AUDIBLE DIFFERENCES: ESL AND SOCIAL IDENTITY IN SCHOOLS. Jennifer
Miller. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. xv + 200.
$89.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.
Jennifer Miller's book is a case study that focuses on
students' spoken English, how students are “heard” or
become “audible” in the mainstream context, and the
relationship between this audibility and identity formation. The twist,
and one of the major contributions of this work, is Miller's
careful theoretical positioning. She is working in the space where
theories of identity formation and SLA overlap to paint a more complex
and interesting picture of language acquisition than any of the
theoretical frameworks could accomplish alone.