This collection spotlights the authentic voices of plurilingual learners, bringing together autoethnographies of over twenty graduate students to deepen current understandings of lived experiences of plurilingualism. The volume begins with outlining foundational work on plurilingualism in language education up to this point, with the body of work on plurilingual subjectivities historically focusing on researchers’ and practitioners’ gazes, rather than students. The book moves into short autoethnographies of graduate students at the University of Toronto enrolled in a graduate education course over three years. Employing autoethnography as the primary methodology allows the space for privileging authentic voices of plurilingual learners in their own words, learners whose individual lived experiences are uniquely contextualized within the lens of plurilingual theory. The volume and diversity of perspectives showcased offer a unique window into the diversity and commonalities among plurilingual learners, offering opportunities for reflection on directions for future research. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in applied linguistics, language teaching and learning, and language education.

Storytelling is an ideal avenue for language learners to share their experiences and journeys and find a sense of identity. Everyone who has learned an additional language has a story to tell, but there is a unique type of autoethnographic and linguistic story that can be read in scholarly platforms. Autoethnographic Perspectives on Multilingual Life Stories presents the life stories of multilingual people and their experiences by using autoethnography as a research method. It proposes narrative as an autobiographical research method that provides the technique and opportunity to express how transnationals construct their identities in foreign and new contexts through partial or full life stories. Covering topics such as identity, life stories, and self-discovery, this reference work is ideal for academicians, researchers, scholars, practitioners, instructors, and students.

Showcasing a new methodology in language learning and identity research, this carefully conceptualized, innovative book explicates the use of autoethnography as a way of re-imagining one’s sense of linguistic and cultural identity. A key work for researchers and students in Applied Linguistics and Language Education, it addresses fundamental aspects of research methodology and explores substantive issues relating to individual dimensions of multilingualism. Choi shows convincingly how the learning of a language is inseparable from one’s constant searching for a voice, a place, and a self in this world, demonstrating the importance of interrogating what lies behind everyday life events and interactions—the political and ethical implications of the utterances, thoughts, actions, and stories of the self and others. Themes of authenticity, illegitimacy, power relations, perceptions of self/other, cultural discourses and practices, and related issues in multilingual identity development surface in the multi-modal narratives. Chapters on methodology, woven through the book, focus on the process of knowledge production, approaches to writing narratives, the messiness of research writing practices, and the inseparability of writing and research.

Questions for Discussion -- Author Profile -- References -- Index

This autoethnographic account of the author’s Japanese as a second language learning trajectory is an important and unique addition to diary studies in SLA and applied linguistics qualitative research circles. In-depth ethnographic details and introspective commentary are skilfully interwoven throughout Simon-Maeda’s narrative of her experiences as an American expatriate who arrived in Japan in 1975 – the starting point of her being and becoming a speaker of Japanese. The book joins the recent surge in postmodernist, interdisciplinary approaches to examining language acquisition, and readers are presented with a highly convincing case for using autoethnography to better understand sociolinguistic complexities that are unamenable to quantification of isolated variables. The comprehensive literature review and wide ranging references provide a valuable source of information for researchers, educators, and graduate students concerned with current issues in SLA/applied linguistics, bi/multilingualism, and Japanese as a second language.

Learning a language in a formal context is not the same as learning a language in a natural setting, in that the goal of one of the participants in the communicative events that occur in the classroom, the teacher, is to teach a language. For this reason, the majority of the actions undertaken by the participants are directed at achieving that goal. That is why observing and analyzing interaction in the classroom becomes a key element in understanding how we learn. This chapter sets out ways this issue is approached through conversation analysis. The transcription symbols used in this chapter are based on conventions developed by the GREIP group (see Moore & Llompart, this volume) and are included in the annex. [A Catalan version of this chapter is also included in the book. For the complete volume, "Qualitative Approaches to Research on Plurilingual Education," see ED573580.].

This innovative volume showcases the possibilities of autoethnography as a means of exploring the complexities of transnational identity construction for learners, teachers, and practitioners in English language teaching (ELT). // The book unpacks the dynamics of today’s landscape of language education which sees practitioners and students with nuanced personal and professional histories inhabit liminal spaces as they traverse national, cultural, linguistic, ideological, and political borders, thereby impacting their identity construction and engagement with pedagogies and practices across different educational domains. The volume draws on solo and collaborative autoethnographies of transnational language practitioners to question such well-established ELT binaries such as ‘center’/’periphery’ and ‘native’/non-native’ and issues of identity-related concepts such as ideologies, discourses, agency, and self-reflexibility. In so doing, the book also underscores the unique affordances of autoethnography as a methodological tool for better understanding transnational identity construction in ELT and bringing to the fore key perspectives in emerging areas of study within applied linguistics. // This dynamic collection will appeal to students, scholars, and practitioners in English language teaching, applied linguistics, TESOL education, educational linguistics, and sociolinguistics.