ABSTRACT
Languages play a key role in how we construct understandings of ourselves, our social surroundings, our pasts, and our possibilities for the future (Norton & Toohey, 2004). Reorientations in language learning theory have shifted the focus away from understanding acquisition as primarily an isolated mental and individual process. Instead, more recent critical perspectives (Fairclough, 2001) support moving toward an interactionist view of language that focuses on input from the surrounding context and internal language processing (Ellis, 1997; Larsen-Freeman, 2011). This social turn in the understanding of acquisition recognizes language learning as a socially situated activity intricately tied to issues of power, identity construction, and the surrounding sociocultural context. According to Norton and McKinney (2011), “there is now a wealth of research that explores the relationship between identity and language learning, testament to the fact that issues of identity and power are being recognized as central to SLA” (p. 74).
