The language and culture of identity: Crafting a new self in a second language.

摘要

This dissertation explores the psychodynamic relationships among acculturation, identity, and language acquisition in order to provide the basis for a more effective and psychologically supportive pedagogy for second-language development. Drawing on the psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, the study adopts the perspective that a person's identity is constructed in the network of language and questions what this precept means for a person learning a second language.; The research follows an ethnographic approach to understanding the relations among acculturation, identity, and second-language acquisition. Student journals from a course titled "The Immigrant Experience in Literature" are examined to see how the students' metacognitive awareness of the relationship between language learning and identity influenced their language fluency. The analysis addresses whether, through the process of becoming cognizant of the ways their identities were being influenced, changed, and sometimes challenged or threatened by acculturation, these students were able to produce deeper, more reflective writing in English. The analysis also speaks to another powerful outcome: the student's sense of empowerment over his/her process of acculturation.; The study introduces the concept of "remothering" to describe the resignifying of imagistic and affective-physiological states in the second language that was facilitated by interaction in the course. Arguably pivotal to becoming bilingual/bicultural, remothering relates to the affective states of being (self) loved and being (self) understood, as well as being able to elicit those responses from others.; The implications for the classroom drawn from this psychoanalytically oriented teaching approach build on earlier research that concluded that language learning and identity in the second-language classroom are problematized by the relations of power, usually inequitable, that are at work outside the classroom. This research highlights the need for both the teacher and the student to become conscious of the psychological tension between identity maintenance and identity change implicit in language learning, so that they may develop and engage the student's awareness of his/her own creative and co-constructive processes in learning a new language.