Identity construction in complex second language classrooms

Abstract

This study explores the identities that are made available and how they are negotiated over time in a second language classroom. Like any classroom, second language classrooms do not exist in a vacuum, they are socially, culturally, politically and historically located. Choices at the political level, about selecting the language to be taught, and at the institutional level, about staffing, timetabling, curriculum content, resources, pedagogy, classroom management, are all inherently ideological. This view of the classroom as a site constituted at the intersection of different ideologies and cultures, of multiple and often conflicting discourses, challenges the notion of language learning as an abstract cognitive process, and has significant implications for the construction of learners' cultural identities as they are negotiated in the micro-politics of second language classrooms (Pennycook, 2000). This study focuses on one student, Nancy and analyses her discoursal journey over the period of a nine month period in a primary second language (Indonesian) class. The concept of 'voice (Bakhtin, 1981) is deployed in this study as an analytical tool to examine dialogic encounters: the sites of negotiation where stances are taken up, and we negotiate our place and positioning towards others with the voices available and in response to the voices of others (Hall, 1995). The study considers what kinds of people are being shaped and are shaping our world in the uneasy tensions between the neo-liberal underpinnings and market driven logic of second language policies, community concerns about security and increased nationalism, and a curriculum that explicitly aspires to the development of intercultural identities.