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Applied Linguistics Advance Access originally published online on December 12, 2007
Applied Linguistics 2008 29(2):267-289; doi:10.1093/applin/amm053
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© Oxford University Press 2007

‘Because She Made Beds. Every Day’. Social Positioning, Classroom Discourse, and Language Learning

Julia Menard-Warwick

University of California, Davis


  Abstract

This paper discursively analyzes two events of gendered positioning that took place during a unit on employment in an adult English as a Second Language program in California. Because the program primarily served Latina immigrant women, the teacher focused in this unit on the needs and goals of full-time homemakers who might want to transition into paid employment. This paper contends that it was the tensions inherent in the teacher's assumptions about her students’ identities which led to the events of positioning discussed in this paper. In one of these events, a learner contests being positioned as primarily a homemaker; in the other, a more-advanced learner appropriates this positioning to her own ends in the classroom. Arguing that events of language learning and social positioning often occur simultaneously in the L2 classroom, the paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of such events for longer term processes of language socialization.

Received for publication 1 March 2007.
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