Investments in Communities of Learners and Speakers: How African American students of Portuguese negotiate ethno-racialized, gendered, and social-classed identities in second language learning

This study investigates the experiences of four African Americans learning Portuguese on a university study abroad program in Salvador, Brazil with the objective to understand better how black students navigate second language learning (SLL), so as to duplicate conditions that engender success and ameliorate circumstances that impede it. The study examines the participants' classroom and outside activities, their journals, interviews, and Portuguese language writings to create an account of how myriad identities of African Americans are manifest through discourse and investments in SLL. Data are scrutinized using thematic, critical, and descriptive conversation analyses to describe the participants' positioning within material, ideological, and symbolic groups; to show how linguistic action reproduces or resists structures of power and inequity; and to illustrate the enactment of identities in interaction. Findings are presented as four individual case studies. They reveal how African Americans learning Portuguese in an Afro-Brazilian city co-construct and negotiate multiple ethno-racialized, gendered, and social-classed identities as they make choices and efforts to participate or not in different communities of language learners and speakers. The findings also demonstrate that these investments greatly influence how successful black second language students become or are perceived to be in SLL.