ reminds us that an individual can be simultaneously the subject of a set of relationships (e.g. in a position of power) or subject to a set of relationships (e.g. in a position of reduced power). Thus, for Weedon, social relationships are crucial in how individuals are constructed and construct themselves.

Weedon used the terms subject and subjectivity to signal a break with dominant Western humanist views of the individual. While Western humanist philosophy stressed the essential, unique, fixed, and coherent core of an individual, Weedon's view, like that of other poststructuralists, was that the individual (i.e. the subject) was diverse, contradictory, dynamic, and changing over historical time and social space. Like Foucault (Reference Foucault and Gordon1980), Weedon argued that subjectivity is discursively constructed, and is always socially and historically embedded. Holland & Lave (Reference Holland and Lave2001) discussed the apparent paradox of identity being experienced as unitary and durable, while being, at the same time, variable and situated in dynamic practice. Like many other poststructuralist theorists, they emphasized that ‘both the continuity and the transformation of social life are ongoing, uncertain projects’ (2001: 4) and that individuals maintain ‘histories in their persons’. These theories of identity are central in Norton's early work, and have been taken up by many identity theorists, including Kramsch (Reference Kramsch2009), whose compelling book, The multilingual subject, focuses on the subjectivity of the foreign language learner.

Language educators have found poststructural observations about subjectivity helpful in theorizing how education can lead to individual and social change. A conceptualization of subjectivity as multiple, non-unitary, and dynamic leaves room for the view that individuals need not be locked forever in particular positions. Rather, from this perspective, although some contexts and practices may limit or constrain opportunities for learners to listen, speak, read, or write, other contexts and practices may offer enhanced sets of possibilities for social interaction and human agency. Thus, pedagogical practices have the potential to be transformative in offering language learners more powerful positions than those they may occupy either inside or outside the classroom. In poststructuralist theory, subjectivity and language are seen as mutually constitutive, and are thus centrally important in how a language learner negotiates a sense of self within and across a range of sites at different points in time. It is through language that a learner gains access to, or is denied access to, powerful social networks that give learners the opportunity to speak.

Post-colonial theorists such as Stuart Hall (Reference Hall, Donald and Rattansi1992, Reference Hall1997) and Homi Bhabha (Reference Bhabha1994) used poststructuralist identity theory to analyze how categories such as race and gender have been essentialized. In theorizing cultural identity, Hall focused on identity as in process, ‘becoming’, and stresses that identity is ‘not an essence, but a positioning’ (1997: 226) in particular historical and cultural environments. This means of theorizing difference has not been entirely satisfactory to those who would assert their identities as homogenous and unitary, foregrounding a particular aspect of their experience such as gender, race, or religious affiliation (see Section 5 below). Current worldwide expressions of nationalism and religious fundamentalism testify to this. Such unitary assertions of identity are often explained as strategic essentialism in service of political goals (Yon Reference Yon1999). The terms identity politics or the politics of difference reference this particular coalescence of identity and power relations.

3.3 Poststructuralist theories of positioning

Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin1981) was particularly interested in how position or status was signaled in language in works of fiction, and in conversation in general. Many identity and language learning researchers and theorists also stress the importance of considering how contexts shape positioning among particular interlocutors. While positioning has been discussed by many poststructuralist theorists (Foucault Reference Foucault and Gordon1980; Henriques et al. Reference Henriques, Holloway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine1984; Weedon Reference Weedon1987/1997; Hall Reference Hall1997), it was Davies & Harré (Reference Davies and Harré1990: 7) who explicitly used position as ‘the central organising concept for analysing how it is that people do being a person’. They and other poststructuralist theorists have reminded us that identities are contingent, shifting and context-dependent, and that while identities or positions are often given by social structures or ascribed by others, they can also be negotiated by agents who wish to position themselves. As Davies & Harré put it: ‘discursive practices constitute the speakers and hearers in certain ways and yet at the same time are a resource through which speakers and hearers can negotiate new positions’ (Reference Davies and Harré1990: 7).

