“ Tú Necesitas Preguntar en Español ”: Negotiating Good Language Learner Identity in a Spanish Classroom

Abstract

This article builds on Norton and Toohey's (2001) Norton, B. and Toohey, K. 2001. Changing perspectives on good language learners. TESOL Quarterly, 35(2): 307–322. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] critique of good language learner (GLL) research to illustrate how college students in an advanced Spanish conversation course drew on particular ideologies of language and foreign language learning to construct and negotiate their classroom identities. I argue that these ideologies were implicated in the production of a local, metapragmatic model (Wortham, 2006 Wortham, S. 2006. Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning, New York: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]) that allowed the use of certain linguistic resources to be understood as indexing GLL identity. Moreover, through a detailed account of 2 interactional encounters, I demonstrate how individuals actually used these linguistic resources to negotiate their identities as GLLs relative to one another in practice. I conclude with a brief discussion of how this approach to understanding GLLs can inform both research on language learners and additional language learning.

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