32.2198, Review: Applied Linguistics: Rudolph, Selvi, Yazan (2020)

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Subject: 32.2198, Review: Applied Linguistics: Rudolph, Selvi, Yazan (2020)

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Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:38:12
From: Melissa Hauber-Özer [mhauberr at gmu.edu]
Subject: The Complexity of Identity and Interaction in Language Education

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2592.html

EDITOR: Nathanael  Rudolph
EDITOR: Ali Fuad  Selvi
EDITOR: Bedrettin  Yazan
TITLE: The Complexity of Identity and Interaction in Language Education
SERIES TITLE: Psychology of Language Learning and Teaching
PUBLISHER: Multilingual Matters
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Melissa B Hauber-Özer, George Mason University

SUMMARY

Rudolf, Selvi and Yazan’s edited volume provides interesting glimpses into the
complex processes of identity development and negotiation among language
learners and teachers alike. Although each chapter takes a somewhat unique
approach to the topic of identity, common threads in the theoretical
approaches used and intersecting findings make for a cohesive volume. Most
chapters focus on English as a second or foreign language, but the studies
cover an interesting array of student populations and national contexts,
including the United States, Colombia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and
Japan. 

The introductory chapter written by the editors, “The Complexity of Identity
and Interaction in Language Education,” establishes the central concept of the
volume: critical perspectives on how identities are formed, assigned, and
contested in and through language teaching and learning. The introduction also
provides a broad review of related literature, including relatively recent
work by Blommaert (2010), Canagarajah (2017), De Costa and Norton (2017), and
Kramsch (2014), which is useful as a reference but could have used a bit more
context about the focus of the volume. The chapter then gives an overview of
the book’s scope and contents, which are organized into three sections,
summarized below. 

Part 1, “Learners, Teachers, and the ‘Ares,’ ‘Cans’ and ‘Shoulds’ of Being and
Becoming” consists of four chapters examining teacher identity development.
“The Monolingual Bias: A critique of Idealization and Essentialization in ELT
in Pakistan” by Syed Abdul Manan, Maya Khemlani David, Liaquat Ali Channa and
Francisco Perlas Dumanig seeks to address a gap in the research on the
management and maintenance of language policies and practices in elite
schools. This study offers useful implications regarding deficit-based
monolingual policies for EFL and English-medium contexts and the suppression
of multilingual students’ identities and potential, but it would have been
significantly strengthened by interviews with administrators to corroborate or
contest teachers’ claims and power analysis to go much deeper into school
dynamics. 

The second chapter, “Constructing ‘Other Identities as a French Second
Language Teacher” by Meike Wernicke, critiques the native-speaker standard in
Canada that is tied to concepts of national belonging and race as well as
lingering colonialist ideologies. This multiple case study of over 80 French
second language teachers participating in a professional development program
takes a discursive-constructivist approach to examine how teachers
authenticate their identities through various assertions. 

Chapter 3, “‘English is the Commercial Language Whereas Spanish is the
Language of my Emotions’: An Exploration of TESOL and Bilingual Teacher
Identity and Translanguaging Ideologies” by Lobat Asadi, Stephanie Moody and
Yolanda Padrón, uses narrative inquiry to determine the ideologies of
bilingual and TESOL teachers at a public university in Texas about identity
and translanguaging (Garcia, 2017). The chapter offers a very interesting
discussion of the colonial roots of English language pedagogy and the
possibilities of translanguaging for decolonizing the field, but the findings
could have been more streamlined in certain areas and could have delved more
deeply into participants’ insights. 

Chapter 4, by Véronique Lemoine-Bresson, is titled “Identity Dynamics in the
Speech of Language Teachers in French and German Primary Schools: How Do They
Go About Constructing ‘Interculturality’?” Through focus groups with
participants in a teacher training course and inductive phenomenological
analysis, Lemoine-Bresson examines how French and German teachers construct
professional identities. The chapter presents an interesting topic but could
have presented a fuller analysis of the data, particularly the links between
stereotypes and teacher identity. 

The fifth chapter, “English in Cuba: Reflections on a Study of Cuban Teachers’
and Students’ Relationships to English” by Jeremy R. Gombin-Sperling and
Melanie Baker Robbins, reports on an interview study with Cuban English
teachers. Set against the backdrop of more than a century of US-Cuba power
struggles and the authors’ prior deficit views of Cuban English teachers, the
chapter provides a fascinating glimpse into a place and subject unknown to
most US English teachers and presents a valuable critical reflective approach.

