(Dialogue Studies, v. 8) Gergana Vitanova - Authoring The Dialogic Self - Gender, Agency and Language Practices-John Benjamins Pub. Co (2010) PDF

Authoring the Dialogic Self
Dialogue Studies (DS)

Dialogue Studies takes the notion of dialogicity as central; it encompasses every type
of language use, workaday, institutional and literary. By covering the whole range of
language use, the growing field of dialogue studies comes close to pragmatics and
studies in discourse or conversation. The concept of dialogicity, however, provides
a clear methodological profile. The series aims to cross disciplinary boundaries
and considers a genuinely inter-disciplinary approach necessary for addressing the
complex phenomenon of dialogic language use. This peer reviewed series will include
monographs, thematic collections of articles, and textbooks in the relevant areas.
Editor
Edda Weigand
University of Münster
Editorial Advisory Board

Adelino Cattani Marion Grein Anne-Marie Söderberg
Università di Padova University of Mainz Copenhagen Business School
Kenneth N. Cissna Fritjof Haft Talbot J. Taylor
University of South Florida University of Tübingen College of William and Mary
Světla Čmejrková John E. Joseph Wolfgang Teubert
Czech Language Institute University of Edinburgh University of Birmingham
François Cooren Werner Kallmeyer Linda R. Waugh
Université de Montréal University of Mannheim University of Arizona
Robert T. Craig Catherine Kerbrat- Elda Weizman
University of Colorado at Orecchioni Bar Ilan University
Boulder Université Lyon 2
Yorick Wilks
Marcelo Dascal Geoffrey Sampson University of Sheffield
Tel Aviv University University of Sussex
Valeri Demiankov Masayoshi Shibatani
Russian Academy of Sciences Rice University
Volume 8
Authoring the Dialogic Self. Gender, agency and language practices
by Gergana Vitanova
Authoring the Dialogic Self
Gender, agency and language practices
Gergana Vitanova
University of Central Florida
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vitanova, Gergana.
Authoring the dialogic self : gender, agency and language practices / Gergana Vitanova.
p. cm. (Dialogue Studies, issn 1875-1792 ; v. 8)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Dialogue analysis. I. Title.
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Table of contents
introduction 1
chapter 1
Language, consciousness, and dialogical selves:
An outline of theoretical underpinnings 9
1.1 Overview of Bakhtin’s framework 10
1.2 A dialogic approach to language and the self 21
1.3 Why narratives? Why Bakhtin? 29
chapter 2
Introducing the participants and the setting of qualitative inquiry 35
2.1 The participants 36
2.1.1 Vera and Aleksei 37
2.1.2 Sylvia and Boris 40
2.1.3 Natalia and Dmitri 42
2.1.4 Lydia and Peter 43
2.2 Collection of narrative examples 44
chapter 3
Positionings in the second language: Gender, power, and emotion 49
3.1 “I am like in the kindergarten”: In the discourse of silence 52
3.2 “Sometimes people don’t like immigrants”:
Othering language practices 56
3.3 “He cannot do anything because he has no language”:
English as a source of positioning 61
3.4 “I was afraid”: Gender and the discourse of emotion 64
chapter 4
Gender, language learning, and discursive practices 75
4.1 Dialogue, situated ethics, and responsibility 78
4.2 Discourses about language learning and accuracy 80
4.3 Metalinguistic discourses 84
4.4 Gendered discourses of linguistic expertise 90
vi Authoring the Dialogical Self
4.5 “Because I feel a responsibility”: Discourses of responsibility,

second language use, and gender 94
4.6 Gender and discourse in culture 101
chapter 5
Between the self and the Other:
Culture and subjectivity in immigrants’ worlds 105
5.1 “Americans are very different” 110
5.2 “When I communicate, I live” (Kogda ya obshayus’, ya jivu) 114
5.3 “Bol’naya tema”: Culture and the languaged self 118
5.4 Gendered zones of dialogical selves 124
chapter 6
Acts of agency in a new language 129
6.1 Authoring selves, acts, and discourses in a dialogical world 129
6.2 Reflexive awareness and responsive understanding 136
6.3 Responsive understanding and discourses of education and values 138
6.4 Creativity in answerability 142
6.5 Resistance as an act of agency 145
afterword 153
Legend of transcription symbols in narrative excerpts 160

References 161
Index 171
introduction
As an immigrant and a second language learner, I have long been fascinated with
the multifaceted aspects of language acquisition. The traditional, mainstream re-
search in the field of applied linguistics, however, has not reflected my own expe-
rience, nor has it been able to answer some of my most difficult questions: How
do we develop an agency in a second language? What are the everyday, discursive
practices, in which agency originates? What is the role of gender in the develop-
ment of identity? Perhaps other, even more pressing questions have been: How
do we conceptualize discourse, identity, and agency; what theory or framework
would allow us to link constructs that have defied not only researchers of lan-
guage acquisition, but also philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, communica-
tion scientists, and literary critics alike?
An important part of my interest in this topic lies in the concept of heuris-
tic research (Moustakas, 1990), according to which qualitative investigators often
choose a question of personal significance:
Heuristic inquiry is a process that begins with a question... that has been a per-
sonal challenge and puzzlement in the search to understand one’s self and the
world in which one lives.... The heuristic process is autobiographic, yet with...
every question that matters personally there is also a social – and perhaps univer-
sal – significance. (p. 15)
Years after I first came to the United States, as I was exploring the literature in
second language acquisition, a disappointment began to build. Where was I? I
could not locate my language learning journey in the popular socio-psychologi-
cal models in my theoretical textbooks. The very personal and even emotional
process of establishing a linguistic and social self was missing in the tables of the
quantitative studies I was reading.
Today, as someone who teaches theories of second language acquisition, I still
experience the difficulty of choosing a text that encompasses the cognitive, psy-
chological, and social facets of the process. I have not been alone in this struggle.
Tarone (1997), for instance, has expressed a concern that, “most current SLA the-
ories overemphasize the cognitive and downplay or even ignore the fact that the
second language (L2) learner learns by interacting with others in various social
contexts” (p. 137). Similar concerns have prompted Firth and Wagner’s assertion
(1997) in a now classic article that the dominant view of second language acquisi-
tion on discourse is “individualistic and mechanistic” (p. 285). The writers also
Authoring the Dialogical Self
mention that learners who do not acquire the second language in a formal setting
have remained largely excluded from second language research. Their observa-
tion echoes the findings in a report published by the National Center for English
as a Second Language Literacy Education (Johnson, 2001), suggesting that most
of the work in second language acquisition on adults has focused classrooms and,
specifically, in post-secondary educational contexts.
Scholars like Firth and Wagner (1997), who call for a reconceptualization of
the field of second language acquisition, have found the lack of studies focusing
on the everyday use of language particularly problematic. In a follow-up to their
original article (Firth & Wagner, 1998), the two authors invite what they call “tres-
passers” (p. 93) to the field, in other words, theories, concepts, and methodologies
that had not been integral to the area of second language learning, and that had
been largely excluded from the scope of formal linguistics or psycholinguistics.
More recent reviews trace how Firth and Wagner’s appeal for a reconceptualiza-
tion has impacted the discussion on the social and cognitive factors in the field in
the last decade (Firth & Wagner, 2007). Others have outlined the major socially-
embedded approaches that have influenced research in second language acquisi-
tion (Swain & Deters, 2007), including poststructuralism, sociocultural theory
and, to an extent, Bakhtin’s dialogism.
Traditionally, second language acquisition research has been grounded in a
fairly unitary approach to language and the individual. As it becomes evident in
some major, still often-used textbooks and in handbooks, formalist linguistic and
cognitive approaches prevailed in second language studies until quite recently. This
is not surprising considering the evolution of applied linguistics as a discipline in
the West. It originated when behaviorism and structural linguistics governed our
understanding of human nature and the nature of language, respectively; thus,
the notions of error, error analysis, and the individual learner’s interlanguage de-
velopment largely dominated the discussion in these early years (Corder, 1974;
Selinker, 1972). The differences between instructed and non-instructed learning
and the effect of instruction on grammar development, particularly morphology
(Lightbown, 1983, 1985; Long, 1983) were of great interest not only to theorists
but also to practitioners for pedagogical purposes. Data were usually collected in
a classroom setting, and a quantitative approach to data analysis was employed.
Even the few studies interested in socio-psychological factors in adults’ language
acquisition in naturalistic settings (Schmidt, 1983; Schumann, 1978; Shapira,
1978) demonstrated little concern with who actually the learners are or in what
societal contexts the learning takes place.
Schumann’s work has been particularly influential and is still widely cited as an
example of a model introducing socio-psychological factors. Schumann (1986),
in proposing his Acculturation theory, identified a variable called acculturation
��
Introduction
as a major causal factor in second language acquisition. In it, a learner could be

positioned on a continuum that ranges from social and psychological distance
to social and psychological proximity with speakers of the target culture. He rea-
soned that learners’ levels of language acquisition are exclusively dependent on
the degree to which they acculturate to their host environment. The classic case
study, on which Schumann based his model, is his research of Alberto, a poor
and unskilled immigrant worker from Latin America (1976, 1978). Alberto’s lack
of success in progressing in the second language was explained through his so-
cial and psychological distance from target culture. For instance, Alberto lived
in a neighborhood with other Latin Americans, and he “chose to work at night
as well as in the day, rather than attend English classes….” (emphasis added,
1978, p. 97). One could question, however, how much Alberto’s learning was
hindered by his own choice and how much he was hindered by his unfavor-
able socio-economic status. A major drawback in such approaches is that the
social position of the learner was not considered as a main factor in this analysis,
nor were the opportunities for creating social relationships examined. In other
words, this traditional exploration of the socio-psychological factors in second
language acquisition assumed a strongly individualistic approach, where learn-
ers seemed to function in a social vacuum, and where the social interaction with
others was absent.
Other, still popular models, for example, the Socio-Educational Model
(Gardner, Lalonde, & Moorcroft, 1985; Gardner, 1988; Gardner & Lalonde, 1985),
explaining extra-linguistic factors in second language learning such as motivation,
have attracted similar criticism for being too unconcerned with the social sur-
roundings of learners. Following the current, positivist trends and grand theories
in psychology and sociology, these second language models have attempted to in-
terpret complex, socio-psychological phenomena by building on one or two all-en-
compassing principles (social and psychological distance in one case; motivation
on the other), thus describing a limited view of the relationships between second
language achievement and external factors. The notion of motivation, for instance,
simplifies learners’ subjectivities and the multiple factors they have to navigate.
The main problem with these approaches is that the voices of the subject (or the
self, to use a broader and less jaded notion), the social structures in which she
or he is located and constructive relations among them are non existent. What is
especially noteworthy of these positivist models of the self is that they firmly posi-
tion the learner as the sole agent in the language learning experience. For instance,
learners are either motivated to acquire a language or not. They either choose to
acculturate and become members of the target language society or not. Recent
postmodern developments in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, however,
have rejected the belief that individual agency is, indeed, solely individual. Rather,
it could be viewed as the product of the interactions between one’s desires, dis-
course, and socio-cultural milieu.
Only recently have second language acquisition studies welcomed trespass-
ers along with more socially sensitive approaches and qualitative modes of in-
quiry. This acceptance of new theories and paradigms was marked by what Block
(2003) termed the social turn in applied linguistics. In addition to the main-
stream experimental methodology that still dominate the field, studies based on
qualitative inquiry started shaping the discussion of second language learning
in major journals. A notable example stems from the pioneering work of Bonny
Norton Peirce (1995) who introduced poststructuralist theory in the analysis of
identity, gender, and power relations among eight immigrant women in Canada.
In her book, Norton (2000) tackled specifically the treatment of motivation as
an extra-linguistic variable in the dominant second language acquisition litera-
ture. She claims that motivation has been problematic because it fails to account
for the relations between power, identity, and language learning and proposes
instead the concept social investment. By building on poststructuralist and criti-
cal discourse approaches to identity, Norton Peirce was among the first in the
field of second language learning to introduce theoretical trespassers to second
language learning, and, fortunately, she has not been the only one. Recent collec-
tions of studies (e.g., Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004) have highlighted the struggle
of immigrants’ voices within multiple discourses and ideological implications
for language learners.
A socially-grounded approach to the development of second language learn-
ers’ identity is also prominent in the work of Pavlenko (2002), who offers an ex-
tensive outline of poststructuralist approaches in second language learning, and
Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) who involve Vygotsky’s (1978, 1986) theory. Lantolf
(2000; Lantolf & Thorne, 2006), in particular, has been highly influential in estab-
lishing Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory – another trespasser – into second language
studies and applied linguistics. Yet others (Canagarajah, 1993; Hall & Eddington,
2003; Pennycook, 2001; Toohey, 2003) have looked at larger socio-cultural and
ideological phenomena that shape the way learners use the second language in
the classroom through discourse practices. Pennycook, for example, contrasted
critical applied linguistics with mainstream applied linguistics, showing that the
former is concerned with viewing classrooms and texts not as politically isolat-
ed and autonomous, but relating them to questions of access, difference, power,
and resistance. Studies also showed how the field had embraced different types of
ethnographies that were more conducive to investigating the relations between
discourse and power. Canagarajah’s critical ethnography (ibid.) drew attention to
the role of ideology in teaching sensitive aspects of culture and raised the issue
of resistance in the English language classroom from a postcolonial perspective.
��
Introduction
Toohey (2003), in a detailed, longitudinal ethnographic study of kindergarten

