1. English 343: Language and
identity (I)- Week 4
To me, no one needs to defend their right to speech, even if its not their first
language. …if we are the land of the free, why do we try so hard to control
others?--- Amy
I feel that it is a more realistic approach to a language study when you do study
the narratives of different language learners instead of just giving tests, just
observations, etc. With these narratives you can gain insight to what the mind is
directly thinking and/or feeling and be able to somewhat experience what the
writer has experienced. With these experiences you can draw more contemporary
idea conclusions with historic background knowledge. --- Jasmine
If I never learned Korean I probably would have identified myself differently. I
probably wouldn’t have studied abroad, which helped me connect and define my
identity. I probably would not be as close to my parents as I am now…Learning a
language can change a person’s identity. When someone is learning another
language, they are beginning to enter another culture as well.--- Jennifer
2. Goals…
• To understand that linguistic communities are NOT
homogenous, but often heterogeneous and conflicted (Post-
structural theories of language).
• To understand the relationships between
individuals, communities and nations.
• To re-conceptualize language learners as having multiple
desires, complex social histories Social identity as a site of
struggle.
• To understand that when ELLs are speaking, they are “not only
exchanging information, but also constantly reorganizing a
sense of who they are and how they relate to the social
worlds (Norton, 1995; p. 18).
3. Agenda
Part I: 2:00-3:20
• Activity on critical moments in intercultural communication
• Key concepts from language & identity research
• Dialogic lecture on post-structural theories in TESOL
Part II: 3:30- 4:50
• Presentation by Melinda and Lauren
• Class analysis of immigrant narratives
• Show and Tell: Sharing your Identity Narratives in groups (if
time allows)
• Next week’s schedule
4. Group Discussion: Critical Cross-
cultural Incidents
• Critical incident is a cross-cultural situation where
communication breakdown might occur among the
interlocutors.
• Please read the critical incidents and discuss what has caused
the conflict. How would you approach to this incident?
5. Key concepts
• Investment vs motivation
• Social identity
• Identity as a site of struggle
• Social distance
• Post-structural aspect of SLA
• Critiques of Krashen, Schuuman
• The use of autobiographies in class
• Classroom based social research (CBSR)
7. Brain explains his experiences as sound
technician in Europe…
• In the classroom of course, the implementation of tough-love is highly unlikely it
may be encountered "beyond the four walls of the class room" (Norton 355). In
reading some of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century autobiographical accounts
from Pavlenko's "The Making of an American", I realized that I had been creating
my own identity narrative for my L2 experience. The European crew member
narrative I created enabled me to integrate and maintain respect from my
colleagues, and it required a de-Americanization of my native-identity narrative.
I had to embrace the idea of multilingualism (as Americans are so adamant
mono-linguists) and, for this particular social situation, to perform an unnatural
toughness. Ironically I found that nearly every crew member was also
performing this toughness, and in reality we were all empathetic, open-minded,
and compassionate people. Without the creation of my European crew
narrative, I would not have survived the two-years of being the only American in
Holiday on Ice's over fifty international, mostly European crew members. I think
that opening up this unconscious act of identity narrative creation, that we all
do when entering new social situations especially those that are outside of our
native culture, would be an essential exercise in helping students make
conscious, and thereby more directed and positive, decisions about the
narrative they choose to compose for themselves.
8. Shawn says…
• Even many immigrants these days try very hard to assimilate themselves
to the American culture that they, too, forget their own culture (compared
to the Great Migration). If a student from a different country enters a new
classroom in America, what is the first thing they notice? The difference in
the language and appearance (which both can be associated to culture). If
the student's culture is not recognized and appreciated in the classroom,
just like during the Great Migration, the student's original culture will
surely be washed away (just like the Great Migration!). As teachers, we
need to appreciate each and every child’s identity and value it. We need
to encourage students to value their own culture; at the same time,
introduce them to the culture they are at, here in America.
