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Social Identities and Multiple Selves in Foreign Language Education

Damian J. Rivers & Stephanie Ann Houghton 2013

E-Book: 256 English pages

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Price: FREE

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Within foreign language education contexts across the globe, inadequate attention has been paid to documenting the dynamics of identity development, negotiation and management. This book looks at these dynamics in specific relation to otherness, in addition to attitudinal and behavioural overtones created through use of the term ‘foreign’ (despite its position as an integral marker in language acquisition discourse).

This book argues that individual identities are multidimensional constructs that gravitate around a hub of intricate social networks of multimodal intergroup interaction. The chapters pursue a collective desire to move the notion of identity away from theoretical abstraction and toward the lived experiences of foreign language teachers and students.

While the identities entangled with these interactions owe a significant measure of their existence to the immediate social context, they can also be actively developed by their holders. The collection of chapters within this book demonstrate how foreign language education environments (traditional and non-traditional) are ideal locations for the development of a sophisticated repertoire of discursive strategies used in the formulation, navigation, expression and management of social identities and multiple selves.

Review

This book is a collection of papers that together offer a bold and refreshingly new take on the many trials and tribulations that ELT professionals across the world-all of them, irrespective of where they come from and what credentials they bring along with them-go through as they negotiate their identities and strive to role-play these new identities against the backdrop of what their profession demands and what the public at large expects of them. (Kanavillil Rajagopalan, Professor of Linguistics, State University at Campinas, Brazil 2013-04-16)

This volume challenges a number of key assumptions made in the field of applied linguistics and pushes the boundaries of research on identity in the context of foreign language learning and teaching. (Ahmer Mahboob, Senior Lecturer of Linguistics, The University of Sydney, Australia 2013-05-07)

The major strength of this book is that it brings together research conducted in several different countries, which allows readers to explore additional language identity development in a variety of different settings; this is invaluable because, as Kunschak and Girón exemplify in chapter 4, this process can proceed differently for language learners from different cultures, educational contexts and so on. Though the title of the book may be misleading, the content is not limited to research on foreign language education and includes research on second language settings as well . To sum up, this is a valuable volume for both identity researchers and additional language teaching practitioners. (Ksenia Gnevsheva, University of Canterbury, UKLINGUIST 23:31)