Social Learning Theories: Identity
Approaches to SLA
Week 10
Tonight
• Discussion lead 1: Block (2007)
• Intro to Identity Theory (Norton & McKinney,
2011)
• Discussion lead 2: Norton & Toohey (2001)
• Bringing it together
• HW
Discussion lead 1: Block (2007)
• What is identity?
• What are its major sub-components or related
ideas?
Intro to Identity Theory (Norton & McKinney,
2011)
• What is identity?
• Norton uses the term identity “to reference
how a person understands his or her
relationship to the world, how that
relationship is constructed across time and
space, and how the person understands
possibilities for the future” (2000, p. 5).
• every time learners speak, they are
negotiating and renegotiating a sense of self
in relation to the larger social world, and
reorganizing that relationship in multiple
dimensions of their lives.
characteristics
• three characteristics of identity are
particularly relevant to SLA:
– the multiple, non-unitary nature of identity;
– identity as a site of struggle;
– and identity as changing over time.
Sub-components
• Investment
• Imagined communities
• The construct of investment, first introduced by Norton (Norton
Peirce, 1995), signals the socially and historically constructed
relationship of learners to the target language, and their often
ambivalent desire to learn and practice it.
• “cultural capital” to reference the knowledge and modes of thought
that characterize different classes and groups in relation to specific
sets of social forms, with differential exchange values.
• Norton argued that, 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, which will in turn increase the
value of their cultural capital. Learners expect or hope to have a
good return on that investment—a return that will give them access
to hitherto unattainable resources.
• How is the idea of investment supported in
the Duff (2002) study?
Motivation vs. Investment
• What is the difference? Why does it matter?
• Instead of asking, for example, “To what extent is
the learner motivated to learn the target
language?”the researcher asks, “What is the
learner’s investment in the target language
practices of this classroom or community?”
• A learner may be a highly motivated language
learner, but may nevertheless have little
investment in the language practices of a given
classroom, which may, for example, be racist,
sexist, elitist, or homophobic.
Critical theory background
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
– According to these theorists, a “critical” theory
may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory
according to a specific practical purpose: a theory
is critical to the extent that it seeks human
emancipation, “to liberate human beings from the
circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer
1982, 244).
• They often draw on Foucault (1980) to
understand not only the relationship between
knowledge and power, but the subtle ways in
which power operates in society.
• Foucault noted, for example, that power is
often invisible in that it frequently naturalizes
events and practices in ways that come to be
seen as “normal” to members of a community.
Imagined Communities
• What are they and why do they matter?
• Imagined communities refer to groups of people, not
immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we
connect through the power of the imagination.
• in imagining ourselves bonded with our fellow compatriots
across time and space, we can feel a sense of community
with people we have not yet met, and perhaps may never
meet. A focus on imagined communities in SLA enables us
to explore how learners’ affiliation with such communities
might affect their learning trajectories.
• These imagined communities are no less real than the ones
in which learners have daily engagement and might even
have a stronger impact on their identities and investments.
Structuralist vs Post Structuralist Ideas
of Language
• How do they differ?
The Twenty Statements Test (TST)
• The TST requires participants to write down
their responses to the question ‘who am I?’
twenty times, after which their responses are
systematically coded.
• The Twenty Statements Test (TST), originally
devised by Kuhn and McPartland in 1954, is
designed to capture the linguistic
manifestation of the working content of the
self concept.
Winchester (2009, pp. 63-64)
• Assessing the Self
• the self concept is a dynamic construct, the content of
which is influenced by the social situation at a given
time, in addition to being influenced by an individual’s
current goals, emotional and motivational state
(Kanagawa, Cross and Markus 2001: 91).
• Consequently, individuals’ working self concepts
emerge in social behaviour and can be accessed
through their declarations about the self (i.e. their selfdefinitions). These give an indication of how individuals
evaluate the context, in addition to how they wish to
be perceived by the co-participant(s) in a conversation.
• Positives of this approach
• Negatives
Discussion lead 2: Norton & Toohey
• Be sure to understand the context and goals
of this study. You will be given questions
afterwards require you to use this
information.
Questions Norton & Toohey
Why is this focus important?
• By focusing on the situated experiences of
these two learners, we seek new insights into
the dialectic between the individual and the
social; between the human agency of these
learners and the social practices of their
communities.
What are these ideas overlooking?
1) questions of interest were how good learners
approached language learning tasks
differently from poor learners and what
characteristics of learners predisposed them
to good or poor learning.
2) successful learners were somehow different
in constitution from poorer learners.
Why would researchers focus on this?
• We approach the explanation of the success
of good language learners on the basis of their
access to a variety of conversations in their
communities rather than on the basis of their
control of a wider variety of linguistic forms or
meaning than their peers or on the basis of
their speed of acquisition of linguistic forms
and meanings.
How are these possibilities created?
• From this perspective, learners of English
participate in particular, local contexts in
which specific practices create possibilities for
them to learn English.
Why this focus?
• (a) How did the practices in the environments
of these good language learners constrain or
facilitate their access to English, and (b) how
did these good language learners gain access
to the social networks of their communities?
What were these differentiated
practices? How do they influence SLA?
• Munchies, a fast-food restaurant, was a
workplace that had differentiated practices for
workers.
From this perspective, what factors
contribute to learning and why
important?
• Although both [students] exerted agency in
making these offerings, the others in their
social context determined the worth of their
contributions.
BRINGING IT TOGETHER
• In what ways does this approach combine
social and cognitive?
Cognitive
• Need opportunities for input and out.
• Example, Spolsky (1989) identifies the many
benefits learners reap from “informal natural L2
learning” contexts:
– 1. Language is being used for communication.
– 2. The learner is surrounded by fluent speakers.
– 3. The context is the real outside world, open, and
stimulating.
– 4. The language is free and normal.
– 5. Attention is on the meaning of the communication
(p. 171).
Social
• How does the social matter?
p. 87
• Opportunities to speak and exposure to target
language speakers, essential to language
learning, are fundamentally socially
structured.
• Also, individual properties and social
environment
Research assumptions
• First, much identity research rejects the view
that any research can claim to be objective or
unbiased.
• Second, identity researchers aim to investigate
the complex relationship between social
structure on the one hand, and human agency
on the other, without resorting to
deterministic or reductionist analyses.
• Third, identity researchers seek to better
understand how power operates within
society, constraining or enabling human action
• From this perspective, L2 learning is not seen so
much as a gradual and neutral process of
internalizing the rules, structures, and vocabulary
of a standard language; rather, learners are seen
to appropriate the utterances of others in
particular historical and cultural practices,
situated in particular communities. Thus,
researchers need to pay close attention to how
communities and their practices are structured in
order to examine how this structuring facilitates
or constrains learners’ access to the linguistic
resources of their communities.
HW
• Atkinson (2011) Ch 4, Language socialization
approaches to second language acquisition
• Discussion lead: Watson-Gegeo (2004):yun
kyoung
• Discussion lead: Byon (2006):sojung
• Discussion lead: Duff (2010): William D.
• Reader Response