ABSTRACT
Recent decades have witnessed a shift in the epistemological paradigms and research trajectories employed by many linguistic anthropologists, second-language scholars, and applied linguists, from a focus on the acquisition of English skills (both oral and written) to an emphasis on the construction of social identities and they ways in which language users enact these identities. In this view, language learning is about language use or language in practice, and it is deeply imbricated with the ways in which people understand their relationship to the social world. Language practices involve a re-defining and renegotiating of how one communicates and relates to other people — an ongoing process of constructing and reconstructing identity (Norton 1997, Norton 2000).
