This second edition of Norton’s classic text on language learning and identity will bring her ground-breaking ideas to a new generation of students, teachers and researchers. Featuring a comprehensive Introduction and an Afterword by Claire Kramsch, this new edition integrates research, theory and classroom practice.
Identity and Language Learning draws on a longitudinal case study of immigrant women in Canada to develop new ideas about identity, investment, and imagined communities in the field of language learning and teaching. Bonny Norton demonstrates that a poststructuralist conception of identity as multiple, a site of struggle, and subject to change across time and place is highly productive for understanding language learning. Her sociological construct of investment is an important complement to psychological theories of motivation. The implications for language teaching and teacher education are profound. Now including a new, comprehensive Introduction as well as an Afterword by Claire Kramsch, this second edition addresses the following central questions:
- Under what conditions do language learners speak, listen, read and write?
- How are relations of power implicated in the negotiation of identity?
- How can teachers address the investments and imagined identities of learners?
The book integrates research, theory, and classroom practice, and is essential reading for students, teachers and researchers in the fields of language learning and teaching, TESOL, applied linguistics and literacy.
