Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants

Accounts of Language Learning and

Work
ELIZABETH R. MILLER
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist
perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as
individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents
within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as
inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act.
Drawing on a corpus of 18 interviews with adult immigrant small
business owners in the United States, this study uses both quantitative
and qualitative discourse analytic approaches in considering (a)
recurrent linguistic constructs used across interviews to position
interviewees as (in)agentive characters in the story worlds of their
autobiographical accounts; (b) how these constructs are mobilized in
the co-constructed positioning work of interviewer and interviewees;
and (c) so-called common sense ideological discourses by which the
interviewees are constituted as agents who rationally and responsibly
make self-generated choices and act on them. This multilayered
positioning work constrained interviewees to speaking from positions
of language learner or immigrant or small business owner, but at the same
time such positioning mobilized recognizable subjectivities for them,
enabling them to act in interpretable and meaningful ways.
doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.226854
T
he interrelationship of language, identity, and learning has been
investigated extensively by second language acquisition (SLA)
researchers in the past decade and a half, resulting in what Block
(2007) labeled as a boom in publications linking identity and SLA
(p. 864). And, as Block notes, much of this research has adopted a
poststructuralist perspective to identity construction. Rather than
treating identity as a manifestation of ones essential self, this research
emphasizes the dynamism, fragmentation, and contested nature of
identities. Relatedly, learner agency has increasingly come to be
regarded as a necessary construct in understanding language learning
as well (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Swain &
TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 44, No. 3, September 2010 465
Deters, 2007; van Lier, 2008), and much of the poststructurally informed
research on identity has viewed learners as able to exercise their agency
in making identity choices and in positioning themselves within and in
response to local and larger social constraints (DaSilva Iddings & Katz,
2007; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton, 2000; Ros i Soli, 2007; Vitanova,
2005). Understanding these mediating enablements and constraints
becomes particularly consequential when considering adult immigrant
language learners, individuals who frequently are marginalized in the
dominant society (Norton, 2000; Vitanova, 2005).
In this study, I adopt Ahearns (2001) provisional definition of
agency, which is the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (p. 112),
and I draw from van Liers (2008) work in second language (L2)
research. van Lier (2008) notes that language learners agentive capacity
to act runs contrary to any notion of linguistic competence as something
one can possess; agency is instead action potential, mediated by social,
interactional, cultural, institutional and other contextual factors
(p. 171). He also cautions against treating apparent action, such as
active participation in a language classroom, as an indication of learner
agency at work; one can, after all, express ones agency by deliberately
not acting. Relatedly, Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001) contends that agency
encompasses more than performance, or doing (p. 145, cited in
Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p. 349). It is also linked to how individuals
assign relevance and significance to things and events (Lantolf &
Thorne, 2006, p. 143).
Aligning with a number of studies that have drawn on interview
research in exploring the construction of identity and agency (de Fina,
2003; McKendy, 2006; OConnor, 1994; Ros i Soli, 2007; Vitanova, 2005),
I examine here the autobiographical accounts coconstructed in inter-
views with 18 adult immigrants to the United States, as they positioned
themselves and were positioned as variously agentive. I advance the
notion that the socioculturally mediated capacity to act and ability to
assign relevance and significance to such acts emerge as individuals are
positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. This
positioning occurs, in part, as individuals speak themselves into being
through discursive regularities (Poynton & Lee, 2000, p. 5), the
interactional and linguistically recurring ways of speaking that allow us
to make sense of our selves, to (re)enact those selves, and to respond to
being positioned by our interlocutors. Furthermore, I consider how such
positioning can reconstitute or resist ideological views of how individuals
operate in the social world (Bamberg, 2004). Here I use the term
ideology not as the obfuscation of unequal power relations but as the
discursive construction of so-called common sense discourses or ways of
understanding and reconstituting social reality (Miller, 2009;
Pennycook, 2001). Ultimately, I propose the need for us to rethink
466 TESOL QUARTERLY
how we understand and research agency among language learners, when
adopting a poststructuralist approach. Learner agency, I argue, must be
understood as inherently unstable and as inevitably enabled and
constrained in the ongoing co-constitution of identity and social reality.
And it is this understanding that I explore as I consider how the
participants in my study come to be constituted as agents of language
learning and work-related actions.
FEMINIST POSTSTRUCTURALIST APPROACHES TO
AGENCY
Poststructural research focusing on identity and language learning, and
including considerations of agency, can be traced to Nortons (1995, 2000)
formative work among adult immigrant women learning English in
Canada. More recent scholarship has continued to advance the notion of
learner agency as constructed in the interrelationships of individuals and
social discourses. Ros i Soli (2007), for example, sees L2 users as dynamic
agents who take the initiative and take charge of their own learning while
also noting that agency is co-constructed, both by the sociocultural
environment and by those around the L2 user (p. 205). Vitanova (2005)
regards the adult immigrant language learners in her study as active,
responsible and languaged sel[ves] (p. 153), who, through everyday acts
of creativity (p. 166) are able to reestablish voices for themselves in the
target language and culture. These researchers and others work to address
the challenge posed by Pennycook (2001) to
find a way to theorize human agency within structures of power and to
theorize ways in which we think, act and behave that on the one hand
acknowledge our locations within social, cultural, economic, ideological,
discursive frameworks but on the other hand allow us at least some possibility
of freedom of action and change. (p. 120)
More compellingly, Pennycook adds that agency never works outside
some domain of power and neither is it merely . . . a dialectical
relation between macro structure and micro agency but it is rather a
constant recycling of different forms of power through our everyday
words and actions (p. 120). Adopting such a poststructuralist approach
to agency presents an interesting theoretical and analytic challenge, for,
as Price (1996) argues, researchers often implicitly grant a priori agency
to individuals and groups, portraying learners agency as exercised in
relationship between pre-given subject-agents and prevailing dis-
courses (p. 332). Price further argues that such an approach treats
identity positioning as the outcome of individual capacities (p. 332)
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 467
rather than as co-constituted in local and larger social discourses, as
advocated in poststructural theory.
