The discursive construction of subject positioning, power, and language ideologies among adult immigrant learners of English

This critical ethnographic study of adult immigrant learners of English highlights the discursively constructed nature of language learning, power relations, and language ideologies. It draws on varied data gathered over the two-year duration of the project, including video tapes of the participants interacting in their community center ESL classroom, audio-taped interviews with each focus participant, detailed transcripts, the researcher's written reflections following each weekly ESL class, and outside-of-class observations. The study adopts a Foucauldian view of the microdynamics of power and draws on Davies and Harre's (1990) positioning theory in considering how individuals' differing displays of English knowledge in the context of an ESL classroom can position them as good or poor language learners. In taking this approach, this study suggests that language ability ought to be understood as emergent in the moment-by-moment development of interactions, with some options more ratified than others depending on the situated activity, thereby foregrounding the relational aspects of learning as well as the limitations to notions of general linguistic competence among learners. It also considers the possibilities for learner empowerment from a critical pedagogy perspective. Through close analysis of classroom interactions, the study demonstrates some of the paradoxes and tensions that accompany critical pedagogical practices as well as institutional and interactional constraints in bringing about empowerment among adult immigrant learners. Lastly, it examines how language ideologies, particularly those that legitimate the dominant role of English in American contexts, were produced in the mundane interactions of the study's participants. By framing these beliefs as discursive constructions, the study problematizes the inevitable and seemingly natural status of these "common sense" beliefs. At the same time, it suggests that adult immigrants' utterances regarding the role of English in their lives are uniquely situated to challenge status quo beliefs, even if only subtly and indirectly, because of the struggles these individuals experience in learning and using the language.