Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

English as an International Language 99
lamp. We have also seen how these imagined communities can be a powerful
force in commercial aspects of language learning. Linked closely to
language learners’ imagined community of English speakers is the new
identity that may potentially come from belonging to this community,
either as an aspiration or as a reality. Indeed another area in which we
have learned a great deal is the role of identity in language learning.
The role of identity in language learning
Examining the identity of second-language learners is a relatively recent
interest in second-language acquisition research. In the past, major attention
was devoted to interlanguage analysis, with little recognition given to
learning processes, individual variables, or the social context in which a
second language is learned. However, recent work, informed by poststructuralist
approaches and critical theory (e.g. McKay & Wong, 1996;
Peirce, 1995; Rampton, 1995), has begun to examine how educational
institutions can position students in particular ways. Work that is especially
relevant to our discussion examines how school discourses can position
English language learners within the educational context and, hence,
give them a particular identity.
Harklau’s (2000) ethnographic study of three English learners (ELs)
transitioning from a US high school to a community college is particularly
insightful on the relationship between educational institutions and learner
identity. Within the high school context investigated by Harklau, the
three target students tended to be ‘affi liated with and the responsibility of
the ESOL program and teacher’ (Harklau, 2000: 45). Harklau found that
in the high school, the students and teachers ‘collaboratively regenerated
and perpetuated’ (Harklau, 2000: 46) a representation of ELs as highly
motivated students who provide an inspiration for everyone by their
heroic struggles during their immigration to the United States and their
acquisition of a second language.
At the same time, the teachers in the school often expressed doubts
about the students’ academic and cognitive ability. Given prevalent negative
social attitudes in the United States toward bilingualism and an educational
context in which English is the exclusive medium of instruction,
Harklau did not fi nd it surprising that teachers cast these students’ ability
to communicate in two languages not as a special talent or strength but
rather as a disability, emphasizing what immigrant students could not do
relative to monolingual, standard English speakers. One teacher, for example,
commented, ‘It must be like somebody who’s very bright and has a
stroke. And can’t express themselves’ (Harklau, 2000: 50). In our study of
Chinese junior high school students (McKay & Wong, 1996), we too found
that in general teachers, by refusing to recognize any knowledge that students
might have brought with them (including native-language literacy