Between ‘becoming Like-natives’ And ‘multilingual’: A Poststructuralist Orientation To Imagined Iden-tity And Agency
Keywords:
Imagined identities, multilingualism, power relations, poststructuralismAbstract
Do learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) develop imagined identities in target language learning? Are their identities affected by their use of other languages? How does relations of power foster the complexity and multiplicity of the developed identities in language learning? To explore these questions, an interactive theatre course was carried out at a university in Algeria. The students who took part in this course were undergraduates aged between 19 and 31 years old. The participants have a rich linguistic repertoire as they are multilingual, who make use of Berber as their mother tongue; Arabic as their first language; French and English as foreign languages. This study aims at promoting change in the way students learn English through introducing innovative tasks to the EFL classroom. The study adopted a poststructuralist framework, which is highly grounded in Norton’s perspective on identity (Norton, 2000) and Bourdieu’s concept of power relations in language use (Bordieu, 1991). I applied interpretive phenomenology as a research design, where in-depth interviews were conducted with the participants. Their scripts written in the three languages: English, French, and Arabic were considered in the analysis. The findings of this study revealed the effectiveness of using narratives and drama tasks in the EFL classroom. The findings also revealed that the proposed method involved the participants in an interactive and imagined space where they empowered themselves, constructed their agency, and developed new self-understandings which covered their multiple and imagined identities.
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