Californians often take for granted a split between ethnic and linguistic identities, expecting immigrants to maintain strong ethnic identities while becoming monolingual in English. However, recent immigration has led to increasing diversity at California universities, with no majority ethnic group and many students bilingual. This study explores…

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) scholars have recently drawn on critical race theory (CRT) to critique and understand the propagation of Whiteness as a norm associated with native English speakers. However, the area of language studies, more broadly defined, has yet to develop the same link with CRT. To this end, this…

This article presents the results of an analysis of student perceptions about speakers of Spanish in the United States before and after participation in a university course on U.S. Spanish that incorporates a hands-on research component. Three arguments are made here: That these perceptions influence their day-to-day relationship with bilingual…

As literacy researchers, we are challenged to consider whether our instructional practices are sufficient to help students engage in literacy practices in our current and future society, such as reading from critical literacy perspectives. Teacher identities can be discursively constructed in different ways, given the contexts in which they work.…

This article tells the story of a child immigrant's L2 acquisition process. The narrative demonstrates the effects of social and academic factors on motivation to acquire an L2 and the result of immigration at a young age on cultural identity formation. The article begins by discussing the need for research into sociocultural factors in the second…

Using sociocultural and poststructuralist theoretical lenses, this study examines the narrative construction of language-learner identity across time and space. We applied cross-narrative methodologies to analyze language-learning autobiographies and interview data from three English users who had recently transitioned to a U.S. context for…

This study examined the lived experience of students participating in foreign language houses to improve their skills in Russian, French, or Japanese. American students residing in apartments with other language learners and a native-speaking resident facilitator were required to speak with one another exclusively in the target language and…

The articles in this issue focus on the collaborative and negotiated construction of identities in interaction. Most of the articles are concerned with the constitution of identities through time in powerful educational and legal institutional contexts. Here the emphasis is on the emergence of new identities being learned by some participants…

This article addresses how different types of, and differences in, power affect the micro-processes of face-to-face interaction as they contribute to the dynamic co-construction of identity of the interactants. The specific focus will be on linguistic and national identity when a French L1 speaker who is bilingual in American English and lives in…

This article offers a critical discussion of notions of self as they emerge in the diaries kept by Alzheimer patients and their caregivers. It explores ways in which diary writing becomes simultaneously an agentive way by which a sense of "self" gets scripted since memory is fast slipping away, while also pointing to the fluid nature of identities…

In this article, we explore the complex and nebulous terrain between two theoretical concepts, imagined communities (Norton, 2000, 2001), that is, individuals' imagined affiliations with certain groups, and regimes of truth (Foucault, 1980), dominant images inscribed and reinscribed into individual consciousness until they become normative. Using…

Recent scholarship on "disabilities" and bodies has tended to be extreme in its orientation and has, on the whole, not been able to speak of chronic disabilities and bodily breakdown in humanistic ways. In its verve toward finding "cures," biomedical discourses, from which societal discourses draw their strength, have emphasized malfunctioning…

This is a theoretical paper that attempts to re-conceptualize language learning motivation by taking into consideration the effects of globalisation on learners' sense of identity and how this impacts on the motivation to learn the unquestioned language of globalisation, English. I will argue that in EFL contexts it is learners' sense of…

This study is concerned with interactional involvement and identity construction in a university seminar comprised of native and non-native English speaking students. Findings reveal that in their classroom interactions, these two groups of students take on and perceive others to take on identities that have little to do with their language status…

This article explores the concept of tradition within language teacher education (LTE) and extends our understanding of the elements involved in the formation of identity in preservice, second language teachers. After reviewing various perspectives of identity formation, a discursive model is offered as an approach to individual development within…