Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Understanding second language acquisition

THE PHENOMENON OF MULTILINGUALISM is as old as humanity, but multilingualism has been catapulted to a new world order in the 21st century. Social relations, knowledge structures, and webs of power are experienced bymany people as highly mobile and interconnected—for good and for bad—as a result of broad sociopolitical events and global markets. As a consequence, today’s multilingualism is enmeshed in globalization, technologization, and mobility. Communication and meaning-making are often felt as deterritorialized, that is, lived as something “which does not belong to one locality but which organizes translocal trajectories and wider spaces” (Blommaert, 2010, p. 46), while language use and learning are seen as emergent, dynamic, unpredictable, open ended, and intersubjectively negotiated. In this context, increasingly numerous and more diverse populations of adults and youth become multilingual and transcultural later in life, either by elective choice or by forced circumstances, or for a mixture of reasons. They must learn to negotiate complex demands and opportunities for varied, emergent competencies across their languages. Understanding such learning requires the integrative consideration of learners’ mental and neurobiological processing, remembering and categorizing patterns, and momentto-moment use of language in conjunction with a variety of socioemotional, sociocultural, sociopolitical, and ideological factors. The field of second language acquisition (SLA) seeks (a) to understand the processes by which school-aged children, adolescents, and adults learn and use, at any point in life, an additional language, including second, foreign,

A Transdisciplinary Framework for SLA in a Multilingual World

This article locates Norton's foundational work on identity and investment within the social turn of applied linguistics. It discusses its historical impetus and theoretical anchors, and it illustrates how these ideas have been taken up in recent scholarship. In response to the demands of the new world order, spurred by technology and characterized by mobility, it proposes a comprehensive model of investment, which occurs at the intersection of identity, ideology, and capital. The model recognizes that the spaces in which language acquisition and socialization take place have become increasingly deterritorialized and unbounded, and the systemic patterns of control more invisible. This calls for new questions, analyses, and theories of identity. The model addresses the needs of learners who navigate their way through online and offline contexts and perform identities that have become more fluid and complex. As such, it proposes a more comprehensive and critical examination of the relationship between identity, investment, and language learning. Drawing on two case studies of a female language learner in rural Uganda and a male language learner in urban Canada, the model illustrates how structure and agency, operating across time and space, can accord or refuse learners the power to speak.

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Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics

Resena de libro: A. Suresh Canagarajah. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1999,216 paginas

Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching

As technology enables migrant learners to maintain multi-stranded connections with their countries of origin and settlement, they engage with the world with transnational identities that negotiate a complex network of values, ideologies, and cultures. How teachers and peers recognize that migrants come with specific histories, knowledges and competencies shapes migrant learners’ investment in learning. By building on their transnational literacies, the language learning classroom can be a Third Space which acknowledges and affirms their fluid, multidimensional identities. Digital storytelling, by allowing them to share their personal histories, their stories of migration and assimilation, and the material conditions of their lived experiences, holds great potential for enabling migrant learners to be fully invested in their transnational identities and to claim their right to speak.

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Transnational Identity and Migrant Language Learners: The Promise of Digital Storytelling

A necessary component of the neoliberal mechanisms of globalization, migration addresses the economic and labor needs of postindustrial countries while producing new modes of social fragmentation and inequality (Crompton, 2008). As migrant students insert themselves into segmented spaces, their countries of origin are themselves implicated in a global class hierarchy, often positioning them in ways that refract this world economic order (Kelly, 2012). Operating in these transnational contexts, social class plays a significant role in determining life trajectories and the ways by which migrant students of diverse social classes exercise agency. In language education research, however, social class remains largely underexplored, compared to identity categories of ethnicity, race, and gender (Block, 2012). To address this gap, this article employs a Bourdieusian conceptualization of social class, to examine how class differences in transnational contexts can impact the social and educational trajectories of ...

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Social Class, Identity, and Migrant Students

This article examines the construct of investment in language learning, developed by Bonny Norton from the mid 1990s (Norton Peirce, 1995; Norton, 2000; 2013), and expanded in more recent research with Ron Darvin (Darvin & Norton, 2015). A sociological complement to the psychological construct of motivation, investment has become a pivotal construct in applied linguistics and language education (Kramsch, 2013), and makes visible the relations of power that enable or constrain language learning and teaching. The paper focuses on Darvin and Norton’s expanded model of investment, which responds to changes in the communicative landscape spurred by technology. Seeking to address the paradoxes of globalization and the invisible mechanisms of power in the knowledge economy, the model locates investment at the intersection of identity, capital and ideology. As such, it provides an important elaboration of the ways in which the right to speak needs to be understood as materially and ideologically constructed. Drawing on data from learners in Canada and Uganda, the paper demonstrates how investment is shaped by the positioning of learners, their negotiation of learning affordances, and the systemic patterns of control that impinge on their agency. The paper concludes that a critical pedagogy promoting a cosmopolitan future may enhance the investments of language learners in the language and literacy practices of classrooms in the 21st century.

Investment and Language Learning in the 21st Century

The year 2020 marked the 25th year since Bonny Norton published her influential TESOL Quarterly article, ‘Social identity, investment, and language learning’ (Norton Peirce, 1995) and the fifth year since we, Darvin and Norton (2015), co-authored ‘Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics’ in the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. From the time Norton’s 1995 piece was published, investment and motivation have been conceptually imbricated and often collocated, as they hold up two different lenses to investigate the same reality: why learners choose to learn an additional language (L2). In our 2015 article, we made the case that while it is important to ask the question, ‘Are students MOTIVATED to learn a language?’ it is equally productive to ask, ‘Are students INVESTED in the language practices of the classroom or community?’ (Darvin & Norton, 2015, p. 37). We recognize that the relationship between language teachers and learners is unequal, and that teachers hold the power to shape these practices in diverse ways. Teachers bring to the classroom not only their personal histories and knowledge, but also their own worldviews and assumptions (Darvin, 2015), which may or may not align with those of learners. Relations of power between learners can also be unequal. As Norton and Toohey (2011, p. 421) note:

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Ron Darvin

Papers

Identity and a Model of Investment in Applied Linguistics

Transnational Identity and Migrant Language Learners: The Promise of Digital Storytelling

Social Class, Identity, and Migrant Students

Investment and Language Learning in the 21st Century

Investment and motivation in language learning: What's the difference?