The Applied Linguistic Individual - Sociocultural Approaches to Identity, Agency and Autonomy - Phil Benson
8 Teenagers making sense of their foreign language practices: individual accounts indexing social discourses
The Applied Linguistic Individual - Sociocultural Approaches to Identity, Agency and Autonomy - Phil Benson
Anne Pitkänen-Huhta
Tarja Nikula
University of Jyväskylä
Description
The first part of the book examined theoretical tensions between the social and the individual in their approaches, while this second part explores how they are resolved in data-based research. This chapter reports on an ethnographically oriented study on the ways in which Finnish teenagers make sense of their everyday practices with English: where and when they encounter it and use it, what values and meanings they attach to it, and how they see themselves as learners of it. The study looks at language learning through the individual experiences of a small number of teenagers, focusing on the diversity and sharedness of these experiences (see Benson 2005).