A number of feminist poststructuralists have argued that subjectivity (or
identity) and agency do not exist prior to their production in linguistic and
discursive practices (Butler, 1990, 1993, 1997; Davies, 1991; Weedon, 1999).
Importantly, they contend that one cannot achieve agency without
subjectivity, that is, one cannot act in ways that are deemed relevant or
significant, unless one has a recognized identity position from which to act.
On this, Butler (1993) contends that the paradox of subjectivation (p. 15)
is that the constraints that are imposed in constructing a particular kind of
subject at a given moment in time simultaneously enable that individual to
act meaningfully in that interactional space. At the core of Butlers (1997)
understanding of agency is her contention that anyone who acts . . . acts
precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and hence
operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset
(p. 16). Thus discursively constituted and ideologically recognizable subject
positions such as adult immigrant or language learner or small
business owner can enable individuals to act meaningfully and also resist
and transform such positioning.
Butler (1997) acknowledges that people operate with a common
sense perception that we and others act and make choices indepen-
dently, that we can at times resist norms and alter dominant discourses
through our own power. Butler (1990) has famously proposed that
seemingly essential identity categories such as woman or man need
to be understood as a doing, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid
regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of
substance, of a natural kind of being (p. 32). Importantly, this
sedimentation of acts, repeated over time, can give the appearance of a
being who is acting independently in the world because he or she is a
particular kind of individual, rather than someone who is positioned as
such in and through a web of ideological discourses regarding
personhood and responsibility (Davies, 1991).
USING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS IN INTERVIEW
RESEARCH
An important consideration for L2 researchers is how to investigate
such positioning work among language learners. van Lier (2008) speaks
to the difficulty of locating agency (p. 164), noting that relevant
mediating factors of our socioculturalhistorical contexts are not
immediately visible in naturally occurring talk, or are, at best, only
[ambiguously] locatable (pp. 175176). My aim is to investigate how
the adult immigrants in my study come to be constituted as agents, how
468 TESOL QUARTERLY
they seem to perceive their own capacity to act, rather than to locate
cases of agency in action. I do so by examining the patterned ways the
research participants talk about themselves and their past experiences,
using both quantitative and qualitative discourse analytic approaches.
Though poststructural research frequently views discourse as post any
kind of structuralist understanding of language, Poynton (1993)
contends that poststructuralist research cannot overlook the linguistic
means by which subjects come to be constituted (see also Pennycook,
2001). I cite Poynton (1993) at some length here, because she argues
that poststructural analytic practice must include
critical aspects of representation, concerned particularly with questions of
the agency of grammatical participants and the relative focus (foreground-
ing/backgrounding) on those participants [which] involve highly specific
grammatical features at the level of the individual clause. Such choices are
not on the whole under conscious control, so do not imply conscious volition
on the part of the individual. Their habitual use within the ways of speaking
characteristic of a particular culture carry significant meanings, however,
concerning the shape of habitual and hence proper relationships within that
culture. (pp. 67)
In examining some of the habitual . . . ways of speaking in my
participants autobiographical accounts,
1
I have focused on the
material phenomena of language (Poynton, 1993, p. 6) as it emerged
in the interview interactions. I reuse familiar metalinguistic labels and
consider language units developed in structuralist approaches to
language. However, I adopt Pennycooks (2007) view of systematicity
in language as emerging from iterative social and linguistic activities,
that is, as the product of ritualized social performatives that become
sedimented into temporary subsystems (p. 110; see Makoni &
Pennycook, 2007, and Pennycook 2007, for in-depth discussion of
language as performatively constituted). Further, I understand these
sedimented ways of positioning self and others in interview talk to be
influenced, in part, by common sense ideologies of language learners as
particular kinds of subjects, as individuals who are believed to already
have agency and thus have responsibility to act.
Relatedly, I treat interviews as occasions for assembling meanings and
constructing selves, not merely eliciting reports, and understand that the
knowledge generated in interviews is created from the actions taken to
obtain it (Gubrium & Holstein, 2003). I thus view seemingly mundane
and familiar ways of constructing versions of self and experience to be
1
Even though the participants in this study may not have developed all of the habitual ways
of using English as found among native speakers, they appear to have appropriated some
of the normative ways to speak about self in relation to past and ongoing experiences.
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 469
co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewee, interlocutors who
simultaneously reconstitute (or resist) normative understandings of the
social world that render these versions sensible (Miller, 2009). In
analyzing these accounts, I want to foreground Quigleys (2001) caution
that there is no need to talk about causality (p. 152), that is,
positioning oneself as an agentive being in autobiographical talk does
not cause one to be agentive. And yet, as Quigley (2000) notes, such talk
provides the primary site for us to organize all our agentive encounters
in the world (p. 189), as we make use of conventional ways of speaking
in constituting recognizable subject positions and story worlds.
THE STUDY
This study draws on a corpus of 18 interviews with individuals who (a)
immigrated to the United States after childhood, (b) learned English as
adults or after early childhood, and (c) opened their own businesses.
The interview study was initiated to investigate how adult immigrants
learn and use English outside of classroom settings and in workplace
contexts. These individuals considerable achievement in establishing
their own businesses in English-dominant communities motivated my
desire to focus on their linguistic strengths and the negotiation
strategies they have developed in order to survive and thrive as they
interact with English-speaking suppliers or clients.
I recruited the research participants through several liaisons,
colleagues, and community members acquainted with me and the
interviewees. I conducted all of the semistructured interviews at
interviewees places of business in order to better understand the
contexts in which they work. One exception was Lou, whom I met at a
coffee shop, given that he no longer owned his importexport business
at the time of the interview. As shown in Table 1, there were 10 females
and eight males, hailing from nine different countries, who owned a
variety of restaurants, small shops, and other businesses. The interviews
lasted 24 minutes, on average, with the shortest lasting only 12 minutes,
and the longest 36 minutes. The interviews were fully transcribed, and
the analysis entailed working with sound files and the transcribed texts
simultaneously.