immigrant children, demonstrated that young learners’ classroom discourse is
socially, historically, and ideologically constructed by inviting a range of trespass-
ers to her framework, including social theorists, poststructuralists, Vygotsky, and
Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue to a complex analysis of interaction among young
immigrant children.
Although the Russian thinker Bakhtin (1981, 1984, 1986b, 1993) is among the
most recent newcomers to the field of second language acquisition, his concepts are
not entirely estranged from second and foreign language researchers. For instance,
Cazden (1989) offered an overview of how Bakhtin’s heteroglossia and dialogue
apply to second language acquisition. Hall (1995), in her re-conceptualization of
face-to-face interaction, built heavily on Bakhtin’s notions of the utterance, trans-
linguistics, and dialogue, while Kramsch (1993) invoked Bakhtin’s framework in
the analysis of culture in foreign language learning and teaching. Dufva (1998)
applied the notion of dialogue to the more cognitive aspects of foreign language
learning. The increasing need for utilizing a new perspective to explain learn-
ing processes, both cognitively and socially, was illustrated by a recent volume
on literacy in the first language (Ball & Freedman, 2004). Another volume (Hall,
Vitanova, & Marchenkova, 2005) was the first one to include a variety of second
and foreign language studies that explicitly use Bakhtin’s framework as their theo-
retical basis. Recently, Kostogriz and Doecke (2007) employed the notion of oth-
erness in Bakhtin and Levinas to offer specific implications for language teaching
by suggesting a pedagogy based on the ethics of dialogic relations. Celebrating
the value of difference in learning, a dialogically ethical pedagogy recognizes the
power of the Other in shaping meanings.
Bakhtin may not be a complete stranger to applied linguistics any longer, but
his work still remains on the periphery of the field as only a few isolated concepts,
typically dialogue, heteroglossia, and polyphony, are used by scholars in both sec-
ond language learning and literacy in the first language and, usually, in conjunc-
tion with other, broader socio-cultural approaches (e.g., Vygotsky). In contrast,
this book positions Bakhtin’s philosophy of language and the self at the center
of a project investigating the subjectivity of immigrant learners of English as a
second language. It argues that Bakhtin’s non-unitary treatment of language and
the self provides a thoughtful, thorough, and generative framework that allows
us to coalesce such complex constructs as subjectivity, discourse, voice, gender,
and agency. At its core, Bakhtin’s framework is a multilayered theory of the novel
as the landscape of human social relationships, but it also supplies us with a tool
for analyzing a variety of discourses. One of the goals of this book is to dem-
onstrate that Bakhtin’s framework is particularly useful in the analysis of narra-
tive discourse, narrative data, and ethnographic interviews. At the same time, in
a ccordance with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, it also reaches to other influences

such as postmodern views of identity and feminist poststructuralism.
The narrative examples in the book come from a longitudinal qualitative in-
quiry into eight well-educated Eastern European immigrants’ experiences with
English as a second language in the United States. The Statistical Yearbook of
Homeland Security (“Yearbook of Immigration Statistics,” 2008) shows that the
number of immigrants from this part of the world has increased steadily in the
post-communist era. Immigrants coming from these countries tend to be highly
educated; yet, little is known about their patterns of language socialization. Hinkel
(2000), summarizing research on Soviet immigrants and offering primarily a de-
mographic and statistical perspective, concludes that they remain largely seclud-
ed from American social and political life. Here, I adopt a more introspective and
emic perspective. Specifically, I employ a Bakhtinian framework in exploring four
heterosexual couples’ narratives to reveal how they enact their gendered subjec-
tivities, and how they claim their agency in the second-language milieu. While
gender as a socio-linguistic phenomenon has been studied by second language
researchers, no other second language studies, to my knowledge, have investi-
gated data elicited from couples. Because the participants were observed and in-
terviewed as couples, the data and the discourse analyses provide an insight not
only into how they construct their subjectivities through their narratives, but also
into the pairs’ interactional patterns.
Thus, the book has multiple, though interrelated goals. First, it outlines a
Bakhtinian perspective in the understanding of subjectivity and agency in the
second language in everyday contexts. Second, it illuminates how gender shapes
the discursive practices of these couples. Yet another goal is to suggest a dialogic,
discourse-centered analysis of the narrative as a research genre itself. As the sig-
nificance of narrative as a type of data in applied linguistics is growing, it behooves
us, more than ever, to consider and employ different approaches to its analysis.
I believe that Bakhtin’s philosophy, with its broad spectrum and versatility, will
prove essential to narrative research. Bakhtin may be a newcomer to applied lin-
guistics – a field that until very recently has cautiously guarded its theoretical and
methodological parameters – but this newcomer is here to stay.
About the structure of this book
In this project, I have drawn largely on Bakhtin’s philosophy, which abandons the
traditional view of narrative as a linear, continuous structure and, instead, stresses
the juxtaposition of multiple plots and voices. Peuter (1998) encapsulates the na-
ture of narrative from a Bakhtinian perspective by claiming that, “Linearity and
��
Introduction
order are disrupted as the subject is exposed from multiple perspectives, oppo-
sitional value-orientations co-exist, producing dynamic tensions which seek nei-
ther resolution nor assimilation (1998, p. 40). Similarly, Lather (1991) describes
the postmodern text as collage or pastiche that is messy and changes positions,
which are frequently incongruous with each other. In line with these theoretical
perspectives, the structure of this book is not linear, either. Although the chapters
are interconnected by the theme of gender and subjectivity, each portrays a dif-
ferent aspect of the participants’ lived experiences. Thus, each chapter provides a
brief background of the issue it discusses.
By focusing on Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, Chapter One outlines the
theoretical umbrella that has guided the data analysis underscoring that nar-
ratives are not acts of individual expression, but function as zones of dialogic
constructions. Chapter Two introduces the longitudinal project that generated
the narratives, its context, the questions it employed, and the eight participants.
Chapter Three focuses on how the participants’ discursive practices in the second
language mediate their social positions and shows that being a linguistic Other
has disempowering implications not only in the working environment but across
all facets of everyday life. The narrative analysis of the participants’ experiences
reveals the complex interplay between gender, power, and the discourses that
they employ in response to how others position them in the English-speaking
milieu. Chapter Four begins by a more traditional approach to discourse analy-
sis by illuminating how the men and women invest in the linguistic aspects of
second language acquisition. For example, although the previous chapter focuses
on how the men and women position themselves in relation to the Other, the
native speaker of English, this particular chapter centers on how each of the par-
ticipants positions him or herself within the respective couples. Their attitudes
toward accuracy in the second language are linked with an analysis of the meta-
linguistic discourses the men and women employ. Chapter Five examines the
notion of culture and is centered on Bakhtin’s (1984) argument that being means
communicating dialogically and demonstrates how the notion of dialogism op-
erates among second language learners.
Chapter Six zeroes in on how the participants construct agency in the second
language. It highlights understanding and creativity – two other critical terms in
Bakhtin’s philosophy – as it illustrates the discourses the participants appropriate
in their experiences. Both understanding and creativity are firmly grounded in
the prosaic, seemingly ordinary practices of everyday life, which are, at the same
time, at the core of our language-rich existence. This final chapter also provides
a brief summary of the findings and illuminates once more the relevance of con-
structs that are discussed to the fields of applied linguistics. Recommendations
for future research are offered as well.
A final note in the introduction is on the intended audience of this book. Be-
cause this text explores the intersections of language, gender, agency, and culture,
I have targeted a broad audience of readers in the fields of applied linguistics,
narrative studies, communication science, and, generally, anyone interested in the
notion of subjectivity from a Bakhtinian perspective. Bakhtin’s scope of work can-
not be restricted to a single field, and I have not attempted to restrict the potential
readership of this book singly to scholars and students of applied linguistics. The
descriptive nature of the book would make it appropriate for graduate courses on
language and identity, TESOL, or language and gender studies. Cultural anthro-
pologists, cultural psychologists, and discourse analysts may also find the con-
cepts discussed here relevant to their disciplines.
chapter 1
Language, consciousness, and dialogical selves

An outline of theoretical underpinnings
Language lives only in the dialogic interaction

of those who make use of it.
Bakhtin (1984, p. 183)
Any true understanding is dialogic in nature.
Voloshinov (1973, p. 102)
Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside
the head of an individual person, it is born between people
collectively searching for truth, in the process
of their dialogic interaction.
Bakhtin (1984, p. 110)
“Where are you from?” is a question I have been asked often, mostly in a tone
of genuine curiosity. However well-intended, it is always a blunt question. It is
a question that comes with its speaker’s certainty of his or her right to ask it of
the Other, the user of another language. Over the years, I have come up with dif-
ferent answers (some polite and serious, some humorous, some neither of the
two). I have turned around and asked equally bluntly about the inquirer’s own
geographic origin. I have also realized that the question about where we are from
is inevitably about language, and how language intersects with our sense of selves.
On the surface, the question is a fairly innocent and simple inquiry, but to me,
and to other immigrants, it is marked by a flow of heavier undercurrents: Where
is my home? Is it where I was born, or is it in my current country of citizenship? Is
it where I am residing with my family? Or is my home wherever my professional
community is – not necessarily as a physical place of work, but as a community
of practice with its own discourse? Ultimately, it is a question of belonging: Who
belongs where? Who and what (i.e., ancestry, race, even accent) decide whether
we belong or not? Inevitably, it is a question of identity and of the factors that
determine how we view ourselves. Is who we are as human beings determined by
our nationality or ethnicity? Is it shaped by our gender? Is it determined by our
occupation or socio-economic status? By what linguistic choices we make? And
what, after all, does identity itself signify?
10 Authoring the Dialogical Self
The last question about what constitutes our selfhood has not elicited a
uniform answer. Identity, as a construct, has been discussed by psychologists,
anthropologists, social scientists, and philosophers. It could be as simply de-
fined as in Sarup’s (1996) statement that our identity is whatever story we tell
about ourselves and the story others tell about us. Its definition could also be
more elaborate as in cultural anthropologists Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, and
Cain’s (1998) description: “Identities are key means through which people care
about and care for what is going on around them. They are important bases
from which people create new activities, new worlds, and new ways of being”
(p. 5). In this definition, Holland and her colleagues link identity with agency
and assert that the latter is not some lofty concept, but is related to events that
happen “daily and mundanely” (p. 5). Today, we know that identity is, indeed,
inherently related to other social factors such as gender, socio-economic status,
ethnicity, race, and not least of all, language or the language variety that we
use. Poststructuralist scholars (Davies, 2000) have even argued that a true, core
identity does not actually exist. Instead, they forward the notion that we display
different fragments of ourselves, depending on the settings we occupy or the
discourses we need to take up.
There are numerous conceptions of what personhood means, and its meaning
has varied along with the changing schools of thought. I have singled out the defi-
nitions of identity above because they resonate best with Bakhtin’s concept of the
self: the self as a story and as possessing a limitless creativity and potential. These
two characteristics are at the core of Bakhtin’s formation of the speaking subject.
They were also what I found to be crucial in the construction of selves in the nar-
ratives produced by the participants in my own research. Our lives are stories, and
we are the ones who are authoring these stories creatively, responsibly, and reflec-
tively. In this chapter, I outline the essential concepts in Bakhtin’s understanding
of the self and language. It is not meant to be an exhaustive introduction to his
work, but to help establish the grounds for the discussion of narrative examples
that follow in the rest of the chapters and, at the same time, to help situate his
specific framework in the larger body of writings on the conceptions of language
and the person. In addition, I explain several of Bakhtin’s major notions, making
connections to narrative analysis and their value in qualitative research.
1.1 Overview of Bakhtin’s framework
Who is Mikhail Bakhtin? Why has it been so difficult to define his framework
neatly within a particular trend or school? Is he a neo-Kantian? Can we claim
that he is a postmodernist as some scholars within the field of second language
Chapter 1. Language, consciousness, and dialogical selves 11
acquisition have implied? Bakhtin’s work has fascinated researchers in various

