Exploring learners’ (re) construction of linguistic identities: An analysis of discursive practices of positioning.

Abstract

In school, there are instituted, fixed practices which classify and re-produce classification and standardization of language learners. Yet learners negotiate their identities within this framework. This qualitative study sheds light on how learners re-construct their linguistic identity through the discursive practices of positioning in the EFL classroom in a private school. Thus, drawing from tenets of poststructuralism, I aim at interpreting students’ discursive practices of positioning as related to the linguistic identity of language learners. In this vein, I describe, interpret, and explain how participants use language to determine themselves as social individuals and to display and negotiate their multiple linguistic identities (Hall, 2003; Pavlenko, 2000; Norton and Toohey, 2011). Therefore, this research assumes that linguistic identity is discursively constructed and co-constructed by oneself and others within the social dynamics and the positions individuals assign or are assigned according to specific situations. Subsequently, classroom interaction was audio-recorded and its transcripts were examined through the tenets of the Conversational Analysis Approach (Schegloff, 1997), the Speech Acts Theory (Searle, 2001), and the Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré, 1990). Data analysis was inductively conducted identifying emerging themes. Findings depict how learners’ linguistic identities are determined by the tensions and contradictions they experience between an imaginary about the English language, entwined with neoliberal agendas (Phillipson, 1992), and the real discursive encounters they take part in. Implications thus invite teacher-researchers to inquire about how social dynamics function and how language, framed in pedagogical settings, is a mediator practice for transformation. Hence, I insist on broadening critical studies about linguistic identity and English learning, as language is not the academic end, but the means to mediate sociocultural meanings.