Narratives on Literacies: Adult Migrants' Identity Construction in Interaction

Anne Golden and Elizabeth Lanza

Introduction

The ways in which people use and evaluate reading and writing are embedded in conceptions of knowledge and identity (Prinsloo & Baynham, 2008), while narratives provide insight into views of the self and other within a cultural context, and hence identity. The relationship between narrative and identity can be perceived as operating at various levels, as De Fina (2003) points out, including the use of narrative resources identifying the speaker as a member of a specific community, the use of stories through which social roles are negotiable and the use of the negotiation of membership into communities that share common beliefs and values. Among these common beliefs and values are ideological stances toward literacy. In this chapter, we will address the issue of identity construction that occurs in the presentation and positioning of self in social experiences related to literacy and language learning in the narratives of migrants to Norway. As migrants encounter new languages and cultures, they also encounter new dimensions to literacy, either initial literacy or further literacy in a new language. Migrants' narratives inevitably involve ideological stances toward language learning and literacy and are thus fruitful sites for investigating identity construction in interaction.

Literacy is here understood in line with 'New Literacy Studies' as 'situated social practices embedded within relations of culture and power in specific contexts' (Prinsloo & Baynham, 2008: 2). Construing literacy as (a set of) social practices, studies within this perspective emphasize 'what people do with literacy' (Barton & Hamilton, 2000: 9) and thus encompass the negotiations of selves within these different relations. Hence literacy practices involve values, attitudes, ideologies and social relationships – in sum, how people in a particular culture construct literacy and how they talk about literacy and make sense of it. According to Street (1993), literacy practices are not observable units of behaviour since they involve values, attitudes, feelings and social relationships, including people's awareness of literacy, constructions of literacy and discourses of literacy. Literacy events, however, involve reading and writing, and the conception of events stresses the situated, contextualized nature of literacy, that is that literacy always exists in a sociocultural context (Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Lewis et al., 2007).

Through the lens of narratives of personal experience in conversational interaction, we will investigate various ways through which adult migrants position themselves and provide ideological stances towards language learning and literacy, and thus construct identities. We will examine the choice of narratives the adult migrants introduce into an interaction and the linguistic resources the individual employs in the performance of the narratives in interaction. Both language learning and literacy are critical in a postmodern text-based society like Norway, and success in these domains empowers individuals, providing them with added social capital. We will explore these issues through an interactional analysis involving highly skilled migrants with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

In the discussion that follows, we first present the notion of identity that motivates our study and in particular the issue of identity in narrative. Stance-taking, agency and categorization are important components in identity construction and will be brought up in this regard. Then we present current research on literacy that focuses on identity and narrative. Subsequently, we present the database that ultimately forms the core of our analysis. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of our results for language education of understandings of complex blendings of cultural and linguistic diversity in communities and institutions, and of new cultural identities and practices.

Identity in Narrative

A recurring theme in narrative inquiry, framed within a poststructuralist approach to the study of the self and the other, is the notion of identity, or rather identities (Bamberg et al., 2007; Benwell & Stokoe, 2006). The individual can negotiate and construct many identities along various social axes, including ideological stances to literacy (Lanza & Svendsen, 2007). The approach to the study of identities taken in this chapter is a constructionist one in which identities are perceived as negotiated and emergent in interpersonal communication – the study of how identity emerges at various analytical levels and how these resources gain social meaning (cf. Bucholtz & Hall, 2005).

Narratives structure our experience, our knowledge and our thoughts (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001: 1) and provide a window to the study of identity. Emphasizing the constructionist nature of identity, Benwell and Stokoe (2006: 138) underscore the role of narrative in this process, portraying

... identity as performed rather than as prior to language, as dynamic rather than fixed, as culturally and historically located, as constructed in interaction with other people and institutional structures, as continuously remade, and as contradictory and situational. ... Thus the practice of narration involves the 'doing' of identity, and because we can tell different stories we can construct different versions of self.

The sociolinguistic literature on narrative has been highly influenced by Labov and Waletsky...