5496P APPROACHES TO SLA-A/rev/lb_New supps Royal Bembo ligs

The central argument of the identity approach to second language acquisition (SLA) is twofold: First, SLA theorists need a comprehensive theory of identity that integrates the individual language learner and the larger social world; second, SLA theorists need to address how relations of power in the social world affect learners’ access to the target language community. In relation to the former, a fully developed theory of identity highlights the multiple positions from which language learners can speak, and how sometimes marginalized learners can appropriate more desirable identities with respect to the target language community. In relation to the latter, identity theorists are concerned about the ways in which opportunities to practice speaking, reading, and writing, acknowledged as central to the SLA process (cf. Spolsky, 1989), are socially structured in both formal and informal sites of language learning. Identity theorists thus question the view that learners can be defined in binary terms as motivated or unmotivated, introverted or extroverted, inhibited or uninhibited, without considering that such affective factors are frequently socially constructed in inequitable relations of power, changing over time and space, and possibly coexisting in contradictory ways within a single individual. Norton first published these key arguments in the mid-1990s (Norton, 1997; Norton Peirce, 1995), supporting this theory with a comprehensive study of language learners (Norton, 2000). She then followed up these findings in subsequent research, often conducted collaboratively (Kanno & Norton, 2003; McKinney & Norton, 2008; Norton, 2001; Norton & Gao, 2008; Norton & Pavlenko, 2004; Norton & Toohey, 2001, 2004; Pavlenko & Norton, 2007). 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). In this view, 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. 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8111 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 35 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 41111 5496P APPROACHES TO SLA-A/rev/lb_New supps Royal Bembo ligs 08/11/2010 13:46 Page 73