RSSLanguage and Identity across Modes of Communication
Jan 29
EDITOR: Dwi Noverini Djenar
EDITOR: Ahmar Mahboob
EDITOR: Ken Cruickshank
TITLE: Language and Identity across Modes of Communication
SERIES TITLE: Language and Social Processes [LSP] 6
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2015
REVIEWER: Andrea Eniko Lypka, University of South Florida
Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
Linguistic approaches to interconnection among language, identity, and
societal power structures have received significant scholarly attention;
however, few studies explore these interconnections across various modes of
communication. Contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship stretches the
conventional linguistic orientation to identity by conceptualizing it as a
perpetual social sense-making process and a struggle to articulate membership
in a community of practice. Communication in traditional and informal spaces,
including public speech, learning in mainstream schools or heritage language
schools, is impacted by individuals’ (un)conscious ability to negotiate who
they are, how they discursively validate certain positions and avow or resist
socially ascribed identity positions (Davies & Harré, 1999), such as
non-native speaker status, race, minority or ‘other’ status within social
norms, ideologies of majority language and culture, and institutional
discourses that tend to marginalize certain groups or individuals. Depending
on their agency, individuals can choose to contest belonging to a community of
practice by not-participating in the discourse community when marginalized by
normative discourses or by choosing alternative modes of self-presentation in
web-mediated, visual or artistic spaces.
Drawing from the social semiotic view of identity, the fifteen chapters in the
volume edited by Dwi Noverimi Djenar, Ahmar Mahboob, and Ken Cruickshank
expand the earlier language-based definition of identity to multimodal,
semiotic contexts, advocating for a layered approach to examine the dynamics
of identity constitution on a continuum, as opposed to viewing identity as
fixed and pre-established variable. The contributors in this edited
collection, faculty and scholars in the field of language and identity,
recognize identity as a perpetual, strategic, relational, and
multi-directional meaning-making process and action shaped by social norms and
conventions, meta narratives, multimodality, style, and genre. They recognize
that identity is negotiated across various modes of communication, via
different modalities, and semiotic resources, in and through language.
Specifically, identity-in-action emerges in various modes of communication,
such as verbal (Meyerhoff, Cruickshank, Tsung, and Rubino), written (Mahboob
and Wang), visual (Paltridge), or combination of modes, such as images,
speech, gaming, and facial expressions (Bucholtz) or writing, layout, and
speech (Lipovsky). The chapters highlight the fact that identity is both
conditioned and enabled by a web of factors linked to interactional contexts,
existing power relations, and social norms. Because of this interdependence,
identity performance requires strategic orientation toward a set of semiotic
resources.
In line with this multimodal approach to identity, authors problematize
simplistic definitions of identity and uncover the complex process of
constituting a language learner self while maintaining multiple identities as
a student, researcher, adviser, mother, worker, or housewife, for example.
Particular attention is paid to identity-in-action or identity-in-interaction;
how the actions enacted by an individual to belong to a community of practice
intersect with multiple other identities, languages, cultures, and
geographical spaces. The chapters examine how identity is strategically
negotiated in a particular time frame and in various interactional contexts,
i.e., web-mediated communication, media environment, and face-to-face
communication; in informal and formal modes of communication, and hybrid
modalities, such as blogs (Liu), popular fiction (Noverini Djenar), women’s
magazines (Jarkey), general interest magazines (Wang), editorial
communications (Starfield), curriculum vitaes (Lipovsky), and Business English
writing (Zhang), among other modalities. Identity is studied in relation to
majority languages, such as Standard English, host-country language, such as
English or Chinese, and heritage languages, such as Rarotongan (in the chapter
by Cruickshank) and Bequia English (Meyerhoff) across the globe, such as
Australia (Paltridge, Rubino, and Cruickshank), Caribbean (Meyerhoff),
Pakistan (Mahboob), Japan (Jarkey), China (Tsung, Wang, Zhang, and Liu),
Indonesia (Noverini Djenar), France (Lipovski), and the US (Bucholtz,
Starfield, and Nelson). These studies associate identity with topics,
including communities of practice, style, minority languages, code switching,
language variation, social class, ethnicity, race, and mainstream educational
norms.