• As for a question for this chapter, how would you know a student is giving
up their culture to fit in with the American mainstream or just assimilating
to the American culture?
9. Amy says…
Both of Norton’s articles were very similar with content and
focusing on the importance of race, class, gender, and power.
Before I read her articles, I was one of the people who focused
on the importance of motivation because that is all I was ever
taught, but the idea of investment makes much more sense to
me. Investing is the physical work one does with expectations to
have a good return, not just with language but also with one’s
social identity. I have also been taught (or at least been given
the impression by other teachers) that our social identity is
something that is constant, yet we are constantly changing over
time and have a multitude of views and qualities that
continually are being transformed. I had never really processed
our “sites of struggle” which Norton writes about, but it is
absolutely spot on. The relation of power has a big effect on
one’s use of English, especially as a second language learner.
10. Immigration Stories as
Classroom Research
See the documentary and discuss some of the benefits of using
life stories (life writing/speaking) of ELLs in the classroom. How
would you connect this documentary to class readings?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch
v=33OINi3xVbc&feature=related
11. Identity and language:
Sites of struggle and resistance
• Languages are not only markers of identity but also sites of
resistance, empowerment, solidarity, or discrimination.
• Giddens says our identities are reflexively organized information
about possible ways of life (how to act and how to be). What a
person is understood to be varies across cultures—do you agree
with this?
• One’s identity is not set and stone; it is not only in the behavior
or people’s reactions, but it’s in the narrative you tell about
yourself. It integrates events which occur in your world—It’s an
ongoing story about self.
Question to Reflect: Do you see your identity(ies) as a matter of
keeping “a particular narrative going”, or would you use another
metaphor? What metaphor would you use to describe your
identity as a pre-service/in-service teacher? Why? Feel free to
refer to your Language and Culture Trajectory assignment.
12. Discussion questions on
identity
• How is identity of one individual created?
• To what extend is any one individual’s identity a matter of
personality and to what extent do influences from the socio-
cultural context impact?
• If identities do change, what factors are responsible for such
change?
13. Identity research in TESOL
• SLA researchers have not adequate addressed how relations
of power affect the interaction in target language.
• The notion of “individual” needs to be conceptualized!
• Artificial distinction are drawn between the individual and the
social- lead to arbitrary mapping of particular factors. Why
is it that learners can sometimes be motivated and
extraverted sometimes the other way?
• More attention needed on poststructural theory of identity as
multiple, “a site of struggle”, ad “subject to change”—We
need a more comprehensive theory of identity!
14. Restrictive look at identity and language use
in earlier years of TESOL/Applied
Linguistics….
• Social Distance Theory: Shumann (1976)
“When there is great social distance between two groups, little
acculturation takes place” (p. 11) (minimal congruence between the
culture of the target language speakers and the culture of the
language learner)- You can be in contact, but there may still be a
greater social, cultural and economic distance.
• Krashen’s language learning theories:
1) Affective Hypothesis 2) learning vs acquisition 3) natural order
hypothesis 4) The input hypothesis-Krashen suggests that
comprehensible input in the presence of a low affective filter is one of
the most important causal variable in SLA All pertains to individual
rather than the social context. Are we portraying learners in
categories? (motivated vs unmotivated, introverted vs extraverted
• Dell Hymes’ communicative competence:
Hymes defines communicative competence as the goal of achieving an
effective and appropriate communication. BUT- Ability to claim the
right to speak should be an integral part of an expanded notion of
communicative competence. Who are legitimate speakers/listeners?
15. Moving from motivation to
investment…
• The concept of motivation (instrumental vs integrative) does not
capture the complex relationships between the relations of power,
language learning and identity.
• If learners invest in a second language, they do so with the
understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and
material resources.