Recognition of the apparent paradox of positioning, reflecting the socially-given and the individually-struggled for, has been important in many studies of language learning. Menard-Warwick (Reference Menard-Warwick2007), for example, identified particular positioning speech acts of both a vocational English language class teacher and her Latina students, such that learners were enabled or constrained to claim voice in the classroom. Noting that while vocational teachers often aim at empowering their students, Menard-Warwick observed that customary classroom materials and activities, as well as powerful societal discourses, often constrain students’ possibilities for claiming desirable identities. She pointed out that teachers should be alert to how students position themselves in classroom discourse and approach language instruction from a critical perspective to enable learners to name, and perhaps struggle against, some of the disempowering tendencies of the linguistic practices of their new cultures.

3.4 Sociocultural theories of language learning

Sociocultural theories draw on L. S. Vygotsky's (Reference Vygotsky1978, Reference Vygotsky, Rieber and Carton1987) insights into the social nature of learning but also on the work of more contemporary theorists who have extended and modified his ideas (e.g. Wertsch Reference Wertsch1998; Rogoff Reference Rogoff2003). Vygotsky (Reference Vygotsky1978) argued that humans act on the world with tools (both physical and symbolic), and emphasized the symbolic tool of language, proposing that children gain ‘increasing control over the mediational means made available by their culture, including language for interpersonal (social interaction) and intrapersonal (thinking) purposes’ (Lantolf Reference Lantolf2000: 8). From this perspective, learning is a social process in which culturally and historically situated participants engage in culturally-valued activities, using cultural tools. They thus develop the sorts of behaviors required for participation, and in so doing, change the activities and the tools. This foregrounding of dynamic social activity and the tool mediators of that activity are special features of sociocultural theory. Educational studies grounded in this perspective pay careful attention to the activities provided for learners in their diverse environments and to the qualities of the physical and symbolic tools, including written language, that learners use. In addition, they stress the importance of learners' access to cultural resources, and how learners might change those resources over time. As Rogoff (Reference Rogoff2003) noted, development (or learning) is ‘changing participation in the sociocultural activities of a community, which also change’ (2003: 368).

Sociocultural theories have been frequently drawn upon in studies of SLA. Such studies are sometimes more psychological in orientation (examples are Lantolf Reference Lantolf2000; Lantolf & Thorne Reference Lantolf and Thorne2006; Swain et al. Reference Swain, Kinnear and Steinman2010); sometimes they are more anthropologically- and sociologically-focused (Kostogriz & Tsolidis Reference Kostogriz and Tsolidis2008; Toohey Reference Toohey1998, Reference Toohey2000; Toohey & Norton Reference Norton, Hornberger and McKay2010). The theories represent a shift from seeing learners as individually internalizing stable systems of language knowledge, to seeing them as differentially-positioned members of social and historical collectivities, using (and thus learning) language as a dynamic tool. This moves observers toward examining the conditions for learning, and the issues of access of learners for appropriation of practices, in any particular community.

Lave & Wenger's (1991) work has been used by many language researchers allied with sociocultural theory, especially with respect to their construct, legitimate peripheral participation, which represented their view that communities are composed of participants who differentially engage with the practices of their communities, and that this engagement or participation in practice is ‘learning’. For them, the ‘oldtimer’ as well as the ‘newcomer’ are simultaneously learning through practice. Stressing the importance of local analysis of communities, they pointed out that conditions vary with regard to ease of access to expertise, to opportunities for practice, to consequences for error in practice, and so on. Lave & Wenger discussed the importance of not sequestering newcomers away from participation in community activities, if they are to learn. They noted that, ideally, learners must ‘see’, or be in the presence of, mature practice. This theme is taken up by SLA researchers who examine, in particular, learners' access to L2 communities.

