Week Four - Feb. 7

Week Four – Identity and Language Learning: Discourse, culture, and identity

The reading for this week focused on how a person’s identity affects their language learning. Beginning with Bonny Norton Peirce and her article Social Identity, Investment, and Language Learning readers meet several immigrant women and their struggles with investing in their cultural capital (as defined by Bourdieu and Passeron). The women in the article were from varying backgrounds but, Martina was of particular interest to me. She was a professional surveyor in Czechoslovakia and came to Canada for a “better life for children.” Her identity was one of caretaker and mother (among others) She found it hard to work with her young co-workers as they would laugh at her because of her English. Through Martina’s identity as a mother she decided to rearrange the power relations between herself and the young co-workers, resulting in the children (her young co-workers) not having any authority over her as a “parent”. Through this reclamation of power, Martina found her right to speak (communicative competence) and claimed the use and importance of her cultural capital.

When turning to the sections in Holliday, I get the strong message from Gee that culture is an ambiguous term. Since no one really knows the definition of culture, he prefers the term Discourse. Discourse and discourse systems refer to the many different “socially recognizable identities and activities” one prescribes to. Through these discourses people integrate language and non-language to communicate and identify identities. Another interesting idea in the reading is that “cultures do not talk to one another; individuals do ... all communication must be interpersonal communication and not intercultural communication (p.110). The Holliday sections also touch on what happens when an individual is forced to learn a new language. How does an individual reconstruct their identity while learning a second language?

The last reading, chapter 2, Language and Identity, the author explores research on language, culture, and identity. Our identity is shaped by the groups and communities to whom we belong. People also have agency to shape these groups and communities through their actions. The theory of structuration and habitus are explored as well as Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS). In this chapter some conclusions that are made include: Language is used as a social carrier of culture. Culture and language are never apart from one another. Personal identities are not stable but rather, emergent – each time we think or speak discourse is being reconstructed.

When I went through my reading master’s classes I studied Gee a little and the effect that discourse has on reading acquisition. I identify with the discourse idea and think that Gee has a point when he talks of the many discourses people ascribe to. The thought that it is through these discourses people frame their identity and language is something I can relate to and begin to understand.

Taking this idea further, I can see how it can work well for an ELL teacher. Tapping into student discourse would be an excellent way to begin English instruction. In October, we were blessed to have a Macedonian student begin our school. He had no English experience and spent the first week of school in tears and utter resistance to being part of our school. Over time we were able to make small gains by tapping into his discourse of being a soccer player. He was able to communicate with students through non-verbal soccer actions. This helped him become more at ease with other students and his teachers. After he was able to display his soccer discourse/identity, we were able to build language on top of that. He has built his identity at school as a soccer player, mathematician, and English language learner. Every day a new discourse may be shared or an established one may be used for a starting place (prior knowledge) for instruction.

One question I have is:

Isn’t culture and discourse really the same thing? Didn’t we say in class that culture is anything a person prescribes to? (Kind of like the activity we did in class where we wrote all the cultural groups we belonged to on paper?) So, if I say I belong to the culture of Elementary Teachers, isn’t that a discourse as well?