Week 4

In this week’s readings, more about identity was discussed and looked at. We had three different readings, one was from Holliday’s book, the other from Hall’s “Language and Identity” and Norton’s “Social Identity, investment and language learning”. These were all very interesting texts in different ways. There were two particular things from what I read this week that really stood out and caught my attention. One was the different factors that Holliday discussed in his book. The other was in the Hall’s reading when talking about second language acquisition.

Starting with what caught my attention in Holliday’s part of our assigned readings is the different factors that play in the identity of people and much they play a role through our communication by talking and writing. As stated in Holliday, “Our sense of self is achieved through our capacity to conceive of our own lives as a unity and this in turn is a result of our capacity to tell the story of our lives.” This type of language is through narratives and storytelling, and this kind of realization of identity will be shown about us through our own trajectory projects. When we write a personal narrative, we are releasing information to the world about what makes us who we are. What shape us are our experiences and views of world and these help shape what we see as “acceptable” and “normal” and everyone’s interpretation of this is different. With this, there are different “discourses” in which an individual will choose which discourse to use depending on their environment, and sometimes this may also be misinterpreted by who is surrounded by the speaker and their thoughts.

There’s more to identity than just this though. In Norton’s article, there was a particular situation that caught my attention. The situation involved an immigrant, Eva and her discussion with The Simpsons.  As states above, part of our identity has to do with our language and speaking it. She was judged right away and classified by her classmates just because she didn’t know about Bart Simpson. Because she didn’t recognize who this cartoon character was right away, she was looked at as a poor language learner. In my opinion, knowing and not knowing a particular cartoon character shouldn’t be a basis of deciding whether someone is a good or poor language learner. Another quote that was referenced in Norton’s article that I found very intriguing was, “’Language is the place where actual and possible forms of social organization and their likely social and political consequences are defined and contested. yet it is also the place where our sense of ourselves, our subjectivity, is constructed’” (21).  I agree with this in part but I also believe that there is more that factors into it.