Bonny Norton

Language, Identity, and the Ownership of English

This article serves as the introduction to the special-topic issue of the TESOL Quarterly on Language and Identity. In the first section, I discuss my interest in language and identity, drawing on theorists who have been influential in my work. A short vignette illustrates the significant relationship among identity, language learning, and classroom teaching. In the second section, I examine the five articles in the issue, highlighting notable similarities and differences in conceptions of identity. I note, in particular, the different ways in which the authors frame identity: social identity, sociocultural identity, voice, cultural identity, and ethnic identity. I explore these differences with reference to the particular disciplines and research traditions of the authors and the different emphases of their research projects. In the final section, I draw on the issue as a whole to address a prevalent theme in many of the contributions: the ownership of English internationally. The central question addressed is the extent to which English belongs to White native speakers of standard English or to all the people who speak it, irrespective of linguistic and sociocultural history. I conclude with the hope that the issue will help address the current fragmentation in the literature on the relationship between language and identity and encourage further debate and research on a thought-provoking and important topic. Just as, at the level of relations between groups, a language is worth what those who speak it are worth, so too, at the level of interactions between individuals, speech always owes a major part of its value to the value of the person who utters it. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 652)

Changing Perspectives on Good Language Learners

Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate. The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture. (McDermott, 1993, p. 295)

Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities: Introduction

(2003). Imagined Communities and Educational Possibilities: Introduction. Journal of Language, Identity & Education: Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 241-249.

Imagined Communities, Identity, and English Language Learning

This chapter introduces the notion of imagined communities as a way to better understand the relationship between second language learning and identity. It is argued that language learners’ actual and desired memberships in imagined communities affect their learning trajectories, influencing their agency, motivation, investment, and resistance in the learning of English. These influences are exemplified with regard to five identity clusters: postcolonial, global, ethnic, multilingual, and gendered identities. During the course of this discussion, we consider the relevance of imagined communities for classroom practice in English education.

Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics

ABSTRACT This article locates Nortons foundational work on identity and investment within the social turn of applied linguistics. It discusses its historical impetus and theoretical anchors, and it illustrates how these ideas have been taken up in recent scholarship. In response to the demands of the new world order, spurred by technology and characterized by mobility, it proposes a comprehensive model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, ideology, and capital. The model recognizes that the spaces in which language acquisition and socialization take place have become increasingly deterritorialized and unbounded, and the systemic patterns of control more invisible. This calls for new questions, analyses, and theories of identity. The model addresses the needs of learners who navigate their way through online and offline contexts and perform identities that have become more fluid and complex. As such, it proposes a more comprehensive and critical examination of the relationship between identity, investment, and language learning. Drawing on two case studies of a female language learner in rural Uganda and a male language learner in urban Canada, the model illustrates how structure and agency, operating across time and space, can accord or refuse learners the power to speak.

Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning: Critical pedagogies and language learning: An introduction

Advocates of critical approaches to second language teaching are interested in relationships between language learning and social change. From this perspective, language is not simply a means of expression or communication; rather, it is a practice that constructs, and is constructed by, the ways language learners understand themselves, their social surroundings, their histories, and their possibilities for the future. This collection assembles the work of a variety of scholars interested in critical perspectives on language education in globally diverse sites of practice. All are interested in investigating the ways that social relationships are lived out in language and how issues of power, while often obscured in language research and educational practice (Kubota, this volume), are centrally important in developing critical language education pedagogies. Indeed, as Morgan (this volume) suggests, “politically engaged critiques of power in everyday life, communities, and institutions” are precisely what are needed to develop critical pedagogies in language education. The chapters have varying foci, seeking to better understand the relationships between writers and readers, teachers and students, test makers and test takers, teacher–educators and student teachers, and researchers and researched. The term critical pedagogy is often associated with the work of scholars such as Freire (1968/1970), Giroux (1992), Luke (1988), Luke and Gore (1992), McLaren (1989), and Simon (1992) in the field of education. Aware of myriad political and economic inequities in contemporary societies, advocates have explored the “social visions” that pedagogical practices support (Simon, 1992), and critiques of classroom practices in terms of their social visions have been common and longstanding in critical educational literature.1 Feminist critiques have also considered classroom practice and have identified ways in which the relationships and activities of classrooms contribute to patriarchal, hierarchical, and dominating practices in wider societies (e.g., Davies, 1989; Ellsworth, 1989; Gaskell, 1992; Spender, 1982; Walkerdine, 1989). In second language education, critiques of classroom practices in terms of the social visions such practices support are relatively recent but are increasingly being published in major venues.2