DATA ANALYSIS: POSITIONING FOR AGENCY
The main analytic concept used in analyzing the discourse data is that
of subject positioning (Bamberg, 2004) within and through linguistic
field[s] of enabling constraints (Butler, 1997, p. 16). In analyzing my
corpus of interview data (approximately 280 pages of transcription text),
470 TESOL QUARTERLY
I used a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytic approaches.
As van de Mieroop (2005) demonstrated in her exploration of
institutional identity, integrating both approaches enables both an in-
depth view and an overview of the corpus (p. 108). I use quantitative
analysis to examine the recurrent (or sedimented) linguistic constructs
used by interviewees in positioning themselves as participants in their
story worlds, the talked-about content of their autobiographical accounts
(see also de Fina, 2003). I then look more closely at the turn-by-turn
development of co-constructed interaction in representative excerpts of
interviewee-interviewer talk. And finally, I consider how these inter-
locutors orient to common sense ideologies regarding language learners
as responsible agents of their learning success.
Positioning Participants in the Story World
In analyzing several of the recurrent linguistic constructions used by
interviewees, I examine how interviewees came to be constituted as
agents of the actions expressed in clausal predicates (Scheibman, 2002)
in which they are named participants (typically through using the
personal pronouns I, me, or we). I selected only those utterances in which
interviewees directly addressed topics regarding their experiences in
their (1) early learning of English, (2) starting and running their own
businesses, and (3) using and continuing to learn English at work. As
shown in Figure 1, the largest percentage of interviewees utterances,
across all three topics, used constructions in which the interviewee is
TABLE 1
Interview Participants
Pseudonym Gender Country of origin Type of business owned
Lan Female Vietnam Hail salon
Kay Female Vietnam Nail salon
Jin Female Vietnam Facial shop
Tony Male Vietnam Vietnamese sandwich shop
Don Male Vietnam Restaurant supply store
Hannah Female China Chinese restaurant
Joe Male China Chinese restaurant
Keith Male China Chinese pastry shop
Lois Female Korea Nail shop
Soo Female Korea Dry cleaning pickup store
Hee Female Korea Korean restaurant
Donna Female Laos Lao dress-making shop
Dorothy Female Laos Lao music and variety store
Paul Male Burma Sushi supply business
Jenny Female Brazil House cleaning business
George Male Greece Barbecue restaurants
Ivan Male France Bakery
Lou Male Italy Import/export business
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 471
positioned as the agent of action predicates. Though influenced by
Durantis (1994, 2006) explication of semantic role types,
2
I use the label
agent here to identify occasions when interviewees construct
themselves as the subjects of predicates that position them as having
the capacity to act (Ahearn, 2001) in some way and that position them
as having some degree of control over their own behavior, suggesting
that they could have acted otherwise (Duranti, 2006, pp. 453454).
Clearly, these individuals come from varied cultural and national
backgrounds, with different economic and educational histories, and
have diverse goals for themselves in the United States, all of which
impact how they perceive themselves as capable of acting in their best
interests. However, my intention here is not to show how such factors
can explain individual choices but to understand how individuals come
to be constituted as recognizable agents with incumbent responsibilities
in local and ideological discourses.
As shown in Figure 1, 52.3% of the 130 subjectpredicate
utterances related to interviewees early learning of English constitute
interviewees as agents who have some control over their learning of
2
Duranti distinguished between agent and actor roles for subjects. Agents affect another
entity in the sentence, as in The boy chased the dog, versus actors, who act but not on an
object entity, as in The boy went to America (Duranti, 1994, p. 122).
FIGURE 1. Subject-predicate utterances
472 TESOL QUARTERLY
English (agent of action predicates). These utterance types were
produced by all 18 interviewees when they spoke of themselves as
individuals who go/went to class, took classes, study English,
pick tutors, and so on, in 68 utterances. Table 2 offers illustrative
utterances of the subjectpredicate linguistic constructions according
to topical category.
Another frequently used construction in their early learning of English
accounts positioned interviewees as subjects of the verb learn (23.8%).
These utterances are more ambiguous with respect to interviewees
agentive activity, tending rather to diminish the agency of the subject as
in, so the basic I learn there (Hee) or the only I learn is uh speaking
speaking a bit more fluent (Tony). Though they position themselves as
undergoing change, they do not construct themselves as actively pursuing
the study of English, and thus I interpret these constructs as mitigating the
narrated characters agency to some degree. In another 5.4% of these early
learning of English utterances, interviewees positioned themselves as
objects of others actions, and thus as nonagents.
Considering the utterance types constructed in interviewees accounts,
one finds variation, but it seems the preferred pattern was for interviewees
to position themselves as agentive characters who actively pursued the
learning of English early in their residence in the United States. Three
individuals, who indicated that they did not have opportunity to take
English classes, still positioned themselves as agents of learning. Hee, for
example, reported learning English on her own by studying the Bible with
a KoreanEnglish dictionary. She became a Jehovahs Witness convert and
took part in weekly Bible studies. In order to understand the teachings of
TABLE 2
Examples of Interviewees SubjectPredicate Utterances by Linguistic Construction and
Topical Category
Linguistic construc-
tions
Topical category
Early learning of English
Starting and running a
business
Using and con-
tinuing to learn
English at work
Participant as agent
of action predicates
I go school night time
like two hours Tuesday
and Thursday.
Then I open the busi-
ness.
I use mostly
English with
American.
Participant as subject
of learn predicates
First few year um I learn
speak in uh broken
English with a lot of
Americans.
I learned a little bit how
you have to organize.
While you talk
with your client
you you learn a
lot.
