Overview: Key Terms and Goals

For the past 10 years, I have taught a graduate course at the University of British Columbia, called 'Language, Discourse, and Identity', which has given me the opportunity to remain connected to the burgeoning literature on language and identity in the field of language education. However, given the immense wealth of this literature, which includes an entire journal devoted to the topic (the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education), this chapter, like my course, is selective in orientation. To achieve some balance between depth and breadth, I include some of the classic literature in the area, while making space for new voices and emerging themes. I begin by defining key terms, and then outline what I see as some of the primary goals of this area of research.

As a starting point, and with a view to defining key terms, it is useful to consider why I include the term discourse in the title of my graduate course. In order to understand the relationship between language and identity, as discussed in this chapter, it is important to understand the poststructuralist theory of language, which is defined as discourse. Poststructuralist theories of language achieved much prominence in the late 20th century, and are associated, amongst others, with the work of Bakhtin (1981, 1984), Bourdieu (1977, 1991), Hall (1997) and Weedon (1997). These theories build on, but are distinct from, structuralist theories of language, associated predominantly with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1966). For structuralists, the linguistic system guarantees the meaning of signs (the word and its meaning) and each linguistic community has its own set of signifying practices that give value to the signs in a language.

One of the criticisms poststructuralists have levelled at this conception of language is that structuralism cannot account for struggles over the social meanings that can be attributed to signs in a given language. The signs /feminist/, /research/, /sociolinguistics/ for example can have different meanings for different people within the same linguistic community.