In the introduction chapter, “Identity and mode as a frame for understanding
social meanings”, the editors provide an overview of identity research, modes
of communication, and the theoretical framework of social semiotic approach
(Kress, 2001) that guides this volume. This section includes thematic and
methodological evaluations of the chapters included in this volume and
furthers the call for interdisciplinary approaches to identity inquiry.
The first two chapters are of particular interest for emerging scholars; these
chapters synthesize identity research and discuss terminology connected to
other chapters, including migrant identity, online identity, language
learning, and blogging. In Chapter One, Brian Paltridge discusses visual
representations of Princess Mary of Denmark and Kylie Kwong, Asian-Australian
celebrity chef. His analysis of news images and of existing research on
identity negotiations illustrates the socially ascribed dimension of identity
embodied both in linguistic repertoires, such as labels, choice of language,
proficiency, and accent and non-linguistic terms, such as clothing and makeup,
to demonstrate or refute an individual’s belonging to a certain community.
Drawing on the “imagined communities” and “imagined identities” concepts
(Norton & Toohey, 2011) in second language acquisition classrooms, Paltridge
concludes that the power of imagination and multimodality to claim membership
in a community of practice can provide a more nuanced approach to identity
inquiry.
From a multimodal perspective, in Chapter Two, Mary Bucholtz conceives style
as a multidimensional negotiation process and action to negotiate identity.
Using sample transcripts and analyses from previous research, the author
demonstrates how a group of high school students construct their identities
within historical, social, or political contexts, by choosing among a wide
range of stylistic markers, such as voice quality, standard, super-standard or
nonstandard language, clothing options, and participating in certain
activities. The complex interactions among these elements create distinctive
identities among groups. The adaptations of certain stylistic elements, such
as designer fashion, strategically index belonging to a particular community
of practice, as well as stance and expertise in the context of interaction.
Inspired by Bucholtz’ definition of style, in Chapter Three, Miriam Meyerhoff
explores frequencies of the variable “be” in past tense marking and
existential constructions in urban sojourners’ Bequia English, using
quantitative research methods. Analysis of interviews with sixty speakers born
in Bequia and field notes reveals that linguistic patterns regarding the
absence or presence of the ‘be’ and past tense marking differ across groups of
speakers from various villages in a Caribbean island.
In the next chapter, Ken Cruickshank examines learner identity negotiation in
non-traditional learning contexts in Australia. Analysis of interviews with
principals and teachers, focus group interviews with 38 students, and field
notes reveal that learners at Chinese, Arabic, and Cook Island Maori heritage
languages schools adopted various strategies to legitimize their membership in
a community of practice or distance themselves from metadiscourses. For
example, to contest racism against Asians in mainstream schools, Asian
participants adopted the label “Chinese” as their ethnic and language identity
marker. The more inclusive Arabic marker was used to unify students from
different ethnic backgrounds in the Arabic language school. Arabic learners
are reported to have used the same marker to contest repressions against
minorities in mainstream schools. Students at Cook Island Maori school are
reported to have developed stronger linguistic and cultural identities in the
community languages schools by participating in cultural performances, such as
dancing and drumming and collaborating with teachers who were less fluent in
the community language, Rarotongan.
In Chapter Five, Linda Tsung uncovers Chinese language learning opportunities
of South Asian migrants, in Hong Kong, using an ethnographic approach.
In-depth interviews with 23 Pakistani, Nepali, Bangladeshi, and Indian
students reveal that even though participants perceived learning Chinese as a
means for achieving upward social mobility, their Chinese learning
opportunities were stifled by teachers and peers who perceived them as less
competent in Chinese, by traditional teaching methods, and by institutional
discourses that devalued participants’ first languages and English language
competency and emphasized participants’ lack of fluency through the
“non-Chinese speaking” label.
In Chapter Six, Antonia Rubino analyzes how members of a working-class
Sicilian-Australian family alternate between the two dominant languages,
English and Sicilian, and the least dominant language, Italian, in
multilingual verbal disputes, drawing on a conversation analytic approach
(Auer, 1984) and Gumperz’s notion of code-switching (1982). The turn-by-turn
analysis of mother-child disputes reveals the complexity of identity and
agency-in-interaction embodied in various linguistic strategies. Family
members drew on a variety of linguistic and cultural resources to perform
their identities during disputes, including transforming the severity of the
discussion into a joke, code-switching to invoke negative evaluations or
contest identity positions, and modifying certain words, such as the Sicilian
‘fummaggiu’ to sound like the Italian ‘formaggio.’
Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics, Ahmar Mahboob in Chapter Seven
unpacks how English language textbooks in Pakistani schools reinforce
ideologies and limit access to global knowledge by including local variants of
English and excluding global English from the educational curriculum. The
analysis of the content and language in textbooks for grades 9 and 10 reveals
that by providing more local content about local culture and national
religious or military heroes and by privileging the genre of biographies,
textbook discourse normalized a national religious and political identity and
limited the development of alternative identities, such as global English user
or academic/professional identity development.
The constitution of housewife identity in the Japanese women’s magazine, The
Housewife’s Companion, is investigated in Chapter Eight by Nerida Jarkey.
Drawing on Bucholtz’ notion of style, Jarkey highlights example excerpts from
articles published in the magazine to discuss textual strategies employed in
the magazine to construct and legitimize the identity of the housewife,
including the use of poetic devices, such as metaphors and simile as well as
the use of honorific language to communicate the role and the persona of the
housewife embodied in the labels of “self-discipline,” “care” and “practical.”
In the next chapter, Wei Wang makes the same point in her analysis of
narrative identities of ordinary people in a collection of 100 most popular
articles in Duzhe, a Chinese general interest magazine with a circulation of 9
million, using positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990). Findings reveal that
the magazine employed a variety of storytelling strategies to increase its
audience and construct an ordinary reader identity through educational
stories. Strategies employed in stories included family-themed narratives,
resolution to the conflict, reflective stance from the protagonist’s
standpoint, and dramatic plots predominantly related to Confucian ethics.
From a sociostylistic approach, Dwi Noverini Djenar defines writer identity as
a negotiation among the writer, genre, and audience. She adopts stylistic
analysis to study authorial stance in teen popular fiction in Indonesia by
examining the use of different negative forms. Using interview data and a
corpus of 6,000 words from two novels by Ken Terate, Noverini Djenar suggests
that Terate’s choice of using different negatives is representative of her
attempt to ease reading for audience and contest standard forms in teenlit.
In Chapter Eleven, Sue Starfield emphasizes the process of her writer and
researcher identity negotiations in academic writing contexts. The analysis of
samples of unpublished and amended texts by editors, as well as responses from
editors on her encyclopaedia entry on researcher reflexivity in applied
linguistics research, reveal that the two texts establish different
relationships with the audience. Starfield suggests that her “non-negotiation”
of use of the first person singular pronoun, “I”, in academic contexts
diminishes her authorial identity: she perceives that the shift of her stance
from a personal style toward a more impersonal style signifies an acceptance
of academic writing norms. The reflexive stance on this non-negotiation
process as well as reflections of her student advising and pedagogy transform
this chapter into an ongoing reflection and contestation of academic writing
norms and positivist research paradigms, revealing that such negotiations
influence identity negotiations beyond the context of a research article.
Drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory, in Chapter Twelve, Caroline
Lipovsky provides a case for professional identity construction in applicant
curriculum vitaes (CVs) for a management position at a food company in France,
arguing that the purpose of curriculum vitaes (CVs) is to strategically
establish a relationship between the writer/applicant, recruiter, and
discourses on profession. The comparison of CVs of participants selected for
job interviews and those not selected, reveals that CVs selected for job
interviews strategically utilized nominalizations, bullet points, extended
qualifiers, such as adjectives and prepositions, noun forms, and bolded terms,
as well as synonyms, hyponyms, repetitions, exemplifications, technical terms,
a clear statement of objective, and headers to clarify specific information,
emphasize experiences and skills related to the advertised position. Such
strategies provide coherence, and legitimize applicants’ professional
identities, as opposed to using full clauses and general language used in CVs
not selected for job interviews. The author concludes that such strategic use
of language creates lexical cohesion, increases the readability and clarity of
information, and thus increases the possibility of an applicant to be selected
for a job interview.