Participant as object
of predicate action
I had one Brazilian girl
she teach me.
People gave me clients. My customer help
me a lot.
Participant as
(potential) agent of
necessary or obliga-
tory action
So there have to be effort
by myself.
If I interested in like, oh
I need more of these,
something like that, I have
to go.
I need to write oh
Im sorry I broke
something.
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 473
the church, she describes herself this way: I dig dig in dictionary . . . and
always I reading aloud . . . So I do and slowly I understand it.
As already alluded to, the agent of action predicate constructs were
also adopted most frequently in these individuals accounts of starting
and running their own businesses (66.4%, see Figure 1). They spoke of
themselves as agents who open a shop (Dorothy) or build another
shop (Jin) or left and took barbecue business (George) and whose
daily activities involve ordering, cooking, sanitizing, and so on. Similarly,
this construction is used in 60.6% of interviewees accounts regarding
using and continuing to learn English at work, such as in we write it [in
English] but most of the time we order by phone (Kay). To a lesser
degree interviewees also spoke of themselves as learners or as the
object or recipient of others efforts in their utterances relating to these
two topic categories.
One way to account for the predominance of participants as agents
in these accounts is the nature of the interaction itself. Scheibman
(2002) noted that in narrative accounts, or reporting activity,
interlocutors are most likely to use constructions involving a subject
with human animacy and active predicates. And yet, these interviewees
did not always position themselves as agentive subjects, and thus the
activity of autobiographical account giving does not absolutely
constrain interlocutors in whether or not they position themselves as
agents. In order to gain a more contextualized understanding of this
grammaticized positioning, one needs to move beyond an overview of
interviewees abstracted utterances and consider how the local co-
constructed interaction contributes to mobilizing particular language
choices and identity positions. Due to space constraints, I examine only
several excerpts in this article; however, I find they illustrate the
processes of positioning self and being positioned that were true of all
interview accounts.
Co-constructed Positioning
In Excerpt 1 below, Hannah, an owner of a Chinese restaurant who
had been in the United States nearly 20 years at the time of the
interview, positions herself as an agentive character who took action to
go to adult school in order to learn English after her arrival in the
United States. As was typical, early in the conversation I ask Hannah to
talk about when she first learned English (lines 12).
3
3
Transcription conventions used: square bracket 5 overlapping talk, question mark 5 final
rising intonation, period 5 final falling intonation, comma 5 falling but continuing
intonation.
474 TESOL QUARTERLY
Excerpt 1a
1 INT: All right. My first question I ask everyone is um when did you first
2 start to learn English.
3 HAN: Um when is we we learning English in China [for the students.
4 INT: [Did you?
5 HAN: Yeah.
6 INT: Yeah?
7 HAN: But not not talk a lot.
8 INT: Yeah
9 HAN: Yeah then and I then forgot.
Following my question about when she first started to learn English
(1), Hannah reissues my verb choice in her response, we we learning
English in China for the students (3). In the next few moments of talk
(not included here), she describes her experience giving birth to her
first child soon after arriving in the United States and her inability to
understand the hospital staff. An interpreter was supposed to help her,
but, as she indicates below, she wait for the whole day, nobody will
come (25). She links this experience to her recognition that she
needed to learn English (thats why [28]).
Excerpt 1b
25 HAN: And then we wait for the whole day nobody will come [you
26 know,
27 INT: [Oh no
28 HAN: ((laughter)) Thats why and then and then I I got to learn
29 some ti- learn English right?
30 INT: Yeah yeah. Did you ever go to an English class?
31 HAN: Yeah. And I going to adult school?
32 INT: Yeah
33 HAN Yeah for two hour a day,
34 INT: Oh
35 HAN: And then uh and then and then learning about four years?
36 INT: Wow
37 HAN: Uh huh
38INT: Good for you
39 HAN: Uh huh. And and about ho- how many years. And then I pick
40 American friend?
41 INT: Yeah
42 HAN: Hes uh speak really good English. Chinese. [Hes a teacher.
43 INT: [Ah ah ah
44 HAN: And then he he teach me you know.
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 475
45 INT: Okay.
46 HAN: Yeah.
When I ask Hannah, Did you ever go to an English class? (30) Hannah
again recycles the verb from my question in her response, Yeah. And I
going to adult school (31), for 2 hours a day, activity that she indicates
continued for about 4 years. (I treat her use of learning and going in
lines 3, 31, and 35 as main verbs of the predicates, rather than verbals,
given that they are the only verb entities in these utterances.) However,
Hannah does not slavishly recycle the vocabulary options introduced by
my questions when she appends another example of how she learned
English without my direct elicitation. Though positioned as an object of
someone elses agentive action in he teach me (44), this utterance
follows her highly agentive positioning as someone who picked an
American friend who could speak both English and Chinese (3940, 42)
to be her English teacher.
It appears that Hannahs ways of constructing her participation in the
pursuit of learning English are mobilized, in part, through the verb
choices made relevant in my questions, and thus one can understand
how recurrent linguistic constructs are partly co-constructed by the
interviewer and interviewee. Reissuing these verbs also allows Hannah to
position herself as participating cooperatively in coconstructing a
topically cohesive conversation. Perhaps more significantly, my questions
constrain the possibilities for how Hannah can position herself as an
interlocutor in the talk. Indeed, her positioning as a one-time learner of
English was made relevant before the interview ever began, when she
read my introductory letter and was told about my desire to interview her
through our liaison. At the same time, in being positioned as such an
individual, Hannah can speak from a position of experience and
knowledge on the topic. As Butler (1997) contends, having an
interpretable subject position, though constraining, remains a necessary
prerequisite for enabling one to speak, and act, at all.
