Opportunities for Adult ESOL Learners to Revision and Envision Their Social Identities

Abstract

0 Adult ESOL learners face many challenges, as do teachers who aim to meet their students' needs. Crucial for learners is finding opportunities to enter new speech communities and engage in extended conversations in English. Instructors often find it difficult to offer their learners these opportunities because doing so requires that they move outside the comfort zone of traditional teacher-centered instruction. To respond to these challenges, we, a university language teacher educator and an adult ESOL educator, designed a collaborative project focusing on the role of social identity in the language learning process. This pedagogical intervention grows from a sociocultural perspective on language acquisition that views language development as occurring through interactions in communities of practice located within specific cultural, historical, and political contexts (see Hawkins, 2004; Johnson, 2004; Lantolf, 2000), From this perspective, language learning includes much more than the transmission of linguistic information or a focus on communicative activities in the classroom. Our goal in the project is to prompt the participants to cross linguistic and cultural boundaries while they revision and envision pathways to multilingual and multicultural social identities.