A Business English student’s evolving identity as an international business
professional is the topic of Chapter Thirteen by Zuocheng Zhang. The analysis
of the student journals, interviews, classroom observations, samples of the
student’s (Nan’s) writing in business genres, and professionals’ evaluations
of this student’s writing at a university in China suggests that professional
identity is both reflexive and co-constructed between the individual and the
social world. Through this reflective and enacted socialization process, Nan
internalized specific linguistic and rhetorical resources and used these
structures strategically to constitute his professional identity. During this
process, Nan gained understanding of disciplinary norms and practices, genre
knowledge, and developed beliefs in and awareness of what it means to be an
international business professional.
In the next chapter, Jianxin Liu explores the identity development of a female
migrant domestic worker in China using a virtual ethnography. Drawing on
Butler’s performativity theory (1990), the author analyzes blogposts and photo
collages on gender performance posted by blogger Liuman Yan and media reports
on her blogging. Findings reveal the complex nature of Yan’s evolving identity
as a female: blogging and using profane language created opportunities for Yan
to disrupt power relations, censorship, and discourses on heteronormativity
and traditional views of women.
Inspired by performativity theory, theatre studies, and arts-based methods, in
the final chapter, Cynthia D. Nelson focuses on researcher identity
performance in applied linguistics research. The author analyzes scripted
multimodal research performances to further calls for more performative
approaches that engage public audience in applied linguistics research through
arts, poetry, theatre, and other participatory methods.
EVALUATION
Taking a social semiotic approach (Kress, 2001), the authors in this edited
volume, offer a comprehensive perspective on the intersections among identity,
language, socialization across modes of communication. From a
multidisciplinary, performance-based stance, these chapters challenge
reductionist definitions of identity, culture, language, and ideology. They
emphasize a nuanced approach to study interrelations between micro- and macro
contexts, such as language preferences, perceived linguistic, cultural, and
professional competence, family, culture, race, ethnicity, religion, learning
spaces, media, and institutional discourses on language and communication,
arguing that these factors shape identity positions and normalize status quo
in everyday interactional contexts.
The aim of this edited book is to offer a multimodal approach to identity
inquiry from an international perspective. Chapters are an essential read for
educators, students, applied linguists, communication scholars, and
researchers interested in identity and language. The first two chapters
introduce readers to existing identity-related research and operationalize
relevant definitions. The remaining chapters address identity in a variety of
areas, including language learning, mundane interactions, and web-mediated
communication contexts. Investigated are the discursively and semiotically
constructed social identity negotiations of various groups or individuals,
ranging from more visible public figures (Paltridge) to marginalised voices of
ethnic minorities or individuals, such as Mexican migrant youth and high
schoolers in California (Bucholtz), South Asian migrants in Hong Kong (Tsung),
working class multilingual families (Rubino), school students (Mahboob),
housewives (Jarkey), middle-class families (Wang), and researchers (Starfield
and Nelson), among others. Findings reveal that identity is (re)enacted,
(re)interpreted, and sometimes (re)inforced, depending of encoder and decoder
across various cultures, modes of communication, and social contexts, such as
mainstream schools, universities, media, community language centers, peer
pressure, and family as well as genres, such as textbooks, women’s magazines
and digests, popular fiction, business writing, academic writing, CV writing,
and blogs, among others.
This collection of research highlights that identity negotiation is a struggle
for both visible and less visible communities. However, identity negotiation
becomes more nuanced for less visible communities, such as newcomers, migrant
workers and second language learners, who might not have the linguistic and
cultural capital to refute master discourses that construct them as “the
other.” The focus on less visible communities, individual experiences, and
identity negotiations in everyday conversations make this book insightful, as
migrant language learners, community perspectives, and mundane conversational
contexts remain less studied in research. For example, in-depth analyses of
evolving individual identities, such as a female migrant blogger in the
chapter by Liu or the professional socialization of a Business English student
in the chapter by Zhang, are examined in blogs or CV writing, that blur the
distinction between the voices of the creator or writer and audience or user.
For language educators, some chapters provide valuable insights into the way
that social experiences by second language learners mediate their second
language acquisition.
The exploration of language and identity from the perspectives of the majority
and minority community could be more emphasized. To include both perspectives
of majority and minority community, for example, Lipovsky invites recruiters’
comments on CVs and Zhang includes comments by business professionals in his
data collection procedures. Other chapters would have enriched understanding
of identity negotiations by emphasizing this two way interactional process
between the minority group and host society.
