The Many Faces of the Language ego: Exploring Tensions of Linguistic and Cultural Adaptation in Immigrants and Adult Language Learners

摘要

Immigrants and sojourners arriving to Canada represent the cohorts of additional language learners whose experience of cultural and linguistic adjustment evokes a wide range of discomforting reactions typically accompanying the act of displacement from the home country. Application of psychoanalytical theories provides an additional perspective on the causes of these reactions as well as the personal inhibitions blocking the successful accommodation in the new environment. The sense of the perceived self that accounts for how the learner feels connected to the target linguistic and cultural environment may be the key component of such process. This paper discusses the themes that emerged in the phenomenological study conducted by the author in 2009 in the University of Manitoba, which addressed the transformative role of the language ego (Erhman, 1993; Guiora et al., 1972; 1980) on the process of the learner's identity development in the new cultural and linguistic milieu.