Social Learning Theories: Identity Approaches to SLA

Week 10

Tonight

• Discussion lead 1: Block (2007)• Intro to Identity Theory (Norton & McKinney,

2011)• Discussion lead 2: Norton & Toohey (2001)• Bringing it together• HW

Discussion lead 1: Block (2007)

• What is identity?• What are its major sub-components or related

ideas?

Intro to Identity Theory (Norton & McKinney, 2011)

• What is identity?

• 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).

• 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.

characteristics

• three characteristics of identity are particularly relevant to SLA: – the multiple, non-unitary nature of identity;– identity as a site of struggle; – and identity as changing over time.

Sub-components

• Investment• Imagined communities

• The construct of investment, first introduced by Norton (Norton Peirce, 1995), signals the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners to the target language, and their often ambivalent desire to learn and practice it.

• “cultural capital” to reference the knowledge and modes of thought that characterize different classes and groups in relation to specific sets of social forms, with differential exchange values.

• Norton argued that, if learners invest in a second language, they do so with the understanding that they will acquire a wider range of symbolic and material resources, which will in turn increase the value of their cultural capital. Learners expect or hope to have a good return on that investment—a return that will give them access to hitherto unattainable resources.

• How is the idea of investment supported in the Duff (2002) study?

Motivation vs. Investment

• What is the difference? Why does it matter?

• Instead of asking, for example, “To what extent is the learner motivated to learn the target language?”the researcher asks, “What is the learner’s investment in the target language practices of this classroom or community?”

• A learner may be a highly motivated language learner, but may nevertheless have little investment in the language practices of a given classroom, which may, for example, be racist, sexist, elitist, or homophobic.

Critical theory background

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: – According to these theorists, a “critical” theory

may be distinguished from a “traditional” theory according to a specific practical purpose: a theory is critical to the extent that it seeks human emancipation, “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” (Horkheimer 1982, 244).

• They often draw on Foucault (1980) to understand not only the relationship between knowledge and power, but the subtle ways in which power operates in society.

• Foucault noted, for example, that power is often invisible in that it frequently naturalizes events and practices in ways that come to be seen as “normal” to members of a community.

Imagined Communities

• What are they and why do they matter?

• Imagined communities refer to groups of people, not immediately tangible and accessible, with whom we connect through the power of the imagination.

• in imagining ourselves bonded with our fellow compatriots across time and space, we can feel a sense of community with people we have not yet met, and perhaps may never meet. A focus on imagined communities in SLA enables us to explore how learners’ affiliation with such communities might affect their learning trajectories.

• These imagined communities are no less real than the ones in which learners have daily engagement and might even have a stronger impact on their identities and investments.

Structuralist vs Post Structuralist Ideas of Language

• How do they differ?

The Twenty Statements Test (TST)

• The TST requires participants to write down their responses to the question ‘who am I?’ twenty times, after which their responses are systematically coded.

• The Twenty Statements Test (TST), originally devised by Kuhn and McPartland in 1954, is designed to capture the linguistic manifestation of the working content of the self concept.

Winchester (2009, pp. 63-64)• Assessing the Self• the self concept is a dynamic construct, the content of

which is influenced by the social situation at a given time, in addition to being influenced by an individual’s current goals, emotional and motivational state (Kanagawa, Cross and Markus 2001: 91).

• Consequently, individuals’ working self concepts emerge in social behaviour and can be accessed through their declarations about the self (i.e. their self-definitions). These give an indication of how individuals evaluate the context, in addition to how they wish to be perceived by the co-participant(s) in a conversation.

• Positives of this approach• Negatives

Discussion lead 2: Norton & Toohey

• Be sure to understand the context and goals of this study. You will be given questions afterwards require you to use this information.

Questions Norton & Toohey

Why is this focus important?

• By focusing on the situated experiences of these two learners, we seek new insights into the dialectic between the individual and the social; between the human agency of these learners and the social practices of their communities.

What are these ideas overlooking?

1) questions of interest were how good learners approached language learning tasks differently from poor learners and what characteristics of learners predisposed them to good or poor learning.

2) successful learners were somehow different in constitution from poorer learners.

Why would researchers focus on this?

• We approach the explanation of the success of good language learners on the basis of their access to a variety of conversations in their communities rather than on the basis of their control of a wider variety of linguistic forms or meaning than their peers or on the basis of their speed of acquisition of linguistic forms and meanings.

How are these possibilities created?

• From this perspective, learners of English participate in particular, local contexts in which specific practices create possibilities for them to learn English.

Why this focus?

• (a) How did the practices in the environments of these good language learners constrain or facilitate their access to English, and (b) how did these good language learners gain access to the social networks of their communities?

What were these differentiated practices? How do they influence SLA?• Munchies, a fast-food restaurant, was a

workplace that had differentiated practices for workers.

From this perspective, what factors contribute to learning and why

important? • Although both [students] exerted agency in

making these offerings, the others in their social context determined the worth of their contributions.

BRINGING IT TOGETHER

• In what ways does this approach combine social and cognitive?

Cognitive• Need opportunities for input and out. • Example, Spolsky (1989) identifies the many

benefits learners reap from “informal natural L2 learning” contexts:– 1. Language is being used for communication.– 2. The learner is surrounded by fluent speakers.– 3. The context is the real outside world, open, and

stimulating.– 4. The language is free and normal.– 5. Attention is on the meaning of the communication

(p. 171).

Social

• How does the social matter?

p. 87

• Opportunities to speak and exposure to target language speakers, essential to language learning, are fundamentally socially structured.

• Also, individual properties and social environment

Research assumptions• First, much identity research rejects the view

that any research can claim to be objective or unbiased.

• Second, identity researchers aim to investigate the complex relationship between social structure on the one hand, and human agency on the other, without resorting to deterministic or reductionist analyses.

• Third, identity researchers seek to better understand how power operates within society, constraining or enabling human action

• From this perspective, L2 learning is not seen so much as a gradual and neutral process of internalizing the rules, structures, and vocabulary of a standard language; rather, learners are seen to appropriate the utterances of others in particular historical and cultural practices, situated in particular communities. Thus, researchers need to pay close attention to how communities and their practices are structured in order to examine how this structuring facilitates or constrains learners’ access to the linguistic resources of their communities.

HW

• Atkinson (2011) Ch 4, Language socialization approaches to second language acquisition

• Discussion lead: Watson-Gegeo (2004):yun kyoung

• Discussion lead: Byon (2006):sojung• Discussion lead: Duff (2010): William D.• Reader Response