Identity and Language Learning (Norton)
Identity and Language Learning (Norton) is a recommended TEFL/TESOL title from the Global English reading list, available to buy on Amazon.
What it is. Bonny Norton's research monograph, first published in 2000 and reissued in an extended second edition. It asks a question methodology books tend to leave alone: under what conditions does a learner actually speak?
How it is built. It reports a longitudinal study of five immigrant women learning English in Canada, followed through diaries and interviews, and uses their accounts to build two ideas that have since travelled well beyond this book. The first is investment: a learner may be highly motivated in the abstract and still stay silent, because speaking in that room, to those people, is a poor investment of a self they are trying to build. The second is the imagined community - learners orient towards the group they hope to belong to, not only towards the one in front of them. Identity, on this account, is multiple, contested and changing, rather than a fixed attribute a learner brings into class.
Who it suits. Trainees at Level 5, and any teacher who has a quiet learner and has run out of technique-level explanations for it. It reframes silence, participation and confidence as social facts rather than personal ones, which is a different lens from the technique-level one most teacher training uses.
What it does not do. Five participants in one country is a small qualitative study, so treat the constructs as a lens rather than as a measured effect. There are no lesson plans here and no activities. What you take away is a way of reading your class, not something to do on Tuesday.
Recommended for these courses:
Available from Amazon - price & delivery shown on Amazon.
View on Amazon