Language students and emerging identities

2012

The aim of our article is to study written narratives as a way of expressing emerging identities as second language (L2) users. We compare narratives written by Finnish students of Swedish during their first semester (24 essays) with data collected after the third year of study (9 essays), thereby trying to figure out how the university context has affected the development of the students as L2 users. L2 learning is regarded as a complex project entailing constant identity formation as a plurilingual subject. We see identity as a process, as something flexible, hybrid and multifaceted. Identity evolves in participation and it always includes a temporal dimension. The language learning proce…