This book examines how Russian-speaking adoptees in three US families actively shape opportunities for language learning and identity construction in everyday interactions. This work focuses on how learners achieve agency in second language socialization processes and informs the fields of second language acquisition and language maintenance and shift.

This book examines how Russian-speaking adoptees in three US families actively shape opportunities for language learning and identity construction in everyday interactions. By focusing on a different practice in each family (i.e. narrative talk about the day, metalinguistic discourse or languaging, and code-switching), the analyses uncover different types of learner agency and show how language socialization is collaborative and co-constructed. The learners in this study achieve agency through resistance, participation, and negotiation.

Through several unique perspectives and contexts, this volume contributes to current understanding of agency in second language learning. It includes chapters discussing theoretical, analytical and pedagogical approaches, and will serve as a key reference for researchers of language learning and teaching.

This book examines how Russian-speaking adoptees in three US families actively shape opportunities for language learning and identity construction in everyday interactions. By focusing on a different practice in each family (i.e. narrative talk about the day, metalinguistic discourse or languaging, and code-switching), the analyses uncover different types of learner agency and show how language socialization is collaborative and co-constructed. The learners in this study achieve agency through resistance, participation, and negotiation, and the findings demonstrate the complex ways in which novices transform communities in transnational contexts. The perspectives inform the fields of second language acquisition and language maintenance and shift. The book further provides a rare glimpse of the quotidian negotiations of adoptive family life and suggestions for supporting adoptees as young bilinguals.

Using second language (L2) socialization theory as a theoretical framework, this book investigates the ways in which four advanced learners of Japanese on an immersion program in the USA exercise their agency to pursue their language learning goals. The work presents their learner portraits and documents the different ways in which the four learners negotiate the meaning of their participations in the new community of practice, navigate and shape the trajectories of their learning and eventually achieve their goals of learning from their emic perspectives. The book re-examines Norton’s (2000) constructs of investment, investigates its applicability and argues that L2 learners’ desires and drives for learning an L2 are more diverse, unique and contextually situated than Norton’s notion of investment alone can explain. The research will be of interest to researchers and students in the fields of applied linguistics, second language acquisition, foreign language education and language and literacy education.

This monograph reports on a longitudinal inquiry into mainland Chinese undergraduates’ language learning experiences in an English medium university in a multilingual setting with a focus on their strategic language learning efforts. This book examines the issue as to what extent language learners’ strategic learning efforts depend on their ‘choice’, if ‘the element of choice’ is the defining characteristic of language learners’ strategic learning behaviour. The inquiry, using a qualitative and ethnographic research approach, reveals dynamic interaction between learners’ agency and contextual conditions underlying the participants’ strategic learning process. Such understanding informs pedagogical efforts to foster individual learners’ capacity for strategic learning and their capacities in opening up and sustaining a social learning space for exercising their strategic learning capacity or utilizing their strategic learning knowledge.

Second-language Discourse in the Digital World illustrates a new, practice-driven approach to technology in second-language (L2) learning that begins with what L2 users do when they connect with others online. With its rich set of examples from a number of different languages and a variety of digital platforms, in and beyond the classroom, this book provides a structured account of L2 computer-mediated discourse. The book is divided into four sections. Section I considers how new media have changed language learning. Section II is about L2 participation in digital forms and practices in online communities. Sections III centers around L2 linguistic and other semiotic practices, including the use of multimodal and multilingual resources while section IV analyzes social practices to explore how networked L2 users build, maintain and challenge relationships. Written in accessible style, the volume will be an important read to anyone interested in L2 use and learning in Web 2.0.Finalist for the AAAL 2019 book award.

This book explores the phenomena of believing (or giving personal meanings), acting, and identifying (or identity construction), and the interconnectedness of these phenomena in the learning and teaching of English and other foreign languages.

This book presents a longitudinal research which covers a linguistic approach to understand and observe language learner agency. It makes connections between agency in discourse analyses and agency in applied linguistics by examining how learner agency is manifested in autobiographic oral narratives and influenced by contextual factors. This book also demonstrates that agency is not a fixed entity that English learners possess, but a dynamic construct constantly negotiated by the learners with the social world. It is the result of their identity positioning and repositioning within a complex and ever-changing context. Learner identities, either actual or imagined, are significantly correlated with their investment in English and their English learning process. This book sheds new light on teaching English as a foreign language and gives inspirations for enhancing English learners’ agency in contemporary context of China. As learner agency should be treated in a dynamic and process view, a low level of agency manifested in a particular period or in a certain context may not necessarily persist in later periods or extend to other contexts. Provided with supportive contextual conditions and taking on positive and powerful identities, language learners are well on the course for higher levels of agency.

Social Justice through Pedagogies of Multiliteracies explores the ways in which pedagogies of multiliteracies can be used to promote and achieve situated forms of social justice, especially for minoritized L2 learners. This edited collection focuses on pedagogies of multiliteracies that seek to develop and strengthen L2 learner identity and agency within and outside formal educational contexts in bilingual, multilingual, multimodal, community, language, and teacher education. The volume contextualizes agency and identity around questions, ideologies, and issues related to language, gender, sex, sexuality, body, race, and ethnicity. Contributions illustrate the design and implementation of pedagogies of multiliteracies through a diverse range of modalities and settings: linguistic landscapes, graphic novels, picturebooks, photovoice, text, and imagery through instructor- and student-developed materials. The volume acknowledges, enacts, and builds upon the responsibility of L2 educators to develop pedagogies of multiliteracies that reflect the life experiences, identities, and needs of minoritized L2 individuals in the curriculum in order to realize the social justice aim of L2 education. Social Justice through Pedagogies of Multiliteracies will be of interest to L2 researchers, teachers, and teacher educators.