Ideological Positioning
The linguistic similarities in how Hannah and the other interviewees
structured their accounts suggest that these constructs provide conven-
tional ways to present self-in-action in the world. In turn, such discursive
positioning is socially recognizable, in part, because of the ideological
meanings attached to persons who can act. When positioned as individuals
who can act, we are assigned responsibility regarding our choices to
actor not to act (McKendy, 2006; Hill & Irvine, 1993). As Quigley
(2001) observed, a large portion of autobiographical talk is comprised of
interlocutors producing reasons or excuses for their actions.
476 TESOL QUARTERLY
Though sociocultural theorists have shown that learning is a socially
distributed activity, influenced by ones history and ones status in
varying communities of practice (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991), the
traditional view of language learners as contained universes of learning
often functions as the default view in popular discourse as well as in
much of the SLA discourse. The questions and responses in Hannahs
interview seem to confirm this common sense notion of language
learning as individually generated activity and thus as individual
responsibility. By asking Hannah, Did you ever go to an English class?
I position her as someone who has the wherewithal to choose to go to
English as a second language (ESL) classes and to act on that choice.
Davies (1991) contends that normative positioning work typically
constitutes people as individuals who [speak] for themselves, who
accept responsibility for their actions . . . and who can then be said to
have agency (p. 343). As noted earlier, constituting self as agentive
through organizing ones utterances in particular ways does not cause
agency. However, as Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2003) note, through
apparently trivial incidental person references, positioning those
persons in terms of their category memberships, the world of such
categories, and the inferences associated with them is produced,
reproduced and sometimes . . . resisted (p. 160). One can see the
effect of such common sense positioning in the following section where
I examine how these interviewees work to avoid being cast as
irresponsible, even though they discontinued formal ESL classes.
COMPELLED TO (NOT) ACT
Positioning Participants in the Story World
In considering how interviewees constructed themselves as recogniz-
ing their need and obligation to act, one can again observe their efforts
to construct themselves as responsible selves. Furthermore, one can
begin to recognize that the process of positioning self as an agent of
learning English and assuming an identity of responsible person is
complex and a site of struggle. Three of the interviewees indicated that
they never studied English in the United States, and nine explicitly
indicated that they stopped studying English or attending ESL classes at
some point after they immigrated to the United States. All 12 of these
interviewees supply accounts for why they could not study English at all
or for why they had to give it up. One linguistic construction adopted by
the interviewees to position themselves as responsible participants in
their story worlds was the use of agent-oriented modality, constructs
that report the existence of internal and external conditions on an
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 477
agent with respect to the completion of the action expressed in the main
predicate (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994, p. 177).
I focus on interviewees use of have to, got to, or need to, what
Bybee et al. (1994) have labeled obligation or necessity modality (see
Figure 1, [potential] agent of necessary or obligatory action). Six
interviewees used these constructs to position themselves as aware of
their need or obligation to study English while living in the United
States. Hannah, as observed, commented and then I got to learn English
right? after her unfortunate experience of not having an interpreter on
hand for the birth of her child. Keith, who never studied English
formally, noted that but you want to living over here you got to be able
to. Kind of have to learn [English]. Interestingly, five of these same
interviewees use the same modality to position themselves as compelled
to stop learning because of other, more powerful obligations or factors
outside of their control. Most frequently, these obligations included the
need to work all day, sometimes until late at night: I have to you know
overtime, like until ten oclock (Soo), or taking care of family: No
time. I have three children. I got to work hard for them (Hannah). An
example of the co-constructed positioning of self-as-obligated is seen in
the following excerpt.
Co-constructed Positioning
Kay, a Vietnamese nail shop owner and 17-year resident in the United
States, displays herself as active in pursuing her education in Excerpt 2,
but then gives an account for why she finally gives up on it.
Excerpt 2
1 KAY: I learn English in our country before I came here, yeah, like I
2 learn in my uh high school and I learn in college in our country,
3 INT: Okay okay
4 KAY: And after that you know we came here, and after I came here, I
5 know I have to practice more and more,
6 INT: Yeah
7 KAY: And uh that why I went to CPCC school
8 INT: Okay
9 KAY: To learn a-
10 INT: And was that mostly conversational English at CPCC?
11 KAY: Uh yeah
12 INT: Okay, and probably in high school and college it was mostly
13 reading [and writing.
14 Kay [Yeah
478 TESOL QUARTERLY
15 Kay: Because before I plan I back to school like uh finish college [in
16 here,
17 INT: [Yeah
18 KAY: Thats why I try get back to CPCC [learn about English.
19 INT: [Yeah
20 KAY: And I I took several uh uh class you know like math [or
21 something like that?
22 INT: [Uh huh
23 KAY: But after a while I think its hard because I have to [work
24 daytime and
25 INT: [I understand yeah
26 KAY: night- nighttime go to school and college is too much for me
27 you know [and finally I give up?
28 INT: [I know
Kay constructs herself as aware that she has to practice more English
upon arriving in the United States (1516), even though she had learned
English in high school and college in Vietnam. In turn, she positions herself
as agentively going to CPCC, a community college, in order to learn more
English. In Kays uptake to my comment that she likely focused on reading
and writing in English in her home country, she indicates that she wanted
to return to college and finish it in here in the United States (109+516),
adding that she took several kinds of classes, including math, thereby
constructing herself as college student and not just an English-language
learner. However, in line 23, Kay uses the obligation-necessity construct in
uttering I have to work daytime and night- nighttime go to school (2326).
The upshot is that she saw college as too much (26) for her, and she
finally had to give up on school.
In this interaction, Kay is positioned as someone who not only had the
wherewithal to go to school to learn English, but as someone who had the
background for and aspirations to finish college in the United States and
as someone responsible for engaging in the socially preferred activity for
immigrants of learning the dominant language. However, in attributing
her inability to continue going to school to the understandable and
socially recognized difficulty of juggling work and school simultaneously,
Kay positions herself as someone who cannot be held responsible for not
finishing college. That is, if her inaction cannot be helped then she
cannot be held responsible for it. I coconstruct the sense of this by
commenting, I understand yeah (25) and I know (28).