4.1 Investment, motivation, and SLA

When Norton conducted research with immigrant women in Canada (Norton Reference Norton2000), she observed inconsistencies in the predictions made by studies of motivation in SLA, on the one hand, and what she found from careful ethnographic observation of language learners, on the other. Most motivation studies at that time framed motivation as a fixed characteristic of individual language learners, and hypothesized that learners who failed to learn the target language did not, for various reasons, have sufficient (or appropriate) desire to learn the language. Seeing language learning as mainly an individual accomplishment, these studies of SLA motivation were not, by and large, concerned with power relations between language learners and target language speakers. What Norton found was that high levels of motivation did not necessarily result in ‘good’ language learning, and that unequal relations of power between language learners and target language speakers were often salient in her learners' accounts. Accordingly, she found it necessary to develop the construct of investment to complement constructs of motivation in the field of SLA (Norton Peirce Reference Norton Peirce1995; Norton Reference Norton2000, Reference Norton, Hornberger and McKay2010, in press).

The construct of investment in language learning draws on economic metaphors, associated particularly with the work of Bourdieu. Bourdieu & Passeron (Reference Bourdieu and Passeron1977) used the term cultural capital to refer to the knowledge, credentials, and modes of thought that characterize different classes and groups. They argued that cultural capital has differential exchange value (or ‘currency’) in different social fields. Drawing on these metaphors, Norton observed that learners ‘invest’ in the target language at particular times and in particular settings, because they believe they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will, in turn, increase the value of their cultural capital. As the value of learners' cultural capital increases, so learners reassess their sense of themselves and their desires for the future. Norton argued that investment and identity together signal the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners to the target language and their sometimes ambivalent desire to learn and practice it.

The notion of investment recognizes that learners often have variable desires to engage in the range of social interactions and community practices in which they are situated. Previous work on motivation frequently conceived of individuals as having unitary, fixed, internalized and ahistorical ‘personalities’. Investment, on the other hand, sees language learners as having complex identities, which change across time and space, and which are constructed on the basis of the socially given, and the individually struggled-for. Thus, while motivation can be seen as a primarily psychological construct (Dörnyei Reference Dörnyei2001), investment is a sociological construct, and seeks to make meaningful connections between a learner's desire and commitment to learn a language and their changing identities.

Seeing engagement in language learning as investment calls forth different sets of questions about a learner's commitment to learning the target language. In addition to asking ‘To what extent is the learner motivated to learn the target language?’ the teacher or researcher can also ask ‘What is the learner's investment in the language practices of this classroom?’ A language learner may be highly motivated, but may nevertheless have little investment in the language practices of a given classroom or community, which may, for example, be racist, sexist, elitist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic. Alternatively, the language learner's conception of good language teaching may not be consistent with that of the teacher, compromising the learner's investment in the language practices of the classroom. Thus, the language learner, despite being highly motivated, may not be invested in the language practices of a given classroom. The learner could then be excluded from those practices, or choose not to participate in classroom activities. In time, the learner could be positioned as a ‘poor’ or unmotivated language learner by others (Norton & Toohey Reference Norton and Toohey2001).

A classroom-based study conducted by Duff (Reference Duff2002) in a multilingual secondary school in Canada serves to illustrate these theoretical issues. Duff found that the teacher's attempts to provide speaking rights for non-local students in the classroom had ambiguous results. It became apparent that many of the English language learners in the class were afraid of being criticized or laughed at by native English-speaking peers because of their limited command of English, and thus avoided oral interaction. Duff (Reference Duff2002: 312) noted that ‘Silence protected them from humiliation’. Learners' silence, however, was represented by local English speakers as ‘a lack of initiative, agency, or desire to improve one's English or to offer interesting material for the sake of the class’ (2002: 312). In addition, the teacher's efforts to provide non-local students with opportunities to speak sometimes positioned students in ways Duff called ‘awkward’. While some students resisted their subordinate positioning verbally, others were seemingly content to remain silent, investing more heavily in the written activities of the classroom. It could be argued that rather than being unmotivated, many of the silent English language learners in the class were not invested in the language practices of their classroom, actively resisting practices in which they occupied unequal relations of power vis-à-vis local English speakers.