Part 2, “Teacher Identity as/in/Beyond Practice,” begins with Şeyma Toker’s
contribution, “From Being a Language Teacher to Becoming a Graduate
Student-Teacher: In the Midst of Professional Identities.” Toker draws on
Wenger’s (1998) communities of practice framework and narrative inquiry to
trace the journey of a Turkish teacher of English through her early years of
teaching and then graduate school in the United States. The study provides
insight into the construction of professional identities amidst power dynamics
and native-speakerism.

In a similar vein, Chapter 7, “Who Am I and Where Do I Fit In: A Narrative
Analysis of One Teacher’s Shifting Identities” by Naashia Mohamed is a richly
detailed and thought-provoking narrative of a Maldivian teacher’s professional
identity development. Mohamed effectively uses the personal interpretive
framework (Kelchtermans, 2009) and positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990)
to illuminate how the teacher both positions herself and is positioned by
others. 

April Salerno and Elena Andrei’s contribution, “Suntem profesori / We Are
Teachers: Self-exploration as a Pathway to Language Teacher Education,” takes
an interesting approach and provides insightful reflections about their
experiences as bilinguals and language (teacher) educators. The chapter left
me wanting more detail, however, particularly regarding Elena’s perspective,
as April’s experiences formed the bulk of the findings. 

Chapter 9, “Teacher Identity Construction in Progress: The Role of Classroom
Observations and Interactive Reflective Practices in Language Teacher
Education” by Alfredo Urzúa, presents an interesting observation model that
includes both peer and supervisor observations and the use of Ward and
McCotter’s (2004) reflection rubric. However, a bit more depth or critical
analysis on the part of the author, whose positionality and relationship to
the participants are not addressed, would have enhanced the chapter. 

Sedat Akayoğlu, Babürhan Üzüm and Bedrettin Yazan engage an interesting though
somewhat complex theoretical framework based on Kanno and Norton’s (2003)
construct of imagined identities, positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1999),
and identities in interaction (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005) as well as a useful
project model in Chapter 10, “Preservice Teachers’ Cultural Identity
Construction in Telecollaboration.” However, a more thorough description of
the participants’ interactions and overview of the findings would have been
helpful. 

Part 3: Learner Negotiations of Identity in and Beyond the Classroom

Chapter 11 by Shinji Kawamitsu begins the third part of the book, addressing
“Meaning-making as a Site of Struggle: One Japanese Language Learner’s
Negotiation with Identity and Writing.” This chapter takes an interesting
poststructuralist approach to examine the relationship between investment in
second language writing and identity through a multi-stage writing assignment
in an elementary-level college Japanese class. Kawamitsu illustrates how a
student’s linguistic resources constrain the ways she can presents herself in
the target language and contribute to her own subjugation (Darvin & Norton,
2015), a phenomenon many adult language learners can likely identify with, as
well as useful insights for educators. 

Chapter 12, “Negotiating Complex Identities Through Positionings in Ongoing
Interaction: A Case Study in a Foreign Language Teacher Education Program in
Colombia” presents a poststructural ethnographic case study by Adolfo Arrieta
and Nayibe Rosado. This study examines a teacher’s and his students’ speech
acts, positions, and storylines (Harré & Van Langenhove, 1999) to illuminate
the ways interactions demonstrate reflexive and interactive positioning (Davis
& Harré, 1990). The chapter’s title is somewhat misleading, however, as the
study takes place in a college classroom rather than a teacher education
program. 

Sarah Hopkyns  expands on Davies & Harré’s (1990) positioning theory, using
Pavlenko and Blackledge’s (2004) identity categories (assigned, assumed, and
negotiable) to provide interesting insights into the dominance of
English-medium instruction in the United Arab Emirates in Chapter 13, “Dancing
between English and Arabic: Complexities in Emirati Cultural Identities.”
Through a phenomenological case study with 100 Emirati university students,
Hopkyns documents uses of, attitudes toward, and effects of English on
cultural identities and relationships, including an apparent mismatch between
language ideology and real-world practices. 

The final contribution, “The Story of Tabasum: An Exploration of a Refugee
Student’s Developing Identities” by Eliana Hirano and Caroline Payant, takes
the reader to a very different context, the Midwestern US. Employing Bakhtin’s
(cite) dialogic approach and the communities of practice (Wenger, 1998)
framework, Hirano and Payant analyze the experiences of an Afghan student with
interrupted education adapting to the demands of university and attempting to
patriciate in classroom communities, build relationships with professors, and
find a sense of belonging.  The chapter is clearly presented and compelling,
offering valuable insights into both students’ and educators’ roles in
creating supportive learning communities in the college classroom. 

