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Introduction
In restaurant was working a lot of children but the children always thought that I am - I don't know - maybe some broom or something. They always said 'Go and clean the living room', and I was washing the dishes and they didn't do nothing. They talked to each other and they thought that I had to do everything. And I said 'No'. The girl is only 12 years old. She is younger than my son. I said 'No, you are doing nothing. You can go and clean the tables or something'.
(Interview with Martina, Norton 2000: 99)
Martina was an English language learner from eastern Europe who had immigrated to Canada for a better life for her three children. Partly because she was not a proficient speaker of English, she struggled to find work in her profession as a quantity surveyor, and was employed in a fast food restaurant in the greater Toronto area. Her co-workers, as well as the manager's children (who frequently visited the restaurant), were all born in Canada, and spoke English fluently. What Martina communicates in this extract is that engaging in social interaction with her co-workers was a struggle, primarily because she was positioned as a dehumanized and inanimate 'broom'. To resist these marginalizing practices, Martina reframed her relationship with her co-workers as domestic rather than professional, and from the identity position 'mother', rather than 'immigrant' or 'broom', she claimed the right to speak.
While this data has been discussed more fully in other publications (Norton Peirce 1995; Norton 2000) the vignette is a sobering reminder of the powerful relationship between identity and language learning, which is of central concern to many scholars in the field of language education. Indeed, over the past 15 years, there has been an explosion of interest in identity and language learning, and 'identity' now features in most encyclopedias and handbooks of language learning and teaching (Norton & Toohey 2002; Ricento 2005; McKinney & Norton 2008; Norton 2010; Morgan & Clarke 2011). In the broader field of applied linguistics, interest in identity has also gained considerable momentum. There is work, for example, on identity and pragmatics (Lo & Reyes 2004; Spencer-Oatey & Franklin 2009), identity...