Gender and agency practices in a second language

This two-year qualitative inquiry examines the everyday language practices of four East European couples acquiring English as a second language in the United States. The participants were highly educated in their home countries. Two of the couples were in their late forties and early fifties, and the two younger couples were in their mid-to-late twenties.;Gender and agency are the two focal issues of this project. The researcher was interested in how these two categories were discursively constructed in the learners' lived experiences. Challenging humanistic approaches to agency, which treat the individual as an independent social actor, the study offers an alternative, Bakhtinian perspective. This framework of agency emphasizes the dialogic nature of the self, and involves a creative, responsive understanding of one's socio-cultural realities.;In becoming speaking agents, the female and male participants voiced different discourses, and, in this sense, their agencies were gendered. In authoring themselves, for example, the women adopted discourses of emotions, responsibility, and formal, studial approaches to learning. However, the women's emotional discourses were not interpreted as vulnerability. Rather, they were expressions of agency.;The project illuminates how these immigrants author themselves in the second language through negotiating their positions in the L2. The primacy of language in this process is emphasized throughout the project. Of particular significance to this study is that the learners' agencies are embedded in everyday, seemingly mundane language practices. The negotiation of power between the self and the Other is located within discourse. Thus, the author recommends that teachers should raise their students' consciousness of how discourse positions them in the L2 social contexts. She also suggests that language researchers should abandon the traditional view of affective characteristics (anxiety, self-esteem, attitudes) as restricted to the learner. Feelings play a key role in analyzing one's social position and in language learning, but they are not "individual." They originate in the dialogic interplay between speakers and discourses. Finally, by linking two theoretical frameworks---feminist poststructuralism and Bakhtin's view of language and subjectivity---the study also traces a trajectory for our pedagogic work in classrooms and immigrant communities.