SECOND-LANGUAGE ENGLISH userS AND TEACHERS
As language teachers, our students are people who are not only learning a new skill, but are forming new identities in order to adapt to new environments. Not only that, the skill that they are learning (the language itself) is tied to that very identity. From a perspective of sociocultural language learning, the complexity of identity is a part of the language learning process (Norton & Toohey, 2011). As second-language teachers, mentors and supervisors, it is important for us to recognize that our peers are coming from various different cultures and social situations.
In recent years, studies in second-language acquisition have seen a social turn. It is more important now than ever to consider that learners are not people who are simply making mistakes and "practicing" the language; rather they are language users. And in using that language in a particular context or situation, they are no longer "monolingual" or "bilingual;" rather, they are plurilingual - using languages as tools in context-specific situations. Even our ESL teachers are English language users (Cook, 1999; Kamhi-Stein, 2009).
Photo credit: Jeremy Lane
TECHNOLOGY, IDENTITY AND LANGUAGE LEARNING
In a world where information technologies are becoming increasingly implemented into our everyday lives, we have new ways of constructing our identities. Whereas literacy used to be defined solely by one's ability to read text, it may also now include one's ability to navigate online networks via different types of symbols and platforms (e.g. memes, wikis, video journals). It is not only our ability and capacity to do so that contribute to the formation of our identities by other member of society, but we also shape our own identities in doing so (Norton & Toohey, 2011). For example, my ability to use apps such as Instagram grant me membership to communities that use that app. Accordingly, I also form an identity that is associated with Instagram.
"IM permitted [the learners] to engage in literacy practices in ways they were not able to do in school, and they, like many others, argued that schools would do well to try to link students’ expertise in outside-school literacies with their in-school literacy instruction" (Norton and Toohey, 2011, p.433).
For a framework on implementing mobile pedagogy into ESL classrooms, I recommend the following reading: Kukulska-Hulme, Agnes; Norris, Lucy and Donohue, Jim (2015): http://oro.open.ac.uk/43605/