disciplines such as socio-cultural studies (Holquist, 1990), philosophy (Gardiner,
2000), anthropology (Holland et al., 1998), composition studies (Halasek, 1999),
and literacy (Hicks, 1996b) to list only a few. Yet, even today, the nature of
Bakhtin’s work remains unique and resistant to categorization. He shares features
of poststructuralists, but he is not, strictly speaking, a poststructuralist. His name
is often cited along with Vygotsky’s in educational research, yet the main ideas in
these two thinkers are fairly distinct. To complicate matters further, Bakhtinian
scholars do not always agree on the authorship of major texts associated with
his circle as illustrated in the disputes over who wrote Marxism and the Philoso-
phy of Language and The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, whether it was
Bakhtin himself or his close associates from the Bakhtin Circle. (For an in-depth
discussion and a convincing argument that these two books were authored by
Voloshinov and Medvedev respectively, please see Hirschkop, 1999).
Even details of his biography elude scholars and are a source of confusion.
For instance, Hirschkop (1999) refers to Bakhtin’s aristocratic, albeit impover-
ished, origin that others mention (e.g., see Todorov, 1984) as a myth. Biographers
agree that his father worked at a bank, but whether his origin was noble remains
unclear. Bakhtin’s formal education has been another mysterious area. While
commonly accepted that he studied philology at the University of Odessa first
and then in Petrograd, Hirschkop claims that no official records of his attendance
have been found. Bakhtin himself was not very forthcoming about his personal
life and didn’t volunteer information. Instead, he isolated himself in the company
of a close circle of friends. He never left a convenient, formal statement on his
philosophical beliefs, so his scholars have had to search for these within the body
of his writings – a task not made easier by the fact that Bakhtin’s views and key
terminology were quite distinct in the periods before and after his famous publi-
cation on Dostoevsky (Bakhtin, 1979).
To those closely familiar with Bakhtin’s life and professional history, the con-
fusion surrounding his thought is not surprising. In their comprehensive account
of Mikhail Bakhtin’s biography, Clark and Holquist (1984) reflect that the dif-
ficulty to describe his view on a number of issues stems largely from his own
personality. He presented himself as “elusive, contradictory, and enigmatic” (p. 2).
He refused to follow any official traditions, ideologies, or schools. Even though
Bakhtin chose the genre of the novel as the ground for his analysis of discourse
and the self, he rejected the notion that he was a literary critic. Instead, he iden-
tified himself as a philosopher and a thinker. In a famous interview, retold by
Emerson (1997), Bakhtin’s own succinct and unambiguous answer to Duvakin’s
question about whether he was a philologist or a philosopher was, “I am a phi-
losopher. A thinker” (Emerson, p. 6).
Yet, the introductory section of a Russian collection of essays dedicated to

Bakhtin, M. M. Bakhtin as a Philosopher (M. M. Bakhtin Kak Filosof) (Gogotishvili
& Gurevich, 1992), points out that the philosophic essence of his work remains a
mystery. While one can trace influences of the Marburg school and German phe-
nomenology, especially in Bakhtin’s early work, his philosophy defies the strict
delineations of schools and trends. His conceptions of the self and language have
placed him on the border of different dominant thoughts – just as Bakhtin con-
ceived the nature of the subject to be never singular but always on the borderland
of viewpoints and languages. In the intellectual currents between modernity and
postmodernity, Bakhtin’s scholarship has carved a unique space for itself and its
followers. This uniqueness has prompted Bakhtinian theorists to consider him the
creator not just of a theory but of a “programme for the humanities in general,”
and it is what Makhlin aptly calls a “social ontology of participation” (1997). The
reference to “participation” here rejects the conventional portrayal of the subject
as an autonomous one and underscores Bakhtin’s key concept of agency as a pro-
cess that is answerable to others. It is also a rejection of the very core of formalism
and its treatment of language.
Although Bakhtin’s philosophy eludes strict definitions, it was still located
in a specific intellectual and ideological climate with its very specific history and
place. This inherent connection between life and socio-political realities was
clearly recognized and expressed in the early writings of Bakhtin’s own circle,
produced in the early twentieth century. Medvedev (2000), for instance, asserted
in Formal Method of Literary Scholarship:
Literature always represents a person, his life and fate, his “inner world” through
an ideological worldview; everything (in literature) is accomplished in the [larg-
er] scope of ideological entities and values. The ideological context is an atmo-
sphere in which life can happen only as an object of a literary representation.
(p. 199, translation mine)
One of the first major theoretical tasks for the Bakhtin Circle, with Bakhtin,
Medvedev, and Voloshinov as its key figures, was to establish their view of the
importance of language and how it differs from the dominant formalist approach-
es. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, originally published in 1929,
Voloshinov’s (1973) central claim is that language is a social phenomenon, and
thus, it is impossible to separate it from the social values that imbue any linguistic
expressions. Linguistic signs are the major unit of analysis in formalism, and they
are quite abstract by nature. In contrast, Voloshinov claims that linguistic signs,
along with all other signs and symbols, are never neutral. Signs are materialistic
and concrete; they not only represent reality but they may distort or change real-
ity, depending on the purpose of their user. While Voloshinov’s book bows to the
prevalent Marxist philosophy of his time in Russia (it could not have been pub-
lished otherwise), it also establishes the grounds for a core assumption in Bakhtin’s
work: Language and the creation of meaning can exist only between people.
The central assumption in these early works of the Bakhtin Circle that lan-
guage use is embedded in ideology and ideological values contains the Circle’s
critique of structuralism which dominated linguistics at this time. They specifi-
cally reacted to Saussure’s structuralism. Saussure (1916), who adopted the di-
chotomy between langue (structure, system of language) and parole (speech, the
external manifestation of language), considered langue to be most significant
object of linguistics. This fundamental distinction was later taken up by other
formalists, for example by Chomsky, in his own differentiation between compe-
tence and performance – two terms that have had a profound effect on traditional
applied linguistics. Everything that was not langue was accidental and marginal.
Voloshinov and Bakhtin criticize the abstract objectivism of structuralism and
the atomistic nature of its linguistic sign. Instead of treating language as a formal
and stable system of abstract linguistic signs, the Bakhtin Circle makes everyday
speech, with all the various situations and styles in which it occurs, their main
interest of study. To Bakhtin, linguistic expression is not a goal in itself, but it be-
comes a means to achieve something much more important – a dialogic relation-
ship between utterances. While he sees linguistics as studying only the relation-
ship between elements of the language system, in the center of his philosophy
of language are the relationships between utterances, relations of utterances to
reality, and to their author (Bakhtin, 1986b).
Thus, by opposing unity and singularity in language early in his career,
Bakhtin paves the way for an alternative and very distinct approach to language.
To comprehend meaning, one has to have knowledge not only of the formal
properties of the word, for example, its phonetic structure, but also of the par-
ticulars of the situation in which it is uttered. Crucially to Bakhtin’s later notion
dialogism, one should also possess an awareness of the relationship between the
two interlocutors.
Voloshinov (2000) provides a simple illustration of this type of extralinguistic
awareness in the essay “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art,” originally pub-
lished in 1926. He describes a situation in which the only utterance exchanged
between two speakers sitting in a room, after a prolonged silence, is the utterance
“Well!” Voloshinov points out that in this case a formal analysis of this word is
not going to be helpful, so he provides additional details about the circumstances.
He asks the reader to imagine that these two people have been enclosed in the
room for a long time during a cold winter, and they are finally expecting spring.
One of them notices that it’s snowing outside, and this event prompts one of them
to exclaim “Well!” The intonation, with which the word was pronounced, along
with the very specific circumstances of its utterance, is essential in understand-

ing its meaning. I don’t believe that the use of the term intonation by Voloshinov
is accidental here as it will become central in Bakhtin’s concept of the self in the
essay “Art and answerability” (1990). Voloshinov explains that, in general, to un-
derstand a word, we need not only the intonation, but also at least three other
components of vneslovnogo kontexta (the context outside of the word). In his spe-
cific example, to understand the meaning of “well,” one has to have all the follow-
ing information: (1) the speakers’ spatial, physical point of view, for example the
room, the window, etc.; (2) the speakers’ knowledge of the current situation and
their understanding or perception of it; and (3) the speakers’ evaluation of or their
positions on the current event. Voloshinov aims to demonstrate that the word is
a “social event” (p. 83). It is neither an abstract linguistic entity, nor is it an iso-
lated psychological concept of the individual speaker’s consciousness. The word
as actual, realized, and the live utterance are a product of the relations between
the speaker (the author), the listener (or the reader), and what/whom they are
talking about (the hero). The distinction between the word as “a sleeping entry in
the dictionary” (p. 83) and the utterance as a real and vital expression becomes a
key one in Voloshinov’s work.
Bakhtin himself criticizes traditional linguistics and proposes a novel way of
looking at language in “Discourse of the Novel” (1981):
What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common
language, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guar-
anteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are
taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather
language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as
a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres
of ideological life. (p. 269)
The adjective “ideological” here, in its Russian meaning, does not necessarily refer
to political or party affiliations, but to the more general idea of the “social.”
The Bakhtin Circle’s major criticism of traditional linguistics was that it has
taken for granted the singular relation of the speaker to his or her own language.
Instead of this monological, closed view of the word, Bakhtin proposes one of his
most important concepts: the dialogic nature of the utterance, including internal
dialogization (double-voicing). The dialogic nature of the utterance becomes a
critical notion in Bakhtin’s metalinguistics, the term that he uses to describe his
distinct account of language. Metalinguistics strongly rejected the structuralist
view of the sign as an arbitrary mental construct. Instead, the Bakhtin Circle pos-
tulated that signs are a result of an external experience and that they can exist
only in the social space between individuals, on an “interindividual territory”
(Voloshinov, 1973, p. 12). At a time when rationalism prevailed in social sciences

