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When the Learner Becomes the Context: Strategic Identity Display in Learning English as a Foreign Language in Europe

In recent years, foreign language learning literature has placed increasing emphasis on the learner as an individual, resulting on the one hand in prolific research on individual differences, but also, on the other, in repeated calls for regarding the learner as a whole person functioning in a complex social environment. This latter emphasis is now mainstream in educational psychology, but the language learning literature that borrows theoretical frameworks, concepts and approaches from educational psychology is only now beginning to move past calls for research towards providing actual empirical support.