A Case Study Of College English Learner's Identity Change: A Critical Approach

"Identity"is a psychology term, and has become a buzzword in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA), cultural study, critical literature, sociology, and sociolinguistics as well as other social sciences. The recent five decades have witnessed the complicated situations in which the research concerned ranges from the definition and categorization of identity to the empirical study under its guidance. Since the mid-1990s, identity researchers have shifted their paradigm form the traditional socio-psychology to anthropology, sociology, cultural study, feminism, critical theory and post-structuralism etc. And they have expanded the research field of identity within a lot of research methodologies. In general, identity research has formed a trend from unidirectional to multilateral, from structuralism to constructionism, from static to dynamic, from qualitative to the combination of qualitative and quantitative research.In SLA fields, under the influence of"social turn of SLA"(Block, 2003), the research on language learning and identity shifts from cognitive perspective, focusing on the static study of language learner's personalities, learning styles, motivations, and any other cognitive styles, to social-cultural perspective, concentrating on dynamics of identity change in the diverse social, historical, and cultural contexts. Among all the researchers in SLA, the pioneering scholar Norton (1995, 1997) applied critical theory to language learning and identity research to study language learner's learning processes—the practices and interactions in which learners participate through accounting for relations of power in the diverse contexts in which language learning takes place, and how learners negotiate and sometimes resist the diverse positions those contexts offer them. When explaining her theory of identity, Norton (1997) uses identity"refer to how people understand their relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people understand their possibilities for the future (p.410)". She argues that the identities of second language learners are multiple, as a site of struggle and subject to change and shift over time and space. And she claimed that understanding language learner can not be separated from understanding their investment in the language learning, understanding their multilayered roles in their lives instead of only observing their performance in the classroom and she (2001) also claimed that fully understanding their identities and investments in a language learning concerns the imagined communities that language learners may aspire to join when they learn a new language.Under the guide of this new paradigm, this research is modeled after Norton (2000)'s case study of five immigrant women learning English in Canada and attempts to explore the identity change of four non-English major students in the process of their English learning from the May of 2009 to November of 2009. All data from tow questionnaires, two interviews, participatory classroom observations and their English learning diaries are used and analyzed in the notion of investment and imagined community in Norton's identity theory.Findings from the research show that firstly process of English learning and identity change is more complex than we expected. As to the identity change, college English learner have undergone a general identity change from communicative learning or social learning motives (Genung, 2003), including the desire to communicate with others, in which they are active participants in English classroom teaching, and self-related motives (Genung, 2003), including a drive toward self-fulfillment, to cognitive learning or cognitive motives (Genung, 2003), in particular the learning of facts and achieving a high grade, in which they are less active to participate in classroom activities. As to each specific English learner, they have their own specific identity change due to their different investment in their English learning within their imagined communities. Secondly, English learners'identities are constituted by and are constitutive of English learning. In the process of English learning, English learner gradually construct their different dimensions of multiple identities in imagined communities. Thirdly, although different English learners have undergone different identities changes, which are closely related to different investments in their different imagined communities. English learners'investment and imagined communities are influenced by the macro social context but adjusted by micro learning factors. Fourthly, students participation should be encouraged to construct a community, whether community of practice or imagined community, to make them transition from newcomers to full participants.This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter 1 serves as an overall introduction, mainly including research background, the purpose and significance of the study. Chapter 2 reviews the literature on both language learning and identity in second/foreign language learning at home and abroad. Chapter 3 describes the methodology adopted in the study, which includes the contexts of the study: the social and linguistic context, the institutional context and the classroom context; the participants of the study, the research method, procedure for data collection and data analysis. Chapter 4 presents the results and discussions of qualitative research in the present study. Chapter 5 gives conclusions and implications, which consists of the main findings of present study, the implications and limitations of present study and also the suggestions for the future development.