and the field of linguistics portrayed language as a purely essentialist construct,
Bakhtin and his colleagues positioned both language and human experience
within specific social and historical situations. “Live” language consists not only
of phonetic symbols, morphological structure, and syntactic characteristics, but it
also contains what Medvedev calls “social evaluation” (2000, p. 297).
The role social evaluation plays in language is a major theme in Medvedev’s
work, which claims that traditional linguists don’t pay attention to the social eval-
uation inherently embedded in the word. To Medvedev (ibid.), on the other hand,
social evaluation could be found in every zhivoe slovo (live word). Medvedev jux-
taposes his view of zhivoe slovo with the perception of the word in structuralism,
where the word is only a mechanical, random sign. Thus, the connection between
meaning and word in formal linguistics is random and mechanical as well. The
meaning of an utterance, however, is not the equivalent of its dictionary entry:
To understand an utterance means to understand it in its own current context
and in the context of its current reality (if they don’t coincide). To comprehend
meaning, it is necessary to understand the contents of the event and the historic
circumstances of the event, and then how they achieve a specific internal unity.
Without understanding these, meaning is dead…. Social evaluation penetrates
all aspects of the utterance, but most of it, the utterance finds its pure meaning in
its expressive intonation. (p. 299, translation mine)
Individual signs have their dictionary meaning, but they acquire true meaning
only in the relation with other signs and within a specific social experience. Ab-
stract words versus concrete utterances (vyskazyvanie), or “live” meaning ver-
sus “dead” is one of the major oppositions in the Bakhtin Circle’s analysis of
language. Bakhtin doesn’t agree with traditional linguistics, which focuses on
texts alone and perceives signs as mechanical categories, and he openly argues
against the de-personalization that he finds common in it. Instead, he sees an
inseparable link between words and the voices that speak them, insisting, “But
I hear voices in everything and dialogic relations among them…. Contextual
meaning is personalistic; it always includes a question, an address, and the an-
ticipation of a response, it always includes two (as a dialogic minimum)” (1986b,
pp. 169–170). In essence, Bakhtin re-conceptualizes the very notion of the word
as a category. His metalinguistics suggests that a philosophy of language should
study not merely the grammatical and logical relationships between words, but
should include the dialogical relations between speaking subjects. If we want to
understand how language truly works, we need to look beyond the level of lin-
guistics; we need to consider the complex connections between language, human
consciousness, and experience.
In comparing four great Russian thinkers – Bakhtin, Lotman, Vygotsky, and

Ginzburg – Emerson (2000) describes Bakhtin and Ginzburg as “logosphiles”
(p. 23). Emerson comments on the importance of the word as a category for
the two:
In the beginning – and at the end – was the Word. To emphasize this point is
not to ignore the manifest fact that language is pivotal for all four thinkers. But
in Bakhtin and Ginzburg we encounter a special reverence: verbal consciousness
and its manipulation is demonstrably the dominant, that place where the iden-
tity of self coalesces first, validating the resultant world with the most resonant
authority. (p. 24)
Human experience and human existence itself are intricately embedded in lan-
guage use, according to this framework. Voloshinov writes cogently, “People do
not accept their native language; it is through their native language that they reach
consciousness” (1973, p. 81). The concepts of the word and the human being be-
come synonymous. Speech is the source, the very conductor of consciousness. In
other words, if people cannot talk about an experience, they cannot have it. The
idea that human consciousness and language are interrelated is not new. Much
earlier, for instance, the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke (see Harris
& Taylor, 1989) wrote about the clear connection between ideas and words and
that is not possible to articulate our knowledge without using propositions and
other elements of language. Locke claimed that we make our ideas accessible to
others only through words. This resonates with evolutionary linguist Bickerton’s
(1990) belief that we have the capacity for consciousness, and we became the spe-
cies we are exactly because of language. But while Bickerton’s focus is on the bi-
ology of language, and Locke’s ideas are mainly ideas of reflections, “operations
of our own mind” (Harris & Taylor, p. 111), Bakhtin’s unity of experience and
language departs from the singular, inside-the-head individual experience to a
socially mediated one. In Bakhtin and his colleagues’ view, an experience that is
not grounded in a social audience cannot “take firm root and will not receive dif-
ferentiated and full-fledged expression” (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 92).
To be fair, the importance of language is present in Russian formalism in
the 1920s, and the movement acknowledges the relationship between language
and social reality, especially through the prism of Marxist philosophy. The role
of language in formalism is, however, passive as it focuses on reflection, rather
than re-evaluation and re-accentuating language with one’s own meaning. This
opportunity for re-evaluation and the creation of new meanings become two of
the core features of the Bakhtinian agentive self. The Bakhtin Circle also brings
the attention to the genre of the prose, rather than poetics, as Russian formalists
have traditionally done. The shift is significant because it is in the narrative of the
prose that Bakhtin later finds the complex connections between discourse, voice,
and authorship – a concept that is critical to agency the way Bakhtin conceptual-
izes this construct.
Bakhtin is certainly not unique in claiming that experience is produced in
language. Poststructuralists have emphasized that the self is a result of the com-
petition between different socio-ideological discourses, and some parallels be-
tween Bakhtin’s views and poststructuralism are easily discernable. Structuralism
envisioned language as a stable, holistic, and objective system. The broad move-
ment, that has come to be known as poststructuralism and is associated primarily
with Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Barthes, and Kristeva, shuttered these ideas of
stability and continuity. Unlike traditional Western Humanism, which espouses
the idea of disembodied individual, governed by rational thought and possessing
personal will, poststructuralists view subjects as located in social and institution-
al discourses. Similar to Bakhtin, poststructuralists oppose the neutral nature of
the linguistic sign in structuralism. Rather than focusing on linguistic structures,
poststructuralists show the importance of discourse and textuality. Like Bakhtin,
for instance, Foucault (1972, 1981) also distinguished between language as an
abstract system, on the one hand, and discourse (or the more general term discur-
sivity), on the other.
Foucauldian scholars outline at least three different intellectual periods in his
life. However distinct these periods are, the concepts of discourse, power, and
the subject stand out as the most defining of his work and of poststructuralism
in general. Foucault’s notion of discourse was a rejection of how discourse is
viewed by formalist linguistic theories, for instance, ethnography of communica-
tion or speech act theory. These formalist approaches to discourse analysis are
either grounded in socio-linguistics, ultimately studying grammatical features,
or empirical and sociological, studying conversation or social interaction. More
specifically, Foucault’s discourses could be identified by the institutions to which
they related and by the positions that produced them. There are rules or regula-
tions that determine who occupies what position. One example he gives comes
from the field of clinical medicine where social rules determine who is given what
subject position from which to speak in an institutional site as the hospital, as well
as what the speaker is allowed to say (i.e., not everyone has the authority to make
a medical statement).
It is not surprising that feminist researchers from different fields have found
poststructuralist approaches to power and discourses appealing in explaining
the construct of gender. The notion that subjectivity is located in language has
especially resonated with them. Indeed, feminist poststructuralists have chosen
the term subjectivity over identity to differentiate themselves from the humanist
connotations implied in the latter. Whereas humanists assume that the individual
is unique and carries certain fixed traits, feminist poststructuralists propose a

de-centered, fragmented, and contradictory subject. In a widely-cited quotation,
Weedon (1987) has argued that “The meaning of the existing structure of social
institution, as much as the structures themselves and the subject positions which
they offer their subjects, is a site of political struggle waged mainly, though not ex-
clusively, in language” (p. 37). Discursive practices, to feminist poststructuralists,
as well as to other postmodernists, are not simply texts, but become the means
of thinking or producing meaning. Psychologists Harre and Langenhove (1999),
for example, refer to discourses as all the ways in which humans produce their
socio-psychological realities. The notion of discursive practices is closely related
to positioning, as the discourses are actually the force that allows us to create
subject positions. It is through taking up or not being able to take up a certain dis-
course that the subject is created. Position itself is another postmodern concept.
It was proposed as an alternative to role in sociology and came to underline the
dynamic, fluid nature of the self.
Multiplicity underscores the positioning theory as outlined by Harre and
Langenhove. It signifies that subjects can move across contexts and discursive
realities as they assume different positions. In my own research, I felt drawn to
poststructuralism and to positioning theory exactly because of their emphases on
discourse. As I was talking with the participants in this project, for example, I was
able to hear their multiple voices. Their voices were coming to me across time,
across different contexts, and across languages. As I was listening to Boris, one
of the male participants, his voice embodied a variety of subject positions – the
voice of a vice president of a building company, the voice of an architect, Boris
in his new position as a construction worker, and Boris, the proud father of two
daughters. Although these voices are moving across time, geographical and social
locations, it is obvious that, in their multiple complexities, they represent the per-
son who was sitting next to me, in the particulars of his narrative and situation.
Voice is a complex notion in Bakhtin’s work. It can refer to purely physical aspects
such as timber and aesthetic qualities (for example, whether a voice sounds lyrical
or not), but it can also refer to the more general semantic position that a speaker
is taking and even the broader worldview one has.
Another parallel between Bakhtin’s philosophy and poststructuralism could
be traced in their understanding of human experience. To both Bakhtin and
poststructuralists, experience cannot have an inherent meaning, and it is never
independent of language. Weedon (1987) and Wetherell (1986), for instance, ac-
centuate that experience acquires its meaning only through language. Further-
more, experience is at the core of the subject construction. It can validate what
one already knows or can disturb this sense of knowing. Because subjects are con-
structed discursively, any experience is a linguistic event. In an often-cited essay,
Scott (1999) puts it succinctly, “Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the

site of history’s enactment” (p. 93). I believe this postmodern view of experience
should be of interest not only to theorists but also to educators. Educators have
acknowledged the link between learning and experience as an important one,
but no critical theory of experience has been offered in adult education (Usher,
1989). Largely, it has been taken for granted. Usher claims that adult educators
should turn to socially-constructed theories of the self and consider postmodern
approaches to subjectivity and experience. That language and discursive practices
give meaning to one’s experience, and that these meanings can be multiple and
contradictory seems especially significant for educators in adult second-language
classrooms, where divergent discourses of culture, gender, race, and occupation
frequently compete.
Although poststructuralists take slightly different approaches to the subject
(for example, Lacan stresses the production of the subject in language, whereas
Foucault accentuates institutional or discursive practices), their view of identity
as a struggle of discourses, ever changing and conflicting, dominates this move-
ment. Poststructuralism has offered a persuasive approach to the dynamic rela-
tionship between subjects, language, and power. It has also provided feminist the-
orists with a tool for analyzing the interplay between society, power, and gendered
discourses. At the same time, some have criticized poststructuralists for being too
deterministic. For instance, it is societal discourses – school discourses, political
institutions – that exercise power over the bodies of subjects and determine what
they can do, according to Foucault. The critics say that poststructuralists’ focus is
primarily on institutional practices, and that the role of the individual, with his
or her identity as an experience or as a lived narrative, is downplayed (e.g., see
Barrett, 1991; Sarup, 1996; Vitanova, 2005). Human consciousness, one of the
major categories in Bakhtin’s work, is not given real importance in poststructural-
ism, and thus, the possibility for agency and resistance is reduced in the latter as
well. (I discuss the different approaches to agency in more detail in Chapter Six
of this book.)
There is a difference in how poststructuralism and Bakhtin conceptualize the
nature and contemporary value of human sciences as well – the very branch of
sciences whose main purpose has been to explore aspects of the human being.
However, in The Order of Things, Foucault (1973) proclaims how obsolete the no-
tion of the human being has become as an object of study for human sciences and
declares human sciences themselves bankrupt. This statement is in sharp contrast
with Bakhtin’s understanding of the value of human sciences and their primary
object of analysis: the subject. Bakhtin juxtaposes the task of natural sciences with
that of human sciences in “Methodology for the Human Sciences”:
The exact sciences constitute a monological form of knowledge: the intellect con-
templates a thing and expounds upon it. There is only one subject here – cognizing
(contemplating) and speaking (expounding). In opposition to the subject there is
only a voiceless thing. Any object of knowledge (including man) can be perceived
and cognized as a thing. But a subject as such cannot be perceived and studied
as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless,
and… cognition of it can only be dialogic. […] The human sciences – sciences of
the spirit – philological sciences (as part of and at the same time common to all
of them – the word). (1986b, p. 161)
Bakhtin perceives structuralism to be problematic because it is interested only