To account for a multimodal approach to study identity-in-action, chapters
utilize a wide range of methodologies, including multi-sited video ethnography
(Bucholtz), virtual ethnography (Liu), performed research (Nelson),
conversation analysis (Rubino), narrative analysis (Wang), and a combination
of content analysis and genre analysis (Mahboob), and discourse and narrative
analyses (Zhang), among others. Some chapters provide a more in-depth
examination of methodologies. For example, Meyerhoff foregrounds her study on
linguistic variables from Bequia English by cautioning against privileging
certain research methods in sociolinguistics. The author provides rich
sociohistorical context of the Caribbean villages and clear rationale for
using 100 hours of recorded interviews with sixty speakers born in Bequia and
field notes in a Caribbean island to analyze frequencies of the existence of
“be”, past tense marking, and existential constructions. However,
methodological approaches, including analytical frameworks, could be explored
more in-depth in other chapters. For example, it is unclear how analysis
frameworks and codes from identity research are conceptualized in the
analytical framework in the chapter by Paltridge. A more in-depth discussion
on themes that emerged in the literature and data and the resulting concept
maps could also enrich the methodology section of the chapter by Cruickshank.
Reflexive statements about researchers’ cultural and language backgrounds as
well as their insider/outsider positions related to the participants are
noteworthy in the chapters by Cruickshank and Tsung, as researcher reflexivity
about the research process and researcher-participant power hierarchy provides
another relational dimension to identity inquiry.
Other authors point out the importance of reflecting on research paradigms and
advocate for combining quantitative and qualitative methods to effectively
study a phenomenon. Particularly, Meyerhoff calls for a reflexive examination
of research methods and the interconnections among participant, assumptions
behind methods, and semantics: “our research paradigms should be absolutely
clear about what they think we are explaining, because ultimately this clarity
will fine-tune the connections between what are sometimes seen as quite
disparate fields of enquiry: (i) how speakers operationalize identities; (ii)
the assumptions underlying different sociolinguistic research methods; and
(iii) the workings of formal semantics” (p. 64). Novice researchers might find
the author’s use of clear language to provide her rationale for the
statistical analysis (multivariate analysis) employed in the study noteworthy.
Most chapters establish clear connections with concepts mentioned in other
chapters, easing the reading process for the reader. For example, the chapters
by Paltridge, Meyerhoff, and Noverini Djenar are inspired by Bucholtz’ notion
of style. Other chapters explore similar concepts related to identity in
different contexts. For example, race, traditional practices, language
learning, and educational experiences thematically unite the chapters by Tsung
and Cruickshank. A focus on linguistic strategies in magazines connects the
chapters by Jarkey and Wang, and professional identity negotiations within
academic genres connects the chapters by Starfield, Zhang, and Nelson.
Contributors in this book expand the examination of identity in social spaces,
such as traditional learning contexts, that reinforce existing power hierarchy
and against the backdrop of monolingualism, to multiple socialization
contexts, such as non-traditional learning environments and mundane
interactional contexts. By highlighting the importance of various learning
contexts, modes of communication (spoken, written, visual, or a combination of
these), media (photography), and register (language choice dependent on the
situation) for identity negotiations and positions, they advocate for more
nuanced micro and macro level approaches to the study of identity. In these
chapters, identity as an ongoing meaning-making interactional process is
examined across multiple learning contexts, traditional and nontraditional,
“in-between” spaces, such as community language schools (Cruickshank),
villages (Meyerhoff), or mother-children conflict talk (Rubino) that create
possibilities for identity negotiations within less established power
struggles among ethnicity, culture, family, generation, places of origin, and
religion. For example, by examining identity negotiations in non-traditional
learning environments, such as community languages schools, Cruickshank
suggests that these language schools create possibilities for alternative
identity positions, positions that might allow learners to contest ascribed
labels in mainstream schools. For example, through the more inclusive Cook
Island Maori term, traditional literacy-based language learning shifted to
language learning through cultural activities, an approach that has mitigated
the teacher-student power hierarchy and created opportunities for less fluent
students to adopt this identity maker to preserve their culture and language.
Such findings could enlighten pedagogy in mainstream education and second
language acquisition as well as language policy.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrea Lypka is PhD candidate in the Second Language Acquisition and
Instructional Technology (SLA/IT) program at the University of South Florida
(USF). Her research interests include learner identity, discourse analysis,
and digital storytelling.
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