Identity and Language Learning

Extending the Conversation

By (author) Bonny Norton

Publication date:

04 October 2013

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

234x156mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781783090556

Identity and Language Learning draws on a longitudinal case study of immigrant women in Canada to develop new ideas about identity, investment, and imagined communities in the field of language learning and teaching. Bonny Norton demonstrates that a poststructuralist conception of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and place is highly productive for understanding language learning. Her sociological construct of investment is an important complement to psychological theories of motivation. The implications for language teaching and teacher education are profound. Now including a new, comprehensive Introduction as well as an Afterword by Claire Kramsch, this second edition addresses the following central questions:

- Under what conditions do language learners speak, listen, read and write?

- How are relations of power implicated in the negotiation of identity?

- How can teachers address the investments and imagined identities of learners?

The book integrates research, theory, and classroom practice, and is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in the fields of language learning and teaching, TESOL, applied linguistics and literacy.

This book is open access under a CC BY ND licence.

Preface

Introduction

1. Fact and Fiction in Language Learning

2. Researching Identity and Language Learning

3. The World of Adult Immigrant Language Learners

4. Eva and Mai: Old Heads on Young Shoulders

5. Mothers, Migration and Language Learning

6. Second Language Acquisition Theory Revisited

7. Claiming the Right to Speak in Classrooms and Communities

Afterword by Claire Kramsch

The publication of Bonny Norton's Identity and Language Learning in 2000 was a landmark moment in the field of additional/second language learning. The countless discussions in journal articles, research reports and PhD theses in the past decade testify to the power of her multi-faceted and generative ideas. I have no doubt that this revised edition will be on the 'must read' list of anyone concerned with additional/second language learning and language education more generally.