in the subject of research itself. Meaning, however, in Bakhtin’s view, is always
contextual, and contextual meaning is personalistic because “it always includes a
question, an address, and the anticipation of a response, it always includes two (as
a dialogic minimum)” (ibid., pp. 169–170). Thus, Bakhtin asserts a central posi-
tion for the person in human sciences. He renounces structuralism exactly be-
cause structuralism has de-personalized the subject and has enclosed itself in the
strict realm of the text. However, Bakhtin’s self is not the individualist subject of
humanism, either. This is a subject whose cognition and voice are inherently and
unavoidably dialogic. This is also a subject who possesses something that eludes
the poststructuralist self – moral values and responsibility. Indeed, one of the fea-
tures that make the Bakhtinian self distinct is that it is always and inherently a
moral subject. (For a more detailed explanation of this particular characteristic
and of Bakhtin’s concept of responsibility, please see Chapter Four, “Gender, Lan-
guage Learning, and Discursive Practices,” in this book).
I believe that second language research can benefit from the way postmod-
ernists’ ideas of power, positioning and discourse in the formation of the subject
and Bakhtin’s view of personal, but at the same time, intrinsically dialogic nature
of language complement each other. In the next section, I focus on several of
Bakhtin’s most essential concepts that define his philosophy of the self-in-language
and self-in-relation – dialogue and dialogism, the utterance, and prosaics. These
concepts are not exclusive to Bakhtin’s terminology or the scope of his work. The
following chapters in this book will continue to elaborate on these three as well as
on other Bakhtinian terms such as responsibility, emotional-volitional, tone, and
outsidedness as I consider the ways they apply to the lives and narratives of the
participants in my own research.
1.2 A dialogic approach to language and the self
Few would disagree that dialogue has been the most pervasive concept in Bakhtin’s
writings and the one most often cited by researchers in various disciplines. In-
deed, this has become the notion with which we seem to identify Bakhtin’s name
although his conceptualization of dialogue is not the only one. Buber (1996), for
example, also underscores the relationship between the I and thou, postulating
that one’s consciousness is always formulated on the boundary between the “I”
and the Other. In fact, some evidence suggests that Bakhtin was familiar with Bu-
ber’s philosophy and had been influenced by it (Friedman, 2005). Buber, however,
favors poetry as a genre which illustrates the dialogic nature of the spoken word,
while Bakhtin turns to the novel. More recently, Weigand (2009) has outlined a
comprehensive approach to dialogue, which has come to be known as Dialogic
Analysis. Her analysis is more grounded in linguistics and views dialogue as a
communicative function of language, with topics ranging from speech acts theory
to utterance grammar and as communicative action games. Weigand proposes
the Mixed Game Model, which integrates different domains of language use such
as communicative techniques, human cognition, perception and emotion. Simi-
lar to Bakhtin, Weigand’s theory’s central claim is that communication is “always
performed dialogically” (p. 23). Also very much like Bakthin, Weigand believes
that language use should be described as it actually happens.
In this book, I have drawn on the notion of dialogue as it was conceived in
Bakhtin’s philosophy of language and the self. Dialogue, in his view, epitomizes
the essence of human existence. The Russian thinker stresses the relational nature
of language. To him, “The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that
is, of course, a property of any discourse” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 279). Not unlike post-
structuralists, who recognize the multiplicity of social discourse, Bakhtin writes
about the stratification of language:
Language – like the living concrete environment in which the consciousness of
the verbal artist lives – is never unitary. It is unitary only in the abstract grammat-
ical system of normative forms, taken in isolation from the concrete, ideological
conceptualizations that fill it, and in isolation from the uninterrupted process of
historical becoming that is characteristic of all living languages. (ibid., p. 288)
Bakhtin introduces a concept of language not as a stable system, but as a dynamic,

changing, and multi-voiced one. The term “heteroglossia” (raznorechie) encom-
passes diverse worldviews, meanings, and values in language. Pollock (1993) de-
fines heteroglossia as “the web of dotted lines within language – dialects, socio-
lects, idiolects, as well as national idioms – which allow for change” (p. 233). In
this vision of language, not unlike in poststructuralism, meaning is never fixed as

the boundaries between dialects and discourses are fluid. Elements of one dialect
or sociolect can cross over and force negotiation as well as creation of new mean-
ings. To Bakhtin, language is always plural. The multitude of languages encodes
different social histories, experiences, and values. It should be noted that Bakhtin
produced his work during times that were not known for their democracy. Yet,
interestingly, or perhaps exactly because of that, his notion of heteroglossia ex-
emplifies a deeply democratic statement, one that in the philosopher’s own words
“permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and inter-
relationships” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 263). Although Bakhtin was not discussing sec-
ond or foreign language acquisition specifically, the term heteroglossia has been
most easily adopted by applied linguists and could be easily observed in different
learning settings. Whether English language learners are in a classroom or in an
informal context, the diversity of their languages, dialects, cultures, and world-
views is familiar to both scholars and teachers.
Heteroglossia is closely related to dialogue – a notion that interested Bakhtin
throughout his whole life. Bakhtin chose the genre of the novel as the ground
of his understanding of dialogic relationships. Given the socio-political climate
in which Bakhtin was crafting his career, he and his followers were not allowed
(and it would not have been safe) to articulate some of their beliefs directly. Thus,
the structure of the novel in his work served also as a metaphor for the discur-
sive spaces in very real social settings. It is not accidental that the relationships
of the author to the novel’s characters also portray relationships between actual,
everyday speakers of language. In a similar vein, Patterson (1985) has argued
vehemently that the novel, to Bakhtin, is not merely a literary genre, but it is a
dynamic space for locating the truth, for responding to discourses, and for per-
forming acts of creativity:
To the extent that novelistic discourse includes an outlook on the world, it in-
cludes a consciousness of the world; and consciousness, in Heidegger’s words,
places us “before the world. Consciousness situates the world “out there” and
makes it a realm into which we venture and to which we respond. Yet the thing
we respond to is not so much the world as a certain world view, and this response
is what brings our own world view to life. (p. 132)
Bakhtin himself clearly points out the connection between discourse in the novel
to social discourses observed in real life. He states that “a particular language in a
novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for a social
significance” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 333). The genre of the novel becomes the textual
plane – or rather, the multiple planes – onto which human life and human con-
sciousness are transposed.
The metalinguistics Bakhtin proposes differs from other conceptualizations

of language and the way meaning is created in it. To humanists, the person owns
meaning. This is quite the opposite from the belief held by some poststructur-
alists, particularly deconstructionists, that no one actually owns meaning. To
Bakhtin, meaning can only be a shared activity. In his framework, “dialogic rela-
tionships… are the subject of metalinguistics” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 182). Dialogue
appears to be this common, multi-layered thread that unifies other, sometimes
distinct concepts in Bakhtin’s works. Dialogue permeates all spheres of language
and human existence. There are dialogic relationships between social discourses,
between authors and their creations, between speaking subjects. There is also an-
other, very important dialogic relation that makes Bakhtin’s dialogism so unique:
It is the dialogic relationship found in a single speaker’s word to his or her utter-
ance itself.
Even though dialogue is such a ubiquitous term in Bakhtin’s scholarship,
there isn’t always an agreement on how it should be defined. Morson (1986) refers
to the two senses of dialogue in Bakhtin’s writings. In its first sense, dialogue is
a description of all language; it is “in effect, a redefinition of language” (p. 83).
Morson clarifies that, dialogue, in this sense, hinges on the notion of discourse
as not a product of an individual writer or speaker, but the result of a social situ-
ation in which different audiences and numerous social factors shape utterances.
When used in this first sense, dialogue is a universal condition, and no mono-
logue is possible. Morson admits that this definition of dialogue needs further
elaboration, and that it is still somewhat slippery. The second sense of dialogue
refers to a particular discursive position of a speaker, and here, monologue is a
possibility. Western philosophers have found the first definition of dialogue to
be particularly interesting, and some have even introduced the term dialogism
to refer to Bakhtin’s dialogic conception of the world as a whole epistemology.
Emerson (1997) and Morson and Emerson (1990) consistently argue that dia-
logue, in Bakhtin’s work, should not be interpreted as mere talk or the interaction
between speakers. If dialogue is used only as a synonym for verbal interaction, it is
trivialized and loses its meaning. Bakhtin himself describes dialogue as a key and
all-encompassing presence in human thought:
Dialogic relationships are a much broader phenomenon than mere rejoinders
in a dialogue laid out compositionally in the text; they are an almost universal
phenomenon, permeating all human speech and all relationships and manifesta-
tions of human life – in general, everything that has meaning and significance.
(1984, p. 40)
Bakhtin uses the term rechevoi center (speech center) to refer to the author’s or
speaker’s cognitive position, but this center is not immovable. It shifts periodically
in the process of communicating with others, and a change of positions occurs.