The fields of applied linguistics and language education have seen lively interest in the construct of investment (Pittaway Reference Pittaway2004), including a special issue on investment that appeared in the Journal of Asian Pacific Communication (Arkoudis & Davison Reference Arkoudis and Davison2008; Norton & Gao Reference Norton and Gao2008). McKay & Wong (Reference McKay and Wong1996), for example, investigated the English language development of four Mandarin-speaking students in Grade 7 and 8 in a California school, noting that these students’ investment in the school's language was related to their needs, desires, and negotiations. Skilton-Sylvester (Reference Skilton-Sylvester2002) argued that the psychological construct of motivation did not sufficiently describe the complex lives of four Cambodian women in adult ESL (English as a Second Language) classes in the USA with whom she worked, and that understanding the domestic and professional identities of these women was necessary to explain their investment in particular adult ESL programs.

With reference to foreign language learning, Kinginger (Reference Kinginger, Pavlenko and Blackledge2004) documents the experiences of a young American woman called Alice, who, over a four-year period, negotiated many facets of her identity in her struggle to learn French, both in the USA and in a study abroad experience in France. Kinginger addresses the identity changes that Alice underwent as she sought to reconcile an ‘imagined’ France with her mixed language learning experiences, concluding that Alice's efforts towards French language competence were clearly an investment in social identity. In a different context, Haneda (Reference Haneda2005) examined the engagement of two university students in an advanced Japanese literacy course, concluding that their membership in multiple and differing communities may have shaped the way they invested in writing in Japanese. Potowski (Reference Potowski2007) explored students’ use of Spanish in a dual Spanish/English immersion program in the USA, noting that even if a language program is well run, learners' investments in the target language must be consistent with the goals of the program if language learning is to meet expectations. Arguing that investment has emerged as a ‘significant explanatory construct’ (2006: 59) in the L2 learning literature, Cummins (Reference Cummins, García, Skutnabb-Kangas and Torres-Guzmán2006) drew on the construct of investment to develop a definition of an identity text, and he and Early provide powerful examples of such texts in their forthcoming book (Cummins & Early Reference Cummins and Early2011).

4.2 Imagined communities and imagined identities

In modern daily life, people interact directly with members of many communities: they may be involved in neighborhood, workplace, educational, medical, and religious communities. As Wenger (Reference Wenger1998) suggested, however, these are not the only communities with which people are affiliated; they also affiliate with communities of the imagination. Anderson (Reference Anderson1991), who originally coined the term ‘imagined communities’, observed that nations are imagined communities, ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (1991: 6). Thus, in imagining ourselves allied with others across time and space, we can feel a sense of community with people we have not yet met and with whom we may never have any direct dealings.

The term ‘imagined community’ was applied to SLA theory by Norton (Reference Norton and Breen2001), who was particularly interested in the relationship between imagined communities and imagined identities. These concepts were further developed in Kanno & Norton (Reference Kanno and Norton2003) and Pavlenko & Norton (Reference Pavlenko, Norton, Cummins and Davison2007), and have proved productive in diverse research sites (see, for example, Silberstein Reference Silberstein2003; Murphey, Jin & Li-Chi Reference Murphey, Jin, Li-Chi, Benson and Nunan2005; Carroll, Motha & Price Reference Carroll, Motha and Price2008; Dagenais et al. Reference Dagenais, Lamarre, Sabatier, Armand, Shohamy and Gorter2008; Kendrick & Jones Reference Kendrick and Jones2008). There is a focus on the future when learners imagine who they might be, and who their communities might be, when they learn a language (see also Jenkins Reference Jenkins2005, Reference Jenkins2007 with regard to English as a lingua franca). Such communities include affiliations, such as nationhood or even transnational communities, which extend beyond local sets of relationships. Such imagined communities may well have a reality as strong as those in which learners have current daily engagement, and might even have a stronger impact on their investment in language learning. Norton (Reference Norton and Breen2001) argued that a lack of awareness of learners' imagined communities and imagined identities could hinder a teacher's ability to construct learning activities in which learners can invest.

