Submitted by: Nazakat Ali

Submitted to : Mam Saira Sajid

Abstract:
The learning of language affects the identity of an individual as the recent researches on
language learning emphasizes the multiplicity of learner’s identities, a growing group of
researchers is interested in exploring how such relations or identifications as race, gender
and sexual orientation may impact the language learning process. These researchers do
not regard such identity categories as ‘variables’ but rather as socially and historically
constructed processes within particular relations of power. Identity, practices and
resources are inextricably linked and mutually constituted. The variable practices and
resources of specific settings and an individual’s access to them, relate powerfully to the
ways in which identities of individuals are constructed. From a poststructuralist
perspective, practices and identities are both produced and inherited. Examinations of
these in relation to language learning offer promise for improving and inhancing learning
context. L2 learning is not entirely determined by structural conditions and social context,
partly because these conditions and contexts are themselves in state of production. In
addition, language learners who struggle to speak from one identity position, may be able
to reframe their relationships with their interlocutors thereby changing their access to
practices and resources, and claim alternatives identities from which to speak, listen,
read, or write. If learners are successful in their bids from more powerful identities their
language acquisition may be enhanced.
Introduction:
In restaurant was working a lot of children but the children always thought that I am – I
don’t know –maybe some broom or something. They always said ‘Go and clean the
living room’, and I was washing the dishes and they didn’t do nothing. They talked to
each other and they thought that I had to do everything. And I said ‘No’. The girl is only
12 years old. She is younger than my son. said ‘No, you are doing nothing. You can go
and clean the tables or something’.

(Interview with Martina, Norton 2000: 99)

Martina was an English language learner from eastern Europe who had immigrated to
Canada for a better life for her three children. Partly because she was not a proficient
speakerof English, she struggled to find work in her profession as a quantit employed in
a fast food restaurant in the greater Toronto area. Her co-workers, as well as the
manager’s children (who frequently visited the restaurant), were all born in Canada, and
spoke English fluently. What Martina communicates in this extract is that engaging in
social interaction with her co-workers was a struggle, primarily because she was
positioned as a dehumanized and inanimate ‘broom’. To resist these marginalizing
practices, Martina reframed her relationship with her co-workers as domestic rather
than professional, and from the identity position ‘mother’, rather than ‘immigrant’ or
‘broom’, she claimed the right to speak.

While this data has been discussed more fully in other publications (Norton Peirce 1995;
Norton 2000) the vignette is a sobering reminder of the powerful relationship between
identity and language learning, which is of central concern to many scholars in the field
of language education. Indeed, over the past 15 years, there has been an explosion of
interest in identity and language learning, and ‘identity’ now features in most
encyclopedias and handbooks of language learning and teaching (Norton & Toohey
2002; Ricento 2005; McKinney & Norton 2008; Norton 2010; Morgan & Clarke 2011). In
the broader field of applied linguistics, interest in identity has also gained considerable
momentum. There is work, for example, on identity and pragmatics (Lo & Reyes 2004;
Spencer-Oatey & Franklin2009), identity and sociolinguistics (Joseph 2004; Omoniyi &
White 2007; Edwards 2009); and identity and discourse (Benwell & Stokoe 2006; Wodak
et al. 2009; Young 2009). An extended state-of-the-art article on identity and language
learning is timely. We have defined particular areas of interest from a rapidly expanding
literature in order to provide readers with both depth and scholars cite Norton’s work as
pivotal in reframing debates on identity (Menard-Warwick 2005; Ricento 2005; Block
2007a, 2007b; Swain & Deters 2007; De Costa 2010a; Morgan & Clarke 2011) and it was
in the context of such work, as Zuengler & Miller note (2006:43), that identity was
established as a research area ‘in its own right’. Further, as Block (2007a: 864)

Further, while much research on identity focuses on second language (L2) learning,
poststructuralist theory is also of great relevance to foreign language learning (see, for

example, Kanno 2003, 2008; Pavlenko 2003; Kinginger 2004; Kramsch 2009) and will be
incorporated in this article. Readers interested in work on group identity and intergroup
relations, common in the 1970s and 1980s, would find McNamara’s review (1997)
particularly helpful. In his article, McNamara highlights the important work of Tajfel
(1981), who was centrally concerned with identity relationships between in-groups and
out-groups in social life.In 1998, sociolinguist Susan Gass made the important argument
that the theoretical relevance of identity categories to L2 learning needed to be
established. The wide range of research studies we discuss here shows that new
theories of identity and language learning permit a conceptual shift in research about L2
learning, and offer important insights about the language learning process. The points
below summarize the claims made by identity and language learning researchers, with
illustrative reference to Martina’s vignette above, and are

further developed in subsequent sections:

(i) Contemporary identity theories offer ways to see the individual language learner

situated in a larger social world. While some previous SLA research defined learners in

binary terms (such as motivated or unmotivated, introverted or extroverted, inhibited

(ii) Identity theorists highlight the diverse positions from which language learners are
able to participate in social life, and demonstrate how learners can, but sometimes
cannot, appropriate more desirable identities with respect to the target language
community. As Martina found, while some identity positions may limit and constrain
opportunities for learners to listen, speak, read, or write, other identity positions may
offer enhanced sets of possibilities for social interaction and human agency.

(iii) Language learning theory and research needs to address how power in the social
world affects learners’ access to the target language community, and thus to
opportunities to practice listening, speaking, reading, and writing, widely acknowledged
as central to the SLA process. Identity theorists are therefore concerned about the ways
in which power is distributed in both formal and informal sites of language learning,
such as Martina’s workplace, and how it affects learners’ opportunities to negotiate
relationships with target language speakers.

(iv) Identity, practices, and resources are inextricably linked and mutually constituted.
The variable practices and resources of specific settings, and an individual’s access to
them, relate powerfully to the ways in which identities of individuals are constructed.
From a poststructuralist perspective, practices, resources, and identities are both
produced and inherited. Examination of these in relation to language learning offers
promise for improving and enhancing learning contexts.

(v) L2 learning is not entirely determined by structural conditions and social contexts,

partly because these conditions and contexts are themselves in states of production. In
addition, language learners who struggle to speak from one identity position, as Martina
did, may be able to reframe their relationship with their interlocutors, thereby changing
their access to practices and resources, and claim alternative identities from which to
speak, listen, read, or write. If learners are successful in their bids for more powerful
identities, their language acquisition may be enhanced.
Literature Review:
Poststructural theories of not only language, but also subjectivity and positioning, inform recent work on
identity and language learning. Sociocultural theory also offers perspectives on learning that are often
drawn upon in recent work on this topic. We address each of these areas in turn, illustrating the ways in
which they have been taken up in research on language learning and teaching. 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 (1966), 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
(1981, 1984, 1986) 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 participatein 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 (2006) 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 1977; Bourdieu & Passeron 1977; Bourdieu 1991;Albright & Luke 2008). While
poststructuralists are, of course, not the only theorists interestedin 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’ (1977: 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’ (1977: 651). He further noted that dominant usage is
associated with the dominant class. Heller (2008: 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 iidentities structure access to and opportunities for language use
and learning.

Christine Weedon (1987/1997), 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 (1980), Weedon argued that subjectivity is discursively constructed, and is
always socially and historically embedded.

Holland & Lave (2001) discussed the apparent paradox of identity being experienced as uni-tary 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 trans-formation 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 (2009), whose compellingbook, 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 ofsubjectivity 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 (1992, 1997) and Homi Bhabha (1994) 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 1999).