Agent-Oriented Modality and Fulfillability
An important distinction emerged in how interviewees used agent-
oriented modality to position themselves as responsible individuals
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 479
across topic categories. In their accounts of starting and running their
own businesses (see Figure 1), 11 individuals used 31 such obligation-
necessity constructions, comprising 22.1% of the utterances related to
this topic category. These agent-action utterances include comments
such as Georges, You have to to control the money, you know and Kays
We have to go you know the professional place. Though many of them
admitted that running their businesses was not always easy, these
interviewees speak about their obligations or need to act as business
owners with a presupposition of fulfillability; that is, they construct
themselves as following through, presumably competently, on the
obligations that are part of running a business. Jin, for example, a
late-twenties Vietnamese female who has lived in the United States since
her mid-teens, in the excerpt below, describes her need to travel to
different states for shows and advanced classes (so I have to go, 8) in
running her facial salon.
Excerpt 3
1 INT: Do you have to do more training for your business like for the
2 JIN: Like we um for my job? So Im a aesthetician so I go to like um
3 kind of show?
4 INT: [Uh huh
5 JIN: [Like advanced class?
6 INT: Uh huh
7 JIN: So like if I I in like oh I need more of these something like that
8 INT: Yeah
9 JIN: So I have to go, so
10 INT: Uh huh. And do you like go to different states or [different cities?
11 JIN: [Yes maam
12 INT: Okay [yeah yeah
13 JIN: [Different state most of time. Yeah.
I help construct her as potentially obligated to engage in additional
training activities in my question regarding whether she has to do it for
her business (1). Jin reissues this verb construct (9) in displaying herself
as someone who knows what is required of her and as capable of
following through on it in running her business.
There were many fewer utterances using obligation-necessity
modality in the interviewees accounts of using and continuing to
learn English at work (only 13 out of 104, or 12.5%, see Figure 1).
However, as in their accounts of operating their businesses, the
interviewees positioned themselves as compelled to engage in fulfillable
activities in 10 of these utterances. Dorothy, for example, comments,
When I fax something I have to [use English], and Jenny says, I need
480 TESOL QUARTERLY
to write [in English] oh Im sorry I broke something to the owners of
the houses she cleans. Thus although the interviewees most frequently
positioned themselves as agentive participants of past experiences,
across topics, their use of agent-oriented modality mediated their
discursively constituted capacity to act differently. In providing socially
recognizable and acceptable reasons for being compelled not to act,
with respect to learning English, they can maintain an identity of
responsible person. In positioning themselves as obligated to act in
fulfilling their business responsibilities, and following through on those
obligations, they too are constituted as responsible, but also as more
agentive in this domain of their lives, compared to the pursuit of
learning English.
Ideological Positioning
In focusing on an individuals coconstituted capacity to act,
researchers need to consider the sociocultural contexts in which the
desire to act is aroused. Though many of these individuals had learned
some English in their home countries, the need for and desire for
additional language learning developed as they entered the space of
English-dominant American cities. Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck
(2005) put forward the notion that space or context does something to
people (p. 203) by positioning them as able to act in particular ways,
even as people participate in recreating, resisting, and modifying that
space. Blommaert et al. identify three effects as individuals inter-
actively and physically enter into particular spaces: (1) Certain acts are
legitimized, others are constrained; (2) ones multilingual repertoire is
assigned differential value and function; and (3) ones identities are
both self-constituted and ascribed by others (p. 203). Though the
interviewees in my study all spoke at least two languages, and many spoke
three or four, they came to be ascribed as and took on the identity of
deficient speaker of English on immigrating to the United States and in
the interview talk itself. Although one can argue that such an identity is
neither desirable nor fair, in being positioned as these kinds of
individuals, they came to be constituted as recognizable subjects, thereby
achieving the necessary subjectivity for acting in at least some social
contexts in the United States (Butler, 1993). Being positioned as a
deficient user of the language can motivate and enable socially preferred
ways of acting, namely, learning the dominant language At the same
time, it is clear that such positioning occurs in ideologically infused
spaces. In considering the geographical, political, and cultural spaces in
much of the United States, Wiley and Lukes (1996) discuss the ideology
of monolingualism that persists, despite historical evidence that the
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 481
nation has always been multilingual. They note that in such an
ideologically conceived space, language diversity comes to be seen as a
consequence of immigration (p. 519), and immigrants own languages
are perceived as a hindrance and thus should be surrendered as a kind
of payment for the right of passage to the receiving society (p. 520). It
comes to seem only natural that such newcomers would choose to shift
to the dominant language as quickly as possible (May, 2005).
Further, when language learning is constituted as something that
individuals have control over, something they can choose to do, the
subjects of learning also are positioned as responsible for not learning
the dominant language quickly or fully. Evidence of this sense of
personal responsibility, and failure, is seen in comments produced by
the interviewees when speaking of their English expertise: I not perfect
in English (Soo); My English not very well (Tony); I have a hard
time [learning English] (Donna); or on the difficulty of the language
itself: Its really difficult, its completely different my language (Jenny)
and It is hard language (Hee).
However, an interesting contrast emerged when I asked them about
their use of English at work. Though some commented on moments
when they had to deal with misunderstandings with customers, nearly
all of them indicated that communicating in English to accomplish
their work was not problematic. Lan, for example, noted several times
I have no problem how to communicate with them and deal with
them [customers]. Soo commented, My customers is know Im
English not good. I dont have a problem. We okay each other. And
Jenny indicated, Im accustomed to do this right now when
speaking of communicating with her customers. Importantly, many
of these interviewees also indicated that the kinds of language
exchanges they engaged in tended to be simple and repetitive. Soo
noted, So wed talk not much, just Hi how are you and Hows it
going, something like that. So its not difficult. With the exception
of Paul, who indicated he had to do extensive email writing to conduct
his sushi business, the rest commented that they did very little writing
or reading, in English or any language. Keith reported reading only
telephone and order numbers. Some said they only wrote when faxing
orders. An owner of a nail shop and Vietnamese, Kay adopted a
confiding tone when she told me, I tell the truth, most people do
nail, I dont mean to say their English is poor, but some Vietnamese
people do nails, they they dont speak English like really good. She
went on to say they were able to work with American clients only
because of the good quality of their work.