Further discussion of these issues is available in a co-edited special issue of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education on ‘Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities’ (Kanno & Norton Reference Kanno and Norton2003). In this publication, international scholars explored how the notion of imagined communities figured in language learning in the specific situations with which they were familiar. More recent work by Kanno (Reference Kanno2008) in Japan examined the relationship between school programs and access to bilingualism in five schools that promoted bilingual education. While additive bilingualism was promoted for upper-middle-class students, schools serving immigrant and refugee children were more likely to promote subtractive bilingualism. Kanno concluded that educators' various visions of children's imagined communities drew forth different forms of bilingual education, and maintained existing inequities among upper-middle-class and immigrant and refugee children.

Imagined community also served as a helpful theoretical construct in the work of Dagenais et al. (Reference Dagenais, Lamarre, Sabatier, Armand, Shohamy and Gorter2008) in Canada. These researchers investigated the linguistic landscapes around two elementary schools in Vancouver and Montreal that enrolled L2 learners. The project drew on innovative resources such as digital photography to show graphically how the children imagined the language(s) of their neighborhoods, and how they constructed their identities in relation to them. Children in both cities were also encouraged to exchange letters, posters, photographs, and videos. Dagenais et al. argued that this documentation of the actual and imagined neighborhoods, as seen by children, provided rich information on the children's understanding of their community. Understanding children's actual and imagined communities had important implications for language teaching and learning in these sites.

Kendrick & Jones (Reference Kendrick and Jones2008) conducted research in Uganda to analyze drawings and photographs produced by primary and secondary girls. Like Dagenais et al. (Reference Dagenais, Lamarre, Sabatier, Armand, Shohamy and Gorter2008), this study used multimodal methodologies to investigate the girls’ perceptions of their participation in local literacy practices, and to promote dialogue on literacy, women, and development. The girls’ visual images were found to provide insight into their imagined communities, communities in which command of English and access to education was available. They concluded (2008: 397):

In investigating racial discourses found in educational documents in the UK, Blackledge (Reference Blackledge2003) also used the concept of imagined communities. He found that educational decision-makers’ imagination of a monocultural and monolingual community, seen as normative and natural, marginalized the cultural practices of Asian minorities making regular visits to their heritage countries. From the perspective of this normative homogeneous imagined community, the Asian practices were positioned ‘as aberrant, Other, and damaging to the educational prospects of minority children’ (2003: 332). For him, the discourses of the dominant group, which assumed an imagined community of homogeneity, racialized and stigmatized the cultural practices of Asian families, and accomplished this with apparently ‘common-sense’ arguments.

7.1 International pedagogical perspectives

Apart from the studies discussed so far, there have been many other research studies conducted in diverse global settings that investigate how particular pedagogical practices can either constrain or enable the range of identity positions available to language learners in classroom settings. Lee's (Reference Lee2008) research in a Canadian post-secondary institution suggested the complexities involved when teachers want to enhance the range of identities available to their students, but when customary classroom practices re-assert fixed positions. Despite teachers’ best intentions, Lee argued, pedagogical decisions can reinforce subordinate student identities, and limit students’ access not only to language learning opportunities, but also to their imagination of more desirable identities.

Lee's findings echo those of Ramanathan (Reference Ramanathan2005), who found that teachers’ language instructional practices in secondary schools in India promoted and strengthened existing inequities among students learning English in two different kinds of schools. She examined the adjustment of students who had been educated in either Gujarati- or English-medium schools through grades K-12, when they moved to English-medium tertiary level institutions. She found, perhaps not surprisingly, that students who received English-medium instruction through high school were more successful in English-medium colleges than those schooled in the vernacular. In explanation, she further noted that in the English-medium secondary schools, students were required to engage in creative and high level analysis of English literature, while in the vernacular-medium secondary schools, students, who were mostly lower-caste, were engaged in grammar and translation exercises. Ramanathan suggested that language instructional practices (mandated by curricular statements that might not be under the control of local teachers) like grammar and translation, which do not call on higher-level thinking skills, may limit language learners' progress and thus their access to more powerful identities. This study showed how larger institutional arrangements may limit teachers’ efforts to enable students to appropriate more powerful identities.