The author’s own position becomes the position of the Other; then again, the
author returns to his or her original position, only to go back to position of the
Other again.
In this large sense of the word, human existence itself is a dialogical event.
Dialogic relationships cut across all spheres of human life – culture, social norms,
interaction, and human consciousness. To account for their pervasiveness in
Bakhtin’s work, scholars, for instance, Holquist (1990), have used the term dia-
logism. Dialogism, in this view, is an epistemology, a way of knowing the world,
a philosophy of truth, knowledge, and the self. To Bakhtin, selves and knowl-
edge are always a shared experience; thus, human consciousness itself is based on
the premise of otherness. Dialogism is not a state, but a process, in which one’s
consciousness actively anticipates responses from others’ axiological positions.
Bakhtin elaborates on and offers his most mature understanding of dialogue in
his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics and in Speech Genres.
To understand dialogism, however, and the dialogic nature of the self, it is
useful to turn to his earlier essays, and particularly, to Toward a Philosophy of
the Act (1993) and “Art and Answerability” (1990), where Bakhtin lays out the
foundations of his concept of the self. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin
offers his micro-sociology of everyday life and the role of the individual in it, and
he bases his views not on genres or discourse, but on the concept of the act. On
the one hand, Bakhtin posits a unique position for the subject in the world. He
writes, “I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeat-
able, a place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone
else” (1993, p. 40). On the other hand, the dialogic self, as portrayed by Bakhtin,
reveals a special form of answerability to particular others (for more on respon-
sibility, please see Chapter Four as well). Through our unique acts, which entail a
degree of ethical responsibility to another, we are authoring the world. Clark and
Holquist (1984) have named this characteristic of the Bakhtinian self “the archi-
tectonics of answerability” as they explain:
The self/other dichotomy in Bakhtin does not, as in Romantic philosophy, em-
phasize the self alone, a radical subjectivity always in danger of shading off into
solipsistic extremes. For the same reason the self, as conceived by Bakhtin, is not
a presence wherein is lodged the ultimate privilege of the real, the source of sov-
ereign intention and guarantor of unified meaning. The Bakhtinian self is never
whole, since it can exist only dialogically. It is not a substance or essence in its
own right but exists only in a tensile relationship with all that is other and, most
important, with other selves. (p. 65)
Bakhtin’s subject always speaks from a unique and unrepeatable position, a posi-
tion that is defined by ideologies, socio-economical, and other historical factors.
Indeed, “it is only in that highly specific… placement that the world may address
us…. It is only from this site that we can speak” (Holquist, 1990, p. 167). The
answerability that Holquist and Clark refer to is much larger than the communi-
cative event of answering verbally, in speech or writing, to another interlocutor.
What they describe is, in essence, a type of existential philosophy, according to
which we live in a world that addresses us. Our own subjectivity, engaged in a dia-
logue with the voices of others, answers the world. The way we answer the world
underlines our sense of agency.
The self in Bakhtin’s early work is tripartite: It is a composite of “I-for-myself,”
“I-for-the-other,” and “the other-for-me.” The relationship between the “I” and
“the other” is marked deeply by ethic or moral overtones. This is emphasized by
some Bakhtinian scholars who also see a religious component in his philosophy.
In other words, it could also be a relationship between the “I” and an Absolute
Other, the Christian God (Gogotishvili, 2002). However, what is perhaps most
characteristic and significant of Bakhtin’s conception of dialogue is that dialogue
exists not only between the consciousness of the self and others’ consciousnesses,
but also as an internal dialogue, a dialogue within the self ’s consciousness itself.
Samohvalova (1992) makes the distinction between “vneshny” (external) and
“vnutrenny” (internal) dialogue. Samohvalova refers to this specific necessity of
the self to invite, metaphorically speaking, another consciousness into his or her
own. The other consciousness doesn’t have to be a concrete person in this sense of
otherness, but it could signify any form of social or cultural norms. Self-awareness,
in Bakhtin’s dialogic subject, becomes the ability to see oneself not just through
the self ’s eyes, but from the outside, through the eyes of another consciousness.
Internal dialogue, in this sense, is a dialogue between the self and society. At the
same time, it is the dialogue that selves are carrying on within themselves, but in
the context and with the awareness of the larger society.
Thus, consciousness is not an individual, but a social product. Dialogism is
a complex phenomenon that contains at least two layers. One is the “hidden”
(Samohvalova, p. 192) layer, where the individual engages in a dialogue within
herself or himself, and as a result, a subject position is created; the other layer of
dialogism refers to the dialogue between different speakers or different subject
positions. The notions of the act and position are related in a complex way. Posi-
tion doesn’t merely refer to a view point. The subject occupies a position as a con-
crete and irreplaceable individual, who is enacting his or her life choices through
different acts. By choosing and performing an act, we author ourselves.
The discussion above illustrates how complex, multi-faceted, and difficult it
is to extract a clear definition of dialogue in Bakhtin’s writings, partly because
his work and concepts evolved over his long career. The way we read and inter-
pret Bakhtin today is also problematic because some of his major works were
produced in the beginning of the twentieth century; yet, they became known to
Western scholars in the 1960s and even later. Scholars from different fields – cul-
tural anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism, communication studies, and
education – have all emphasized different aspects of Bakhtin’s dialogism, often
from the point of view of current postmodern influences in their disciplines. It is
not surprising that Bakhtin, who wrote about heteroglossia and polyphony, has
inspired such a polyphonic profusion of ideas and followers. At the same time,
some Bakhtinian scholars have expressed a concern over the use of the terms
dialogue and dialogism. Hirschkop (1998), for example, even laments the abuse of
the former. Similar to Holquist (ibid.), Hirschkop distinguishes between dialogue
and dialogism. He stresses that dialogue, as envisioned by Bakhtin, does not refer
to the written or verbal structure of dialogue, but to the exchange of ideas and
positions. True dialogism, Hirschkop argues, is fairly abstract. It is not found in
the exchange of sentences or utterances between speakers, but within the single
work or single utterance of a single speaker (double-voiceness). Dialogism means
that a single utterance can contain at least two meanings, as “two socio-linguistic
consciousnesses come together and fight it out on the territory of the utterance”
(Bakhtin, 1984, as cited in Hirschkop, p. 185).
In his rather complex and evolving view of the self, how does Bakhtin rec-
oncile the uniqueness of the individual, the creative capacity for authoring one’s
signifying position, on one hand, and for individuals’ inherent dialogic nature,
on the other? The vehicle for accomplishing this seemingly improbable task is the
utterance. The utterance, especially in Bakhtin’s later work, becomes the activ-
ity through which selves author themselves. In “The Problem of Speech Genres,”
Bakhtin (1986a) posits the utterance as the “real unit of speech communication”
(p. 67). He explicitly criticizes nineteenth-century linguistics for emphasizing
solitary language units and for objectifying both the speaker and the purpose for
communication. Bakhtin’s problem with this type of linguistics is that it seems to
posit only one speaker (or type of speaker) who functions without any relations
to other participants. Moreover, in this late essay, he makes the important distinc-
tion between the terms word and utterance. Language tools, such as morphemes,
words, or sentences are neutral and do not express any evaluation. The word and
the sentence, to Bakhtin, are linguistic units, and they are “devoid of expressive
intonation” (p. 85). The intonation is significant throughout Bakhtin’s different
periods as it is the main means of conveying expression, emotion, or evaluating
someone else’s acts or speech. Unlike words and sentences, utterances can im-
part new meaning, can assume new signifying position exactly because of their
inherent nature to be expressive. “Thus, emotion, evaluation, and expression are
foreign to the word of language and are born only in the process of its live usage
in a concrete utterance,” writes Bakhtin (ibid., p. 87).
Although words are neutral, utterances can never be indifferent to oth-
er utterances; they are always responses to other utterances. At the same time,
Bakhtin warns that responses should not be taken literally. Our utterances may
be responses to different socio-ideological positions rather than verbal structures.
Therefore, the major characteristic of Bakhtin’s utterance and what distinguishes
it from words and sentences in the system of language is its addressivity. There is a
complex connection between utterances, their speaker as the author, and real-life
activity. Bakhtin elaborates on the relationships between these:
An essential… marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone,
its addressivity. As distinct from the signifying units of a language – words and
sentences – that are impersonal, belonging to nobody and addressed to nobody,
the utterance has both an author… and an addressee. This addressee can be an
immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue… opponents and
enemies, a subordinate, a superior… and so forth. And it can also be an indefi-
nite, unconcretized other…. (p. 95)
I believe that this last relationship – the relationship between the self and an ab-
stract, non-concrete other – is the most defining in Bakhtin’s philosophy of lan-
guage and the human subject.
The utterance, in its very concrete form in Bakhtin’s late essays, epitomizes
the notion of human responsibility that runs through the core of all his writings.
It has a very moral core, one that Gogotishvili (ibid.) is moved to see as carrying
innately religious and, in particular, Christian overtones. The utterance is what
mediates the social, on one hand, and the individual, on the other. The utterance,
whose “authentic environment” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 273) is produced in the midst
of dialogized heteroglossia – an environment that is drenched with anonymous
voices and social positions – is at the same time filled with specific, concrete con-
tent relevant to the human being who produces it and, importantly, filled with the
unique accent of this human being. In other words, the utterance is the nucleus
that enables the individual to participate in the process of universal dialogue with
different axiological positions as she or he responds to an everyday reality as a re-
sponsible and reflective author. Bakhtin stresses the role of a speaker as a creative
author by pointing out that “Every utterance in this sense has its author, whom we
hear in the very utterance as its creator” (1984, p. 184). Such a philosophy of the
ordinary, everyday subject or speaker as a creative author in his or her own right
makes Bakhtin’s philosophy fairly liberal and democratic.
One of Bakhtin’s most distinct features in outlining a philosophy of language
is that it is not only linguistic or text-based but is also embedded in the events of
everyday life, of everyday life’s prosaics. The neologism prosaics was coined by
Morson and Emerson (1990) to encapsulate two major aspects of Bakhtin’s work.
The first aspect refers to Bakhtin’s shifting the focus from poetics, as Russian For-
malists had previously done, to the genre of the prose and the novel, specifically.
The Bakhtin Circle finds that classic poetic speech is distorted by numerous con-
straints, for example, a sonnet must have a very specific verse structure. The word
itself functions differently in poetry and in prose. In the poetic genre, the relation-
ship between the word and its object is almost all-consuming; the word “forgets”
(Bakhtin, 1981, p. 278) the object’s history and the heteroglossic milieu it comes
from. Instead, the prose writer’s task is to construct the complex and numerous
relations between the object and a multitude of heteroglot voices. Without these
other voices, the novel writer cannot establish his or her own voice. It should
be noted that Bakhtin does not reject poetry as a genre, but to him prosaic dis-
course is much more appealing because it is the practical, economical discourse
of everyday exchanges. He argues that before the emergence of the novel the epic
genres that dominated the literary field were mainly concerned with a mytholo-
gized past. The genre of the novel changes this by possessing the ability to place
the stress on actual historic facts and on embodied, everyday experience.
The prosaic reality of the novel, providing the opportunity for complex and
multiple dialogic relationships, to Bakhtin becomes not merely a genre, but a map
of contemporary life. This leads to the second aspect of the term prosaics, which
refers to Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the everyday as the center of his philoso-
phy of the self. In a ground-laying book for poststructuralism, The Postmodern
Condition, Lyotard (1984) rejected the grand, universal narratives, preferring the
small, local narratives of everyday experiences. Similarly, Bakhtin contemplates
the split between grand theoretical systems and the world of practice and experi-
ence. His philosophy of the self is preoccupied with the small person and his or
her everyday experiences which contain our voices, judgments, and moral values.
This specific feature of his views is what I have found especially applicable to the
analyses of the experiences of adult immigrants in the United States. The intri-
cate relationships between selves and others (concrete as well as abstract), authors
and objects, the notion of the internally dialogized word are all components of
his philosophy of language that allow us to adopt an alternative approach to the
stories that adult immigrants tell. In this book, I have chosen to analyze the nar-
ratives of eight particular adult immigrants. The next section explains why I have
selected the narrative as a genre, and why I think that Bakhtin’s theory of language
provides a dynamic, dialogic tool for narrative discourse analysis.
1.3 Why narratives? Why Bakhtin?
When narratology emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, in a rather structuralist tradi-
tion, it was concerned primarily with analyzing written narrative texts, folklore,
or literary narratives. The sequential nature of narratives was of interest to the
analysts of this period. In their pioneering article, Labov and Waletzky’s (1967)
argued that ordinary people’s texts are important to study as well. Labov and
Waltesky claimed that oral narratives present a special type of discourse. These
early approaches were largely structuralist and were often concerned with gram-
matical features of clauses or with the temporal sequences of events as reported
in narratives. Over the years, narratology has become a truly interdisciplinary
field that approaches narratives from a much broader perspective, where “nar-
rative texts… are all sign systems that organize meanings along narrative lines”
(Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001, p. 4). Narrative has even come to signify not only
texts, but also performative art, such as dance, as well as visual media. Today, nar-
ratology is focused on one important issue – the relationship between narrativity
and the construction of human identity.
“In autobiography, we set forth a view of what we call our Self and its do-
ings, reflections, thoughts, and place in the world,” writes Bruner (2001). Bruner’s
statement on autobiographies captures a critical aspect of the way human subjec-
tivities develop. Narratives are not just stories about the past, but they function as
a cognitive organizer that allows us to establish our identities. Personal narratives
have strongly ascertained their position as an object of study and as a methodol-
ogy across disciplines. Scholars in social and cultural psychology (Bruner, 1986;
Gergen, 2009; Mishler, 1986) and education (Wortham, 2001) have underscored
the relationship between narrativity and human consciousness. For example, to
Bruner, narrative is not just a story; it is a way of human knowing. In the mak-
ings of the self, humans draw on individual memories, feelings, ideas, and beliefs.
At the same time, much of this process is based in implicit cultural expectations
about what we should do or be. In this sense, personal narratives are autobio-
graphic and based on our unique experiences, but they are also a product a par-
ticular culture and evaluated through the prism of this culture’s values and expec-
tations. “A self-making narrative is something of a balancing act,” according to
Bruner (2003, p. 218). It is personal, yet on the other hand, it must relate to oth-
ers – “to friends and family, to institutions” (p. 218). Gergen (2009) also stresses
the relational aspects of selves in story telling as he talks about “the narrating
the we” (p. 179). These observations are strongly reminiscent of French scholar
Barthes’s claim (cited in Polkinghorne, 1988) that narratives perform significant
functions on at least two levels. At an individual level, when people narrate their
own lives, it helps them to construe what they are, where they currently are, and
where their futures are headed. At a cultural level, narrative serves as a transmit-
ter of beliefs and shared values. Bakhtin’s dialogized view of the language and the
self, as outlined above, enables the narrative researcher to exploit exactly this dual
function of the narrative – the interplay between the uniquely autobiographical
(or individual) and the socio-historical.
The role of the narrative in understanding of the self has been so influential
that the whole area of narrative psychology has been developed. Sarbin (1986),
for example, proposes the narratory principle “that human beings think, perceive,
imagine, and make moral choices according to narrative structures” (p. 8). To
Sarbin and others, the narrative is an organizing principle for human action. In
this sense, we each write our own life story; in evaluating our past, we are also
constructing our present selves. Rosenwald and Ochberg (1992) have summa-
rized this value of autobiographical narratives:
How individuals recount their histories – what they emphasize and omit, their
stance as protagonists or victims, the relationship the story establishes between
teller and audience – all shape what individuals can claim of their own lives. Per-
sonal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about one’s life;
they are the means by which identities may be fashioned. (p. 1)
Narrative discourse has long established itself at the center of qualitative research.
In a review chapter, Chase (2005) outlines five different analytical lenses to narra-
tive research. She claims that first, narrative researchers treat narrative discourse
as a special type of discourse, as a way of understanding one’s own and others’
actions in the world. Second, narrative researchers approach narratives as a ver-
bal action rather than as just reports or memories. Third, narrative scholars ac-
knowledge that stories, like human agents, are constrained by social resources
and circumstances. Fourth, to narrative researchers, stories are socially situated
and interactive performance (in other words, a narrative is co-constructed be-
tween the narrator and the listener). And fifth, researchers consider themselves
to be narrators as they interpret and discover ways of presenting their own ideas
about the narratives being studied (ibid., pp. 656–657).
Chase lists a number of researchers and approaches, but I found Bakhtin’s
presence conspicuously missing in her list. I argue that Bakhtin, with his focus
on interactivity and the co-construction of meaning, fits perfectly into the five
analytical lenses outlined by qualitative researchers. In fact, Bakhtin allows quali-
tative researchers to problematize the texts they are studying by looking at the
multi-layered, polyphonic interactions existing not only between the narrator
and the listener, but also in the texts of narrators’ themselves. The voices that
are palpable in narrative research belong not only to the author of the narrative
and the interviewer, for example, but also to others with whom the narrator has
entangled his or her voices or positions. To Bakhtin, the answer to the question,
“Who speaks?” is always at least two voices or two positions – the voice of the
narrator and the voices that are built into the narrative discourse, the concrete or
abstract positions of others. This possibility allows narrative structures to encode
a social analysis and built-in, textual transformation, including the possibility for
a social change.
Recently, narrative research has gained increasing significance in the field of
second language acquisition (e.g., Kouritsin, 2000; Koven, 2004; Pavlenko, 2001;
Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Vitanova, 2004). For instance, acknowledging the role
of narrative approaches to research in psychology and anthropology, Pavlenko
and Lantolf (2000) investigated the formation of identity through the memoirs
of bilingual writers. Pavlenko and Lantolf reject a more traditional, structural ap-
proach to second language acquisition and claim that personal narratives are “a
legitimate source of data on the learning process by teasing out in a theoretically
informed way insights provided by the life stories of people who have struggled
through cultural border crossings” (p. 158). In a recent and remarkably compre-
hensive article, Pavlenko (2007) reviews the burgeoning number of narrative
studies in the field of applied linguistics from a critical perspective. She outlines
three major types of autobiographic narratives, based on how they approach life
reality, subject reality, and text reality. Pavlenko scrutinizes the approach to nar-
rative analysis in each of these groups, and concludes that too many studies rely
on content analysis rather than consider the complex inter-textual potentials in
the texts. The writer recommends that researchers should examine stories as be-
ing co-constructed, and as discursive constructions that are situated in a specific
place in history.
I believe that Bakhtin’s framework of language provides the heuristic and
discursive tools that allow us to incorporate the interactional, cultural, social,
and linguistic components of narrative. Bakhtin’s focus on how we feel and ex-
perience agency in the context of the everyday life is particularly well suited for
the analysis of narrative. Narrative can encapsulate agency through our relations
with the Other, how we position ourselves, and how we disturb or re-arrange
these positions. Because, in Bakhtin’s view, dialogic interaction is built into the
very structure of language, any utterance we make can potentially enter a debate
with different values and positions (Hirschkop, 1998). Tapping into exactly this
dialogic property of Bakhtin’s philosophy makes his concept of narrative identity
distinctive and generative (in other words, the narrative text is a generator of new
meanings and new social evaluative positions). What makes this approach to nar-
rative discourse analysis especially powerful stems from the ability of the narrator
to embed a new meaning within old meaning, or what Bakhtin called double-
voicing. Bakhtin claims that although traditional textual studies don’t recognize
double-voiced discourse (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 185), it should be the central object of

