In this review article on identity, language learning, and social change, we argue that contemporary poststructuralist theories of language, identity, and power offer new perspectives on language learning and teaching, and have been of considerable interest in our field. We first review poststructuralist theories of language, subjectivity, and positioning and explain sociocultural theories of language learning. We then discuss constructs of INVESTMENT and IMAGINED COMMUNITIES/IMAGINED IDENTITIES (Norton Peirce 1995;Norton 1997Norton , 2000Norton , 2001, showing how these have been used by diverse identity researchers. Illustrative examples of studies that investigate how identity categories like race, gender, and sexuality interact with language learning are discussed. Common qualitative research methods used in studies of identity and language learning are presented, and we review the research on identity and language teaching in different regions of the world. We examine how digital technologies may be affecting language learners' identities, and how learner resistance impacts language learning. Recent critiques of research on identity and language learning are explored, and we consider directions for research in an era of increasing globalization. We anticipate that the identities and investments of language learners, as well as their teachers, will continue to generate exciting and innovative research in the future.

Language and culture are no longer scripts to be acquired, as much as they are conversations in which people can participate. The question of who is learning what and how much is essentially a question of what conversations they are part of, and this question is a subset of the more powerful question of what conversations are around to be had in a given culture. (McDermott, 1993, p. 295) Bonny Norton is an associate professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia. She is interested in the relationship among identity, language learning, and social change. Her current research addresses popular culture and educational practice.Kelleen Toohey is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University. She is interested in sociocultural and critical approaches to L2 learning research. Her current research is in public school classrooms and is conducted in collaboration with teachers.

This article describes a longitudinal ethnographic research project in a Grade 1 classroom enrolling L2 learners and Anglophones. Using a community‐of‐practice perspective rarely applied in L2 research, the author examines three classroom practices that she argues contribute to the construction of L2 learners as individuals and as such reinforce traditional second language acquisition perspectives. More importantly, they serve to differentiate participants from one another and contribute to community stratification. In a stratified community in which the terms of stratification become increasingly visible to all, some students become defined as deficient and are thus systematically excluded from just those practices in which they might otherwise appropriate identities and practices of growing competence and expertise. I said: “Some people do know more than others. That contributes to the impression that someone, somewhere, knows the whole thing.” “Neapolitans know a lot,” said Gianni. “But they know it collectively. Break them up, take them away, and they're hopeless, just as stupid as anyone else. It's the city, the phenomenon of Naples itself, that knows something.” (Hazzard, 1970, p. 38)

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents' stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral,globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil.

The Douglas Fir Group (2016) argued that applied linguistics needed new interdisciplinary perspectives, and I suggest here that the concepts provided by new materialism might aid in gaining such perspectives. New materialism foregrounds the material nature of humans, discourses, machines, other objects, other species, and the natural environment, as well as constant change, non-binary thinking, and the porosity of boundaries; it also asks for the posing of new problems and new concepts to ‘bring forth a world distinct from what we already are’ (Colebrook and Weinstein 2017: 4). Refusing the central binaries and hierarchies of Cartesian thinking, new materialism’s relational ontology stresses becoming; people, discourses, practices, and things are continually in relation and becoming different from what they were before. New materialist conceptions of knowledge/knowing and language/languaging are also relational, processual, and entangled. I review recent new materialist educational research and present two descriptions of events in my own research to show what pedagogical and research-oriented questions might be stimulated from this perspective.