Learner Autonomy as Agency in Sociocultural Settings

Second language learning literature (and discourse in other fields) often constructs learners as individuals who act, think, and learn in accordance with innate, specifiable characteristics, independently of the social, historical, cultural and political-economic situations in which they live. From this perspective, these ‘autonomous’ learners have variable motivations, learning styles, cognitive traits, strategies and personality orientations that are seen as causal of their success or failure in language learning. We have seen particular interest in specifying the characteristics of successful language learners (e.g. Naiman et al., 1978). More recently, however, as Canagarajah (2003) points out, there has been a ‘social turn’ in our literature that places emphasis on the ways in which sociocultural factors and larger societal processes are involved in the construction of individuals and their learning (Hall, 1993, 1995; Rampton, 1995; Auerbach, 1997; Pavlenko and Lantolf, 2000; Pennycook, 2001). Another thread in this discussion has related to learners’ agency, their embodied experiences, and their individual histories situated in sociocultural contexts (e.g. Benson, Chik and Lim, this volume).

Digital identities, student investments and eGranary as a placed resource

In this article, we draw on our research on the digital portable library, eGranary, undertaken in a rural Ugandan village in 2008, to contribute to place-based studies of digital literacy. Our research project investigated the uptake of eGranary by students in the community, focusing on six secondary students who worked as library scholars in the local library. Drawing on Blommaerts construct of scale, we illustrate how both space and time were implicated in the diverse practices associated with eGranary, and their indexical meanings in the wider community. In addition, with reference to Nortons work on identity and investment, we illustrate how students’ identities shifted over time from trainee to tutor, and how the use of eGranary enhanced what was socially imaginable to the library scholars. We demonstrate that Nortons construct of investment thus serves as a useful complement to Blommaerts construct of scale. We also found, however, that students in the wider community who did not have access to eGranary engaged in practices of resistance. We conclude that while eGranary traveled well to Uganda, the limited local resources available in the community compromised its effectiveness, and may well limit the realization of students’ imagined identities for the future.

Identity: Second Language

Interest in second language identity in the field of applied linguistics is best understood in the context of a shift in the field from a predominantly psycholinguistic approach to second language acquisition (SLA) to include a greater focus on sociological and anthropological dimensions of second language learning, particularly with reference to sociocultural, poststructural, and critical theory. Researchers of second language identity have been interested not only in linguistic input and output in SLA, but also in the relationship between the language learner and the larger social world. In particular, these researchers have examined the diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts in which language learning takes place and how learners negotiate and sometimes resist the diverse positions those contexts offer them.

The English language, multilingualism, and the politics of location

Abstract Drawing on Pennycooks frameworks for understanding the global role of English, we discuss the paradoxes of English language usage in what Canagarajah terms ‘periphery communities’ internationally. This analysis is complemented by Canagarajahs work on a ‘politics of location’, which provides powerful insights into a periphery communitys local and global investments in English. This notion is explored with particular reference to Nortons work in South Africa and Pakistan, which suggests that creative responses to the dominance of English, whether through codeswitching, appropriation, or subversion, defy essentialist analysis. We argue further that the notion of a politics of location can provide insights into English language usage not only in periphery communities, but also in center communities as well. In this regard, there is urgent need for the ongoing research of such scholars as Cummins, who has sought to better understand the challenges to bilingualism and multilingualism in center communities.