Another example of institutional practices that constrain possibility is found in the Mexican context, where López-Gopar (Reference López-Gopar2007) discussed the identity assignation of indigenous Mexicans as ‘illiterates’. He quoted Molina Cruz (Reference Molina Cruz2000: 405), who described this situation:

López-Gopar argued that this alienating identity comes from narrow views of literacy that preclude recognition of the many multimodal literacies of indigenous peoples. He further argued that building upon the multiliteracies that indigenous children brought to Mexican schools would ameliorate the schooling difficulties of many such children (see also Martin-Jones & Jones Reference Martin-Jones and Jones2000; Hornberger Reference Hornberger2003; Prinsloo & Baynham Reference Prinsloo and Baynham2008).

More promising pedagogical projects have been described by researchers in another Mexican study, in diasporic Chinese communities, and in South Africa, Uganda, the USA, and the UK. These classrooms, and many other transformative classrooms that have been discussed in the literature (see, for example, the many projects discussed in Norton & Toohey Reference Norton and Toohey2004), are led by language teachers who have broad conceptions of ‘language’ and thus of ‘language teaching’.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, Clemente & Higgins (Reference Clemente and Higgins2008), for example, described their research with non-native English-speaking student teachers of English, showing how these pre-service teachers questioned the dominant role that English plays in the globalized political economy, and how they sought to appropriate and perform English without sacrificing their local Mexican identities. Describing their research site as a contact zone, Clemente & Higgins demonstrated that the student teachers in their study satirized and, in effect, ‘de-throned’ English through various forms of language play in both English and Spanish, and argued that the student teacher groups were safe havens in which participants could play with both languages. Such performances allowed them to explore various identity positions, as a counter-discourse to dominant discourses of the native English teacher. As one student teacher said (2008: 123):

The situatedness and hybridity of language learners' identities is also emphasized in the language and teaching of diasporic Chinese communities around the world, where researchers are investigating the heterogeneity of learners of Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL), and their diverse needs and desires for learning (He & Xiao Reference He and Xiao2008). In this regard, the observation by Jason, as quoted in He (Reference He2010: 66) is particularly poignant:

In research on CHL, which extends to research on the learning of Chinese as a foreign language, many scholars are pointing out that identity (ethnic, cultural, and linguistic) is a major factor in learners' investment in learning Chinese (Li & Duff Reference Li, Duff, He and Xiao2008; Duff et al. forthcoming).

In a different educational context, Stein (Reference Stein2008) described transformations in South African schools in which local forms of representation had been marginalized and devalued by the apartheid system. Teachers changed these under-resourced township schools by re-appropriating and re-sourcing local textual, cultural, and linguistic forms. Teachers provided opportunities for their students, English language learners, to make use of multimodal resources, including linguistic, bodily, and sensory modes, in order to engage in representing meaning. Learners were enthusiastic participants in production of multimodal counter-texts that subverted the usual ‘proper’ school topics and readings, and drew on topics considered by some to be taboo.

Recent research in Uganda investigated how instructional activities involving drawing, photography, and drama could be incorporated more systematically into English language classrooms (Kendrick et al. Reference Kendrick, Jones, Mutonyi and Norton2006; Kendrick & Jones Reference Kendrick and Jones2008). Working in two Ugandan sites, Kendrick and her colleagues found, as did Stein, that multimodal activities offered teachers new and expanded ways to validate students’ literacies, cultures, and identities, and in addition, such activities were engaging and supportive of English language learning in the classroom. In a photography project, for example, students began to use English for communication and expression of students’ own meanings, a development from their former perception of English as a somewhat restrictive and artificial medium of instruction.