interest for metalinguistics.
The dialogic property of discourse is prevalent in Bakhtin’s metalinguistics.
Dialogic relationships are possible among whole utterances, between language
styles, social dialects, and different semantic positions. A dialogic approach is pos-
sible toward a single, individual word and even within the word itself. The inter-
nal dialogization of the word is one of the chief means through which narratives
gain their potential for generativity and agency. As narrators strive to understand
their own word and their own worldviews, they enter into dialogic relationships
with others. At this moment, the narrator may just acknowledge another’s word
or worldview, but a much more powerful process may take place as well. The nar-
rator may challenge the conceptual position of the other and may construct his or
her position on the very territory of the narrative text. Therefore, when remem-
bering or talking about an event, the narrative text is not a “passive receptacle for
content introduced into it from the outside” (Lotman, 1994), but has become a
generator for new texts and for new, alternative realties. Stylization and parodistic
discourse are concrete examples of double-voiceness in narrative.
Bakhtin’s focus on the small, everyday human acts and the small, seemingly
unimportant, but nevertheless unique ways in which we express our languaged
selves supplies a fruitful ground for analyzing narrative identity. In a framework
that they define as neo-Bakhtinian, Holland and Skinner (1997) attempt to capture
the creative process of the developing self. Introducing the term “lived worlds,”
they claim that just as speakers populate words with their own meaning, humans
construct their worlds culturally and socially, assuming different subject positions
in different contexts and at different stages of the process. Agency is a key compo-
nent of one’s identity, and in this Holland and Skinner describe a neo-Bakhtinian
framework that differs from a traditional one. Holland and Skinner specifically
disagree with Harre and Langenhove’s (ibid.) positioning theory, which equates
the concept of identity with a subject position in discourse. Holland and Skinner
see this view as somewhat simplistic:
Being subjected to such positions, being treated as though one fits such positions,
are crucial events in the individual’s development of identity, but as any devel-
opmental approach would argue, the individual must be recognized as having a
history-in-person. That is, identities are developed over time in experience. They
are not totally redefined at the instant one is exposed to another discourse and a
different subject position. (p. 198)
The two scholars go on to suggest our identity, agency, and lived worlds are co-
developed and interrelated in an ongoing process. Language is a critical aspect of
this co-development. In a rather Bakhtinian fashion, Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner,
and Cain (1998) prefer to employ the notion of figured worlds, which are com-
plex, socially generated realms of interpretations: “A figured world is formed and
re-formed in relation to everyday activities and events” (p. 53). At the same time,
the authors draw a strong parallel between human figured worlds and narratives
of dramatization, implying that language is at the core of all these processes. Their
view is remarkably similar to Bakhtin’s own: By interpreting oneself through nar-
ratives, one can re-interpret and re-author him or herself.
I have found this particular value of narratives and making meaning critical
in my own work with the participants. Narratives have agentive, transformational
powers. By evaluating and naming the world around them, the eight immigrants
in this project claimed their own transformations and asserted their own figured
worlds through acts and discursive practices. The next chapter introduces the
participants the context of the project and describes how the narrative samples
presented in this book were collected.
chapter 2
Introducing the participants

and the setting of qualitative inquiry
One current approach to narrative adopts the view that as we are analyzing texts,
we are not “accessing speakers’ past experiences or their reflections on their past
experiences…. Rather, we study talk” (Bamberg, 2007, p. 165). I found out, how-
ever, that it was impossible to separate the talk produced by the participants in
this project from their personal experiences, the uniqueness of their voices, and
even their personalities. This impossibility fitted Bakhtin’s idea of personal meta-
linguistics. It also fitted the idea that research is a shared, interactional space
where it is not always desirable for the researcher to remain detached from the
participants. My goal was to understand how adult, well-educated, East Euro-
pean immigrants construct their voices in a second language, through second
language discourse, and what role gender plays in the process. I did not wish to
ask direct questions about gender in their lives. Instead, I relied on Bakhtin’s no-
tion that our everyday discourses inevitably contain our judgments, our values,
and ultimately, our selves.
In his Toward the Philosophy of the Act, Bakhtin (1993) bemoans the split
between grand theoretical systems and the world of experience. Indeed, in most
of his works, he suggests that we begin with experience rather than theory, where
values and emotions of concrete human beings are essential in research inquiry.
Current thinkers have also pointed out that we, as researchers, should be respon-
sible for observing how everyday life functions and should seek how they are
interwoven into the relations of a particular society through these lived experi-
ences (Gardiner, 2000; Holland & Skinner, 1997). Trying to capture the dynam-
ic process of the developing self, Holland and Skinner introduce the term lived
worlds. I was interested in exactly these lived worlds of the participants, as they
were authored through the genre of narrative. Through our selection and use of
utterances, we, metaphorically, put our signatures beneath our textual existences,
declare our own discursive spaces as authors of not only words but also of our
actions. Any research, regardless of the topics and methods we choose, becomes
an act of authoring in itself. Through the research questions we choose, through
our participants, and through our methods of inquiry, we attempt to author our
own space in a specific discourse. In a similar vein, when addressing reflexivity in
qualitative research, Denzin (1997) asserts that in our projects, we are, in a way,
our own subjects. The connection between the personal, autobiographical and the
socio-cultural has become especially pronounced in a novel type of qualitative
inquiry called autoethnography. Essentially, it is a self-narrative, in which the re-
searchers examine their own situations in social contexts. Autoethnography em-
phasizes reflexivity and partiality, dialogue as a means of negotiation, and emo-
tions as catalysts for actions (Jones, 2005; Spry, 2001). The study that I describe
here is not the result of autoethnography although autobiographic components,
for example, my own memories and experiences have influenced my theoretical
orientations as well as methodological choices. The selection of participants and
of research questions reflects who we are and could be deeply personal. Being an
immigrant woman myself, I was drawn to the lived experiences of other immi-
grants and their interpretations of immigrant realities. When Vera, for instance,
reminisced on the value of literacy and interest in reading in Russia or on the
translation of many foreign writers, I was reminded of my own experiences in a
different Eastern European country. I vividly recalled the bookcases I had seen in
my own parents’ house or when visiting relatives, whose living rooms proudly dis-
played bookcases and rows of books. There were books written in Bulgarian and
books translated from languages all over the world. One of my earliest memories
as a child is of me browsing through the luxurious collections of fairy tales from
France, Germany, or Russia. My grandfather, without a college education himself,
used to read Jules Verne for pleasure, and I remember my mother’s passionate
descriptions of the plot of Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
As qualitative researchers, we consciously or subconsciously pursue questions
that are relevant to ourselves. At the same time, Bakhtin would urge researchers
to be morally responsible, to become advocates and agents for the human be-
ings with whom we engage. We are analyzing someone else’s experiences not only
because we might try to understand our own, but to give these specific others a
voice, to allow a certain group or population to claim a position on the map of
social discourses. In this view, research can become an expression of subjectivity
and an authoring act itself. Below, I describe the setting in which the narrative
examples were collected and the participants who authored them.
2.1 The participants
This study was conducted in a large Midwestern city in the United States. I was
interested in working with highly educated Eastern European couples, and the
nature of my qualitative inquiry encouraged purposeful sampling. I chose to in-
vestigate couples because one of my goals was to explore how gender emerges as a
Chapter 2. Introducing the participants and the setting of qualitative inquiry 37
factor in their discourse and in developing second-language subjectivity. In other

