Elizabeth R Miller
 

This presentation adopts a discourse analytic approach in examining a series of interviews in which adult immigrants were asked about their experiences learning and using English after arriving in the U.S. Adopting a view of agency as “something learners do rather than something [they] possess” (van Lier, 2008: 171) and as the “socioculturally mediated capacity to act” (Ahearn, 2001: 112), this presentation seeks to understand how (and whether) language learners present themselves as agents of their own learning. To this end, it examines the linguistic, narrative and interactional resources used in constructing these individuals as agents of their learning experiences, able to manage and overcome the challenges they face as learners of the dominant language, or, conversely, as inagentive individuals, with little power to conquer the difficulties confronting them. The presentation will include numerous short excerpts from the interview transcripts in considering how interviewees position themselves as agents, or not, with respect to their learning of English. In particular, it examines participants’ linguistic choices with respect to subject and object placement, verb transitivity, discourse markers, pronoun shifts, sequential placement of utterances, involvement utterances, and narrative devices. This presentation argues that by approaching learner perceptions of their learning processes through the construct of agency we are better able to recognize the action potential and responsibility individual learners bring to the learning process and their degree of emotional, mental and physical investment (Norton, 2000) in the learning process while also acknowledging the socio-political, economic, and cultural barriers adult immigrants confront in attempting to learn English while adapting to their new lives in the U.S.