In the UK, Wallace (Reference Wallace2003) described her work with adult language learners in which she presented a variety of popular texts, including newspaper and magazine articles and advertisements. Her work with students in critically analyzing such texts made clear to students how power and meaning structure texts, and how students’ engagement in critical reading could help them question and reshape the powerful discourses that surround and sometimes subordinate them. Wallace pointed out the contrast between dominant ESL methodologies (such as communicative language teaching and task-based learning) and a critical approach, arguing that dominant approaches often ‘domesticate’ learners, focusing primarily on activities designed to adapt students to dominant practices rather than engaging them in the important work of critiquing disempowering discourses.

The teachers described in the above projects conceived of language not primarily as a static linguistic system, but rather as a social practice in which experiences are organized and identities negotiated. These teachers recognize that if learners are not invested in the language practices of the classroom, learning outcomes are limited, and educational inequities perpetuated. Further, such teachers take great care to offer learners multiple identity positions from which to engage in the language practices of the classroom, the school, and the community. In diverse regions of the world, innovative language teachers are seeking to provide learners with a range of opportunities to take ownership over meaning-making, and to re-imagine an expanded range of identities for the future.

7.2 Digital technology, identity, and language learning

Multimodal technologies impact twenty-first century citizens and have been investigated by a number of scholars interested in language learning (see, for example, Kramsch & Thorne Reference Kramsch, Thorne, Block and Cameron2002; Warschauer Reference Warschauer2003; Lewis & Fabos Reference Lewis and Fabos2005; Lam Reference Lam2006; Mutonyi & Norton Reference Mutonyi and Norton2007; Snyder & Prinsloo Reference Snyder and Prinsloo2007; White Reference White2007; Pahl & Rowsell Reference Pahl and Rowsell2010). These scholars recognize the increasing multiplicity of communications channels and media, in which meanings are communicated not only through text but also through music, sound, images, and a variety of digital media, thus ‘redefining what it means to be literate in the twentyfirst century’ (Coiro et al. Reference Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear and Leu2008: 10). Indeed, Kramsch & Whiteside (Reference Kramsch and Whiteside2008) have argued that what they call symbolic competence is becoming increasingly important in contemporary society. Similarly, Poyntz (Reference Poyntz2009) reminded us ‘Beginning in infancy, young people now grow up learning the language of mass media through a constant diet of screen images, audio messages, and text-based communication’ (2009: 369).

The way that technology provides language learners with the means to construct imagined lives has been investigated by Lam (Reference Lam2000, Reference Lam2006), for example, who examined the computer-mediated transnational identities that immigrant youth in the USA were fashioning for themselves as multilingual, multicompetent actors. She found that these identities afforded them possibilities to provide language learning opportunities for themselves that were broader than those available to them in school, where they were stigmatized as immigrants and incompetent language users. Similarly, in Australia, the distance language-teaching programs examined by White (Reference White2007) were designed to provide learners with a wider range of choices for foreign language learning in school. She concluded that as innovations in distance learning and teaching expand, it is imperative that the field finds ways of addressing the philosophical, pedagogical, and professional issues that arise, and that issues of identity, for both teachers and learners, are significant factors in each of these domains.

Lewis & Fabos (Reference Lewis and Fabos2005) examined the use of Instant Messaging (IM) by seven young people in the USA for evidence of how these youths' social identities shaped and were shaped by their engagement in this form of digital meaning-making. Not surprisingly, they found that the youth engaged in IM to enhance their social relationships and statuses across contexts, sometimes assuming multiple identities online. IM permitted them to engage in literacy practices in ways they were not able to do in school, and they, like many others, argued that schools would do well to try to link students’ expertise in outside-school literacies with their in-school literacy instruction.

Similarly, Pahl & Rowsell (Reference Pahl and Rowsell2010: 76) describe projects in the UK and the USA that use ‘artifacts as a means to reconfigure students who feel marginalized by school literacy to find a place in the English classroom’. Finding that students ‘valued the artifacts in their lives over many of the texts studied in English class, which bear little resemblance to their own worlds’ (Reference Pahl and Rowsell2010: 79), teachers asked children to use their knowledge of digital social networking and combine this with investigations of traditional school-identified texts, thus providing a school space for hitherto marginalized students.