I realize that this kind of self-reported information cannot be taken at
face value, as evidence of their actual literacy practices. And, despite
their modest attestations regarding their English proficiency, these
482 TESOL QUARTERLY
individuals were all able to interact with me in accomplishing the
interviews. However, it did appear that, for many of them, success at
work was enabled because of the limited English language literacy
practices that were required and the often ritualized texture of their
service encounters with customers and suppliers. In addition, more than
half of the interviewees explicitly reported using accountants to take care
of all of their paperwork, individuals often identified as bilingual
members of their own immigrant community.
These immigrants capacity to take action as business owners was
mediated in other ways by other members of their immigrant
communities. Most reported working for members of their own ethnic
and linguistic communities, learning the ropes, before striking out on
their own. An owner of a Chinese pastry shop, Keith commented, Yeah,
I work for somebody else in a Chinese restaurant. When I asked Soo
how she was able to open her dry cleaning pick-up store, she noted that
Lot of Korean have dry cleaner. Yeah, ask them quest- uh and then I
made a little bit money. And then I buy. However, even as their capacity
to open businesses and run them is facilitated by members of their
immigrant communities, the kinds of agentive trajectories they conceive
to be possible are also constrained to some degree by their positioning as
members of such communities. When I asked them what they might
have chosen to do in the United States if English had never been an
issue for them, most had no ready responses. Jenny, for example, first
said, I dont know but then commented that she would like to work as
a translator because she likes to work with people, and added that she
knew of another Brazilian woman who worked as an interpreter. Keith
seemed confused by the question at first but then said, Yeah if I know
English so I can maybe find a better job. You know, cannot just limit
looking for Chinese. You know, I can go to work for a store, work for
everywhere. He suggests that his possibilities for getting work would not
be limited to Chinese establishments, that he could work for
everywhere, and yet identifies a concrete example as I can go to work
for a store. Hannah indicated that she would not have chosen
differently because restaurant is my favorite.
It is notable that their businesses mostly belong to the service
economy and, as such, are mostly unmarked with respect to their
immigrant status. That is, owning ethnic restaurants, nail shops, hair
salons, dry cleaners, and so on, businesses that are often located in
poorer neighborhoods and cater mostly to nonelite clients, indexes
immigrant business. Though marked with respect to the dominant
culture (unmarked identity in the United States tends to be white,
Anglo, and middle-class according to Urciuoli [1996, p. 8]), owning
such a business seems to be treated as an unmarked arena for agentive
action for many of these first-generation immigrants. And, as noted,
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 483
these interviewees suggest that such normal immigrant businesses do
not require extensive use of English or can be accomplished by paying
individuals who are (more) proficient in English to manage more
linguistically demanding business transactions.
CONCLUSION
We see, then, that constituting subjects, positioning individuals, and
thereby enabling and constraining particular ways of acting in the world,
inevitably occurs in and through ideologically informed spaces. Ways of
making sense of ones place in the world are enabled, as individuals
make use of ordinary, habitual, or sedimented ways of speaking
themselves into being (Poynton & Lee, 2000, p. 5). These habitual ways
of speaking are so unmarked and so familiar (Wilkinson & Kitzinger,
2003) that we often fail to see them as locally responsive and
ideologically influenced discursive constructions, rather than direct
representations of social facts (Miller, 2009). In taking a poststructural
approach to linguistic utterances, I examine the same material
phenomena as structural researchers, but I orient to their ontological
status quite differently; that is, rather than seeing language as a resource
outside of self, I regard ordinary language use as the sedimentation of
acts (Butler, 1990, p. 32). And this sedimentation of acts has particular
language effects (Pennycook, 2007, p. 74), in some cases constituting
subjects as individuals who can and are responsible to act (Davies, 1991).
On the one hand, such positioning limited the interviewees in this study
to speaking from the position of language learner or immigrant or
small business owner, but at the same time this positioning mobilized
recognizable subjectivities for them and enabled them to act mean-
ingfully in [those] culturally defined interactional space[s] (Butler,
1997, p. 16). I want to emphasize that the power to effect such
positioning does not lie in the language itself (i.e., through using agent
of action predications) nor in an already-agentive speaker (Price, 1996)
who simply uses the language. Rather, the habitual ways of using
language (i.e., producing agent of action predicates) have particular
effects, constructing recognizable subjects who are understood to be
enabled to act within the constraints of those subject positions.
In noting that these individuals expressed agentive capacity seems to
be constrained by what is treated as normal or recognizable action for
adult immigrants in the United Statesopening immigrant businesses
or attending English language classesI do not want to suggest that
these people had limited aspirations for themselves or their families.
Several of them, for example, proudly told me that their children were
in or had gone to college. However, one must recognize that the
484 TESOL QUARTERLY
constitution of such normal or recognizable agency is not the same as
other individuals agency, that some individuals are positioned more
advantageously than others. As Butler (1997) argues, the terms that
facilitate recognition are themselves conventional but such survivable
subjects that emerge are often constituted through processes of
exclusion and violence (p. 5). As such, I want to caution researchers
against conflating agency and empowerment. Though one can be
constituted as an empowered agentive individual, being constituted as
an agent does not straightforwardly lead to empowerment. However, in
understanding that the desire to act and the capacity to act toward
learning English is not individually mobilized desire or action, and in
acknowledging Butlers (1997) contention that anyone who acts . . . acts
precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor (p. 16),
researchers, teachers, and other interested participants in language
learning and teaching can begin to imagine ways that we can work to
coconstitute both agency and empowerment among minority learners of
dominant languages.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Sherrie Smith for her efficient and accurate transcription of the 18
interviews analyzed in this article. I am grateful for a Faculty Research Grant,
sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which funded the
interview study.
