ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the role that learners' identities play in mediating the development of L2 learners' repertoires of semiotic resources. When one use their semiotic resources, they do so as individuals with multiple, dynamic, social identities. Social identity is the situated outcome of a rhetorical and interpretive process in which interactants make situationally motivated selections from socially constituted repertoires of identificational and affiliational resources and craft the semiotic resources into identity claims for presentation to others. The expansion of digital technologies and social networking sites has created new transnational, online social spaces, which have become increasingly important arenas for the development and display of multiple activity-based identities, such as bloggers, gamers, web designers, fanfiction writers, and readers. L2 learners inhabit multiple, intersecting social identities, both real and imagined, which are significant to the development of their semiotic repertoires in that they mediate in important ways learners' access to their opportunities for language learning.