Most of the studies that investigate how digital technologies affect identity and language learning have been celebratory, with most observers convinced that ‘Networked electronic communications have given rise to new social spaces, linguistic and semiotic practices, and ways of fashioning the self’ (Lam Reference Lam2006: 171). However, like analysts of the use of digital technologies with youth generally, Lam also cautioned that these technologies may not ‘necessarily provide the analytical tools that may empower youths to critique and change existing social structures in positive directions’ (2006: 186). A cautionary note was also sounded by Kramsch & Thorne (Reference Kramsch, Thorne, Block and Cameron2002), who indicated, in a study of the synchronous and asynchronous digital communications between American learners of French in the USA and French learners of English in France, that these communications were not always identity-enhancing. They found that students had little understanding of the larger cultural framework within which each party was operating, leading to problematic digital exchanges.

Hull, Jury & Zacher (2007) and Poyntz (Reference Poyntz2009) argue that teachers play an important role in instructing children and youth to use multimodality for critical purposes. The interest of many scholars in how digital technologies might contribute to enhanced language learning and learner identities will no doubt add to our increased understanding of this relationship in the future. Further, as scholars such as Warschauer (Reference Warschauer2003), Mutonyi & Norton (Reference Mutonyi and Norton2007), Snyder & Prinsloo (Reference Snyder and Prinsloo2007), and Andema (Reference Andema2009) have noted, digital research on language learning in wealthier regions of the world may be of limited application in other contexts, so understanding how digital literacies are taken up in poorly-resourced communities is essential in future research.

7.3 Identity and resistance

Resistance in language learning was not studied a great deal in the past, but the relationships among identity, language learning, and classroom resistance have become of major interest to several scholars in language education. Such research typically examines how structural constraints and customary classroom practices might position learners in undesirable ways, but that such constraints and practices are sometimes resisted by learners so as to create innovative and unexpected identity relationships.

Canagarajah (Reference Canagarajah, Norton and Toohey2004a), for example, investigated how language learners negotiate learning a new language or dialect (sometimes associated with colonial relationships) but nevertheless maintain membership in vernacular communities and cultures. In his research, he noted that language learners of English in the USA and Sri Lanka were sometimes ambivalent about the learning of an L2 or dialect, recognizing social and economic benefits to such learning, but also serious social losses. He noted that this ambivalence sometimes led to clandestine literacy practices on the part of students to create pedagogical safe houses in the language classroom. In both contexts, the clandestine literacy activities of the students are seen to be forms of resistance to unfavorable identities that learners may be assigned because of their participation in the L2 community. Canagarajah argued that these safe houses serve as sites of identity construction, allowing students to negotiate the often contradictory tensions they encounter as members of diverse communities.

McKinney & van Pletzen (Reference McKinney and van Pletzen2004) provide a second example of research on identity and resistance in language learning. They introduced critical reading into their first year English studies course using two curriculum units on South African literature. Their students, relatively privileged, and studying at a historically white and Afrikaans university in South Africa, felt uncomfortably positioned by the curriculum materials (concerned with South Africa's apartheid past), and therefore resisted these materials. In response, the authors described their attempts to use the course so that both they and their students could explore the many private and political processes through which identities are constructed. Students’ resistance became framed as providing impetus for consideration of these important and complex issues.

A third example is provided by Talmy's (Reference Talmy2008) investigation in Hawai'i of the multiple ways in which secondary school English language learners resisted being positioned as ‘ESL students’. The school expected that ESL students would bring required materials to class, read assigned fiction, do bookwork, meet assigned dates, follow instructions, and work for the full class session. However, resistant ESL students frustrated these expectations, leaving materials ‘at home’, talking with friends, and playing cards. Talmy pointed out that the students’ resistance led to a particularly undesirable end, transforming the ESL program into precisely what the students disliked most, ‘an easy, academically inconsequential program that did little to meet their L2 learning or educational needs’ (2008: 639).