In the afterword, Glenn Toh closes the volume with a critical reflection on
his personal experience of returning to multilingual Singapore with his
Japanese-speaking family, drawing connections to the volume’s chapters and
encouraging continued work on the topics addressed. 

EVALUATION

In summary, Rudolf, Selvi, and Yazan succeed in establishing the complexity of
identity and interaction in second/foreign language teaching and learning
through this collection, highlighting important issues such as power dynamics,
language ideologies, English hegemony, native-speakerism, and interrupted
education within a relatively coherent collection. It is admittedly a
challenge to pack in sufficient context for the reader and delve fully into
study design and findings in edited volumes, and several of the chapters would
have benefitted from additional detail and nuance. Furthermore, a more
standardized structure for the chapters would have been welcome, as would more
up-to-date theories and citations, as the majority of theoretical literature
cited is from the 1990s or early 2000s. There is a particularly heavy focus on
Davies & Harré’s somewhat dated work on positioning theory (1990, 1999) and
Wenger’s (1998) communities of practice framework while more current theories
of identity and imagined communities (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton, 2013) and
translanguaging practices (Garcia, 2017) receive less attention. As Toh
asserts in closing the volume, continued scholarship in the roles and
negotiation of identity in language education is needed. 

>From a methodological and theoretical perspective, the volume presents a
variety of promising approaches for scholars designing studies on these
issues, which is one of its primary contributions to a field long dominated by
positivist and experimental models of research. It also spans a variety of
geographical and cultural contexts, although most studies focus on university
classrooms rather than PK-12 and non-formal education settings. As such, the
volume would be a worthwhile addition to teacher educators’ libraries, a
potential text for second language acquisition courses – particularly for
those planning to teach at the university and adult levels – and a useful
supplemental resource for research-focused applied linguistics courses.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination (C. Emerson and M. Holquist,
Trans.). Austin: \ University of Texas Press.

Blommaert, J. (2010) The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University 
Press.

Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005) Identity and interaction: A sociocultural
linguistic approach, 
Discourse Studies 7(4–5), 585–614.

Canagarajah, S. (ed.) (2017) The Routledge Handbook of Migration and Language.
London: 
Taylor and Francis.
Darvin, R. and Norton, B. (2015) Identity and a model of investment in applied
linguistics. 
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 36–56.

Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1990) Positioning the discursive production of
selves. Journal for the 
Theory of Social Behavior 20 (1), 43–63.”

Davies, B. and Harré, R. (1999) Positioning and personhood. In R. Harré and
L.V. Langenhove 
(eds) Positioning Theory (pp. 32–52). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.”

De Costa, P.I. and Norton, B. (2017) Introduction: Identity,
transdisciplinarity, and the good 
language teacher. The Modern Language Journal 101 (1), 3–14.

García, O. (2017) Translanguaging in schools: Subiendo y bajando, bajando y
subiendo as 
afterword. Journal of Language, Identity and Education 16 (4), 256–263.

Harré, R. and van Langenhove, L. (1991) Variety of positioning. Journal for
the Theory of Social 
Behavior 21 (4), 393–407.

Holliday, A. (2006) Native-speakerism. ELT Journal 60, 385–387.

Kanno, Y. and Norton, B. (2003) Imagined communities and educational
possibilities: 
Introduction. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 2 (4), 241–249.

Kelchtermans, G. (2009) Who I am in how I teach is the message.
Self-understanding, 
vulnerability and reflection. Teachers and Teaching 15 (2), 257–272.

Kramsch, C. (2014) Teaching foreign languages in an era of globalization:
Introduction. The 
Modern Language Journal 98 (1), 296–311.

Ward, J.R. & McCotter, S.S. (2004) Reflection as a visible outcome for
preservice teachers. 
Teaching and Teacher Education 20(3), 243–257.

Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity.
Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Melissa Hauber-Özer completed her Ph.D. in International Education at George
Mason University and instructs teacher education and research methods courses.
Melissa previously taught adult literacy and English as a second language in
the United States for over 15 years in both non-formal and university
settings. Her research focuses on language and literacy education in migration
contexts and employs critical participatory methodology to examine issues of
equity and access for linguistically and culturally diverse learners.





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