This article examines several "language practice" interactions among adult immigrant students in an ESL classroom in the U.S. from the perspective of performativity theory. In drawing on performativity theory, it conceptualizes such classroom interactions, along with the research practices used to investigate them, as constitutive actions. That…

This paper offers detailed analysis of ethnographic data concerning an adult literacy student producing and discussing a text about China, using the framework for investigating the discoursal construction of writer identity developed by Burgess and Ivanic (2010). It sheds light on how writer identity changes and develops over time by showing how…

Linguistic instrumentalism, which underscores the importance of English skills for work and for achieving individual economic success, has influenced language education policies and proliferated the language teaching and testing industry in Japan. Linguistic instrumentalism is linked to the notion of human capital (i.e., skills deemed necessary…

This paper is about narrative and identity in classes of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). ESOL students, adult migrants to the English-dominant West, are positioned by policy and by their institutions primarily as potential employees and as test-takers. The paper considers ways in which ESOL students negotiate and perhaps resist the…

Most analyses of the sociolinguistic aspects of immigration focus on contexts where a single language is official and widely used. In bilingual Catalonia, newly arriving immigrants find themselves in a situation where the administration seeks to treat Catalan as a fully functional public language while large sectors of the local population still…

With a view of standardized testing as a situated local practice that serves "global" agendas, I examine the specific ways that this bureaucratic mechanism receives, sorts, arranges and classifies adult learners of English; inspires certain pedagogical practices; and fosters identities desired by the new global economy. Relying on data gathered…

What are the aspirations of Adult ESOL learners and what social and institutional factors constrain them? What are the consequent implications for Adult ESOL practitioners? This paper draws on a corpus of 76 interviews with adult migrants learning English in the UK, analyzing four of them in detail using a case study methodology. Despite the high…

This paper analyses the contribution of student agency and teacher contingency in the construction of classroom discourse in adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classes for refugees and asylum seekers, for whom the identity of student itself can constitute a stable point in a highly unstable and potentially threatening lifeworld.…

This is a study of the assessment of the speaking skills of adult learners of English for speakers of other languages (ESOL). It is prompted by a concern that participants can have differing expectations of what nature of speech event a speaking test actually is. This concern was identified during the administration and analysis of assessments…

Research in the field of adult ESOL internationally is both spasmodic and fragmentary. The papers in this special issue therefore constitute a major contribution to the field by providing new insights into ESOL research from the perspective of current pedagogical practices in the British context. In this paper, I provide a response to this…

The paper explores the manner in which written texts are selected and used in the adult English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) classroom. Taking a sociocultural view of the reading process and of the nature of text, it argues that ESOL students have potentially rich textual resources, which are typically not acknowledged in the classroom:…

This paper examines a discussion among a teacher and four Latin-American women in a family literacy class who engage for the first time in the practice of peer-editing a learner's text. In the analysis, it becomes evident that they have different ideas of and responses to the text. Whereas the teacher's focus is on revising the textual elements,…