THE AUTHOR
Elizabeth R. Miller is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte, United States. Her recent work examines the construction of language
ideologies in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English, how learner
agency is constituted in discourse, and qualitative research methodologies,
particularly the co-constructed, mediated nature of interview data.
REFERENCES
Ahearn, L. M. (2001). Language and agency. Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109
137. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.109.
Bamberg, M. (2004). Narrative discourse and identities. In J. C. Meister, T. Kindt,
W. Schernus, & M. Stein (Eds.), Narratology beyond literary criticism (pp. 213237).
Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter.
Block, D. (2007). The rise of identity in SLA research, post Firth and Wagner (1997).
The Modern Language Journal, 91, 863876. doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2007.00674.x.
Blommaert, J., Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S. (2005). Spaces of multilingualism.
Language & Communication, 25, 197216. doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2005.05.002.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York, NY:
Routledge.
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 485
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York, NY: Routledge.
Bybee, J., Perkins, R., & Pagliuca, W. (1994). The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect
and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press.
DaSilva Iddings, A. C., & Katz, L. (2007). Integrating home and school identities of
recent-immigrant Hispanic English language learners through classroom
practices. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 6, 299314.
Davies, B. (1991). The concept of agency: A feminist poststructuralist analysis. Social
Analysis, 30, 4253.
de Fina, A. (2003). Identity in narrative: A study in immigrant discourse. Philadelphia,
PA: John Benjamins.
Duranti, A. (1994). From grammar to politics: Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan
village. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Duranti, A. (2006). Agency in language. In A. Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic
anthropology (pp. 451473). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Gubrium, J. F., & Holstein, J. A. (Eds.) (2003) Postmodern interviewing. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Hill, J. H., & Irvine, J. T. (Eds.) (1993). Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Lantolf, J. P., & Thorne, S. L. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second
language development. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2007). Disinventing and reconstituting languages.
Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
May, S. (2005). Language rights: Moving the debate forward. Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 9, 319347. doi:10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00295.x.
McKay, S. L., & Wong, S. C. (1996). Multiple discourses, multiple identities:
Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent
immigrant students. Harvard Educational Review, 66, 577608.
McKendy, J. P. (2006). Im very careful about that: Narrative and agency of men in
prison. Discourse & Society, 17, 473502. doi:10.1177/0957926506063128.
Miller, E. (2009). Orienting to being ordinary: The (re)construction of
hegemonic ideologies among adult immigrant learners of English. Critical
Inquiry in Language Studies, 6, 315344. doi:10.1080/15427580903337446.
Norton, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL
Quarterly, 29, 931. doi:10.2307/3587803.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational
change. Harlow, England: Pearson Education.
OConnor, P. E. (1994). You could feel it through the skin: Agency and
positioning in prisoners stabbing stories. Text, 14, 4575.
Pavlenko, A., & Lantolf, J. P. (2000). Second language learning as participation and
the (re)construction of selves. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second
language learning (pp. 155177). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Pennycook, A. (2001). Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction. Mahwah, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pennycook, A. (2007). Global Englishes and transcultural flows. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Poynton, C. (1993). Grammar, language and the social: Poststructuralism and systemic-
functional linguistics. Social Semiotics, 3, 121. doi:10.1080/10350339309384407.
486 TESOL QUARTERLY
Poynton, C., & Lee, A. (2000). Culture and text: An introduction. In A. Lee & C.
Poynton (Eds.), Culture and text: Discourse and methodology in social research and
cultural studies (pp. 118). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Price, S. (1996). Comments on Bonny Norton Peirces Social identity, investment,
and language learning: A reader reacts. TESOL Quarterly, 30, 331337.
doi:10.2307/3588147.
Quigley, J. (2000). The grammar of autobiography: A developmental account. Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Quigley, J. (2001). Psychology and grammar: The construction of the autobiogra-
phical self. Theory & Psychology, 11, 147170. doi:10.1177/0959354301112001.
Ros i Soli, C. (2007). Language learners sociocultural positions in the L2: A
narrative approach. Language and Intercultural Communication, 7, 203216.
doi:10.2167/laic203.0.
Scheibman, J. (2002). Point of view and grammar: Structural patterns of subjectivity in
American English conversation. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Swain, M., & Deters, P. (2007). New mainstream SLA theory: Expanded and
enriched. The Modern Language Journal, 91, 820836. doi:10.1111/j.15404781.
2007.00671.x.
Urciuoli, B. (1996). Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race and
class. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
van de Mieroop, D. (2005). An integrated approach of quantitative and qualitative
analysis in the study of identity in speeches. Discourse & Society, 16, 107130.
doi:10.1177/0957926505048232.
van Lier, L. (2008). Agency in the classroom. In J. P. Lantolf & M. E. Poehner (Eds.),
Sociocultural theory and the teaching of second languages (pp. 163186). London,
England: Equinox.
Vitanova, G. (2005). Authoring the self in a non-native language: A dialogic
approach to agency and subjectivity. In J. K. Hall, G. Vitanova, and L.
Marchenkova (Eds.), Dialogue with Bakhtin on second language learning: New
perspectives (pp. 149169). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Weedon C. (1999). Feminism, theory and the politics of difference. Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Wiley, T. G., & Lukes, M. (1996). English-only and standard English ideologies in the
U.S. TESOL Quarterly,30, 511535. doi:10.2307/3587696.
Wilkinson, S., & Kitzinger, C. (2003). Constructing identities: A feminist conversa-
tion analytic approach to positioning in action. In R. Harre & F. Moghaddam
(Eds.), The self and others: Positioning individuals and groups in personal, political and
cultural contexts (pp. 157180). Westport, CT: Praeger.
AGENCY IN THE MAKING 487