ABSTRACT
There has been some confusion in applied linguistics between identity and subjectivity in the study of communication across cultures. Ever since Norton Peirce’s trailblazing article (Peirce 1995) and her subsequent monograph on Identity and Language Learning (Norton 2000), which drew on feminist scholar Chris Weedon’s (1997) notion of subjectivity as multiple, changing and conflictual, some researchers have conflated the two notions and subsumed subjectivity, the self and personhood under the generic term ‘identity’ (see, e.g., Pavlenko 2005, Block 2007, 2009). Recently, scholars who have been interested in the social and the cultural aspects of second language acquisition have turned their attention to issues of learner identity, in the belief that what is at stake in learning a language is not only integration or participation in a L2 speaking community, but an ontological change of identity, or as Pavlenko and Lantolf put it, a veritable “(re)construction of self” (Pavlenko & Lantolf 2000: 155).