• You can be very motivated, but still experience disempowering
relations with the target language community due to asymmetrical
power relationships (similar to the participants in Norton’s research)
Notron (1995) asks: why is it that a learner may sometimes be
motivated, extraverted, and confident and sometimes unmotivated,
introverted, and anxious; why in one place there may be social
distance between a specific group of language learners and the target
language community; whereas in another place the social distance
may be minimal; why a learner can sometimes speak and other times
remains silent” (p. 11)
16. Investment
• “when language learners speak, they are not only exchanging
information with target language speakers but they are
constantly organizing and reorganizing a sense of who they
are and how they relate to the social world. Thus an
investment in the target language is also an investment in a
learner’s own social identity, and identity which is constantly
changing across time and space” (p. 18)
• The notion she’s advocating is not SIMILAR to instrumental
motivation. The notion of instrumental motivation
presupposes an ahistorical language learner. The notion of
investment captures the relationship of the learners with the
changing social world.
17. Who is Bonny Norton?
Look who’s at the TESOL
Bonny Norton conference?!
• Professor & Distinguished
University Scholar and the
Department of Language &
Literacy Education at The
University of British Columbia
• Research interests: Issues
related to language, identity,
gender, power, popular culture in
the context of learning and
teaching English as a global
language.
• http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/norto
n/
18. Who is Aneta Pavlenko?
Aneta Pavlenko
• Professor of TESOL at Temple
University, NY.
• Winner of the 2009 TESOL
Award for Distinguished
Research and of the British
Association
• Research Interests:
Multilingualism, bilingualism,
immigrant narratives,
language and identity.
• Check out her website:
http://astro.temple.edu/~apa
vlenk/
19. Pavlenko’s study
• Analysis of 11 narrative of immigrant memoirs and
autobiographies published between the years of 1901 and
1935.
• Methodology: A sociohistoric approach to study personal
narratives” which sees autobiography as a literary and
sociological form that creates particular images of subjects in
particular historical moments” (genre that is shaped by the
local contexts)
• Research questions: which identities are negotiated? What is
the role of language? Does the portray of second language
learning in 20th century differs from those in immigrant
autobiographies?
20. The analysis of earlier
narratives
• Inequality between immigrants.
• Some felt the need to establish and argue for their
Americanness.
• English was seen as the key of assimilation, but the omission
of “language” in the earlier narratives is intriguing. (see the
examples)
• Stories of “happy linguistic assimilation”: Second language
learning as a successful and easy process. No mention of
linguistic discrimination.
21. The analysis of later narratives
• Linguistic hybridity
• Recognition of ethnicity, race and gender.
• Linguistic identities are negotiated in different ways according
to the narrators sociohistorical realities.
• National identity became strongly bound to monolingalism in
English.
• Present immigrants find themselves in a situation where
learning English means giving up the first language.
• Accounts of painful experiences
22. Identity narrative analysis
• In your groups read the narratives from three different groups.
What are some of the emerging themes do you see in these
narratives? How do they negotiate their identities? How is
second language and culture learning represented?
1. Narrative excerpts from “The inner world of the immigrant
child”
2. Narrative excerpts from Eva Hoffman, Fen Shen, H.Kim
23. Group Work: Narrative analysis
Analyzing language choices and content of the immigrant narratives:
• What identities are narrated in this excerpt? Which events in their
learning trajectory have become particularly significant and which
have likely been omitted as a result of this choice?
• What are some of the emerging themes you see in these narratives?
How do they negotiate their identities? How is second language and
culture learning represented?
• Examine the audience the narrator chose to address.
• What are the implications of this linguistic choice for their
narrative? Were the stories elicited in two languages or just one? Is
it possible that proficiency or attrition have influenced the manner
of the presentation or the amount of detail offered by the narrator?
(Pavkenkov, 2009)
REPORT YOUR FINDINGS TO THE WHOLE CLASS
24. Assignments
• Read “ A step from heaven”
• IMPORTANT:
Remember that we will have a guest speaker in class: Please
create at least two questions based on Dr. Kang’s article. Bring
your questions to class. It would be ideal if you could find
connections between the novel and Kang’s research.
