Unveiling students’ identities through written responses to literature in an EFL virtual community

Abstract

This qualitative case study explores the identity relations that four eighth-grade students enacted through their written responses to literature in an EFL virtual community. The participants responded to three literary texts approached in the English Language Arts class during the school year 2012-2013. The written text types the participants used to respond to these literary works were a literary commentary, a poem, and an argumentative composition. This study concludes that participants’ identities were unveiled with reference to the type of reader stance each of them assumed in her written responses within a continuum, ranging from a predominantly efferent reading stance to a predominantly aesthetic one, Rosenblatt (1995). Furthermore, the participants enacted relations of difference or affiliation through language, in order to establish processes of identity display, construction, or negotiation, (Bucholtz & Hall, 2008).