ISSUES IN LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY RESEARCH IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS

Identity has become a key construct in applied linguistics over the past 30 years, as more and more researchers have heeded Norton Peirce's (1995: 12) call for 'a comprehensive theory of social identity that integrates the language learner and the language learning context'. In this article, my aim is to discuss what I see as issues arising in identity research in applied linguistics. I start with a brief consideration of why identity has become so central in applied linguistics, before discussing the poststructuralist model of identity which has been adopted by the vast majority of researchers. I then move to consider three more substantive issues: (1) the potential benefits of a more psychological angle when most language and identity research tends to be predominantly social; (2) the importance of clarifying the interrelationship between individual agency and social structures in language and identity research; and (3) the potential benefits of including a socioeconomic stratification and social class angle in research which tends to prime identity politics (identity inscriptions such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality and language), over the material conditions of life.