words, I was interested not only in their stories, but also in the ways they inter-
acted with each other. In introducing the participants below, I also sketch their
literacy backgrounds and practices, as the latter are important in understanding
their socio-cultural positionings in their first language. Emerson (1997), speaking
generally of education in the former Soviet Union, observes that at least until the
1990s, the Soviets were probably “the most reading people” (p. 34). This fact is not
unimportant, as it means that Russian and other Eastern European immigrants
are usually educated and well-read. Basoc and Robert (1991), for instance, report
that the immigrants from Russia and Ukraine are typically professionals in their
home countries and that, in 1990, one in six former Soviet immigrants held an
occupation such as medical doctor, engineer, or scientist. This level of education
distinguishes them from other, more frequently researched immigrant popula-
tions in the United States.
Four East European couples participated in this study: Vera and Aleksei,
Sylvia and Boris, Lydia and Peter, and Natalia and Dmitry. All of the participants,
except for Natalia, who was in her third year of college when she left Ukraine, held
higher education degrees.
2.1.1 Vera and Aleksei*
Vera and Aleksei were the first couple with whom I met. I met them accidentally
at the bureau of motor vehicles while I was renewing my driver’s license, and Vera
was getting her first American one. As I was waiting in the long line, I heard Vera
and Aleksei talking in Russian. We struck up a brief conversation and exchanged
phone numbers. It turned out that Vera and her husband were newcomers to the
city and the United States, and they were interested in establishing connections
with people who had lived in this area longer. The fact that I was originally from
Eastern Europe intrigued Vera, and she said that she would like the opportunity
to use English more often with someone. After our initial encounter, Vera and I
both got fairly busy so we did not have the chance to meet immediately. Once I
started considering participants for my study, however, I contacted Vera, and she
enthusiastically agreed to meet for an initial, informal interview.
Vera and Aleksei were in their early fifties when I met them. Vera was not
a tall woman, but her dark eyes sparkled with intelligence, and there was an
unmistakable aura of determination and purpose about her. The couple had re-
cently arrived in the United States from Russia. In their small hometown, Vera
*. These are not the participants’ real names and only pseudonyms have been used in the book.
had worked as a television and radio journalist and, at an earlier point of her life,
she had also worked as a Spanish language teacher. Vera described her first job in
the United States as a kitchen manager. She did that for several years, and her re-
sponsibilities varied widely from purchasing groceries to managing workers and
social gatherings. Aleksei had been a physical education teacher and a basketball
coach in his native Russia. In his new immigrant country, he was employed as a
mechanic at a local factory. The couple had a son in his early twenties, who was
not living with them. I saw him only infrequently, and he was not part of this
project. Shortly after I met the family, he decided to return to Russia because of
a better job opportunity.
When I first met Vera and Aleksei, they had been in the United States for ap-
proximately six months. Vera had studied English for a short time formally with a
teacher before she left Russia, but mostly she had acquired her knowledge of Eng-
lish by herself, according to her own words. Aleksei had acquired only isolated
words when we met. After her arrival in the United States, Vera started taking
a free English course for several months, which I attended with her a few times.
The course stressed basic structures and grammar and allowed for little authentic
interaction between the English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners who were
primarily Russian speakers. I don’t know whether it was related to my presence,
but at least when I was accompanying her, Vera was one of the most active stu-
dents there. If the teacher had a question, she was among the first to volunteer
an answer. She was not always correct, but she was eager to participate in the
somewhat restricted practices of her ESL-classroom community. It seemed that
she knew many of the other learners there. During the brief break, I found her
surrounded by other Russian-speaking women with whom she was conversing
comfortably. Vera attended the free ESL class more frequently in the first months
after her arrival. As she got increasingly busier with work, her attendance became
more sporadic. In her second year of living in the United States, she enrolled in
two courses at a local college “in computers” (an introduction to the application
of computers to business) and an ESL composition class. Aleksei attended the free
ESL class only when his schedule allowed him. Typically, he worked until 7:00
p.m., so this limited his ability to attend. He never took any other courses.
Vera and Aleksei prided themselves on being well-read, highly educated in-
dividuals. In Russia, they had read for professional purposes and for pleasure.
Aleksei, for example, mentioned that he had enjoyed reading history books not
only about Russian history but also about France, Bulgaria, and Romania. Vera
pointed out that, in addition to Russian authors, they had read Alexander Dumas,
Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie in translation. Vera proudly stated that
even “the poorest family in Russia has the books at home.” She noted that she was
surprised to find out that in the United States “doctors, lawyers, and businessmen”
did not read fiction as extensively as the educated elite in Russia. Vera’s social in-
teractions with lawyers and doctors in the United States was limited, however, and
occurred only through her work when she was organizing a party for which her
workplace was hired. Interestingly, nearly all of the participants shared a similar
observation of the Americans with whom they were meeting. This view under-
scores a core value with which she and Aleksei grew up and their social bid at
positioning themselves as intellectuals. For instance, by describing her literacy
practices in her first language, Vera claimed a discursive space among the highly
educated. At the same time, Vera’s and Aleksei’s social positions in the second-
language environment had shifted significantly. Their access to highly-educated
members of their new, English-speaking community was accidental and infre-
quent, primarily through work that served the highly-educated Americans to
whom Vera was referring.
In their new country, Vera and Aleksei did not have to do a lot of reading in
English at work. For pleasure, Aleksei attempted to read the sports section in the
local paper. On one occasion, Vera showed me several English textbooks combin-
ing grammar, short reading passages, and exercises. She claimed that she found
them helpful, but said that her husband had never opened them. Vera often used
these textbooks during the first year of her stay in the United States. After that,
she slowly started trying to read novels and magazines in English. For instance,
she subscribed to a magazine called Cooking Light because she found it useful for
her work. Over the course of our meetings, Vera accumulated a significant num-
ber of cookbooks, magazines, fiction in Russian (original and translated), and a
few paperbacks in English. She said she liked to read them and then “retell” them
to her friends. Once, when I met with her, I brought a book by Maeve Binchy
because I knew liked books about “human relationships.” Vera enthusiastically
accepted the book and, in turn, brought out a paperback, a romance novel. Sev-
eral months after that, however, Vera admitted that as she became increasingly
busy with her job, she found reading fiction in English cumbersome because of
her limited knowledge of vocabulary and syntactic structures. She said that she
was “too tired” to look the words up in the dictionary. Several times she admitted
that she was coming home too late to do anything for herself. If Vera watched
television at all, it was after a long day of work, and she said that she watched only
the news. Aleksei liked watching sports channels and action movies. The latter
were sometimes in English on American television channels and sometimes on
video cassettes in Russian. I never observed them watching a Russian channel in
their household.
Although Vera expressed some frustration that Aleksei did not study English
formally, she immediately added that it was very difficult for him because he had
to get up early every morning, at 5:00 a.m., and he would come tired at home at
around 6:00 p.m. Once, as we talked, Aleksei admitted that he often worked two-
three shifts, and this particular week he had counted 20 hours overtime. Another
night, Vera told me that she herself had worked over 120 hours in the past two
weeks. Once, while I was there, she received a call at around 8:00 p.m. about a
flood in the kitchen, and both she and her husband went to help with the emer-
gency. It seemed that the couple was truly busy, and Vera was not trying to ex-
cuse her husband for not taking advantage of her grammar books or reading in
English. She was describing their everyday reality and a new social situation that
molded how much they could invest in their second language literacy skills.
2.1.2 Sylvia and Boris
Sylvia and Boris were in their late forties when I met them. They had moved to the
U.S. from Ukraine. Sylvia had a degree in communication engineering. Boris had
worked as an architect in his home country. After arriving in the United States,
Boris got a job as a construction worker. Sylvia stayed home for a few months, be-
fore she accepted her first job as a “fitting room helper” at a TJ Maxx store, where
her duties were to pick up the clothes left by customers and arrange them back
in their positions. Toward the end of the project, after having taken a couple of
courses in basic computer literacy, Sylvia took a job as a clerk at a bank. Her duties
there were related mainly to entering computer data and did not involve interac-
tions with customers. Sylvia and Boris had come to the United States with their
two married daughters, Natalia and Lydia, both in their twenties, who lived with
their respective husbands. Sylvia and Boris readily admitted that they came to the
United States “with open eyes.” They knew that it would not be easy for them, but
they wanted to provide their young daughters with better opportunities than they
would have had in Ukraine. Both Sylvia and Boris, and Vera and Aleksei moved to
this particular area of the United States because they already had relatives there.
Sylvia and Boris shared their small apartment with Sylvia’s elderly mother. Boris
had studied German in Ukraine, and he knew no English except for a few isolated
words when he arrived in the United States. Sylvia had studied some English in
college, but she said that she didn’t remember much when she arrived.
I met Sylvia, Boris, and Charlotta, Sylvia’s mother, through Natalia, who was
a student in one of the ESL courses I was teaching. Sylvia and Boris were quiet
and personable. They were glad to become part of the project as this allowed them
to use English with me – an opportunity they didn’t have during the first couple
of months of living here. Charlotta, who didn’t leave the house except to visit
her doctor, welcomed the chance to speak with someone in English as well. She
liked telling me stories (in Russian) about her life and her experience during the
Second World War as I tutored her in basic English. Charlotta was tiny, very intel-
ligent, and one of the most eager ESL learners I have ever had. The furniture in
Sylvia and Boris’s apartment was not new, but Sylvia kept everything meticulously
clean and tidy.
Sylvia, like Vera, enjoyed reading fiction in her native country. Very much like
Vera, she shared with me her surprise that the Americans whom she met were not
familiar with some of her favorite writers like Theodore Dreiser or John Steinbeck.
She had read these authors in translation, and to her, they were classics. Sylvia and
Vera were the only participants who attempted to read in English for pleasure, but
this was an occasional practice, and both women preferred to read books trans-
lated into Russian, which they ordered from special Internet sites. One of the first
books Sylvia tried to read in English was a book she had already read in Russian
(a novel by Agatha Christie), and it helped her follow the story line. Sylvia, like
Vera, had a number of English grammar textbooks, specifically designed for Rus-
sian learners. During the first year of her stay in the United States, Sylvia attended
the same free ESL course that Vera was taking, but because of her work and family
obligations, she could not attend regularly. Boris attended only infrequently. By
his own admission, he didn’t try to read “Sylvia’s” grammar books.
Although they preferred to read in Russian, Sylvia and Boris, like the other
participants, found that they had to read in English for very practical purposes
as they encountered utility bills, credit card statements, immigration documents,
and job applications. Although the two younger couples – Natalia and Dmitri,
and Lydia and Peter – adjusted to the format of the new official forms and docu-
ments relatively quickly, this process was more problematic for Sylvia and Boris,
and Vera and Aleksei. Indeed, Boris revealed that in the beginning he couldn’t
understand anything that arrived in the mail, and at this initial stage, he asked
“the kids” to help him with bills. A year after his arrival, however, he announced
that he was the one in the family who now took care of the mail at home. Similar
to Aleksei, Boris didn’t have much time to read in English for pleasure. He worked
long hours at his labor-intensive job, and whenever I met with the couple at night,
he looked tired. His new job didn’t require any reading skills in English. Sylvia
attempted to read the major local newspaper, particularly the classifieds, as she
frequently scanned it for job ads. Once when I walked into their apartment, I no-
ticed that a Russian television channel was on. Sylvia and Boris said that they had
initially subscribed to it because Charlotta did not understand any English, but
that now the couple rarely watched any American channels, either.
2.1.3 Natalia and Dmitri
I met Natalia when she was a student in one of my ESL classes. Once the term was
over, I asked her whether she and her husband, would participate in my study.
They both agreed. Later, when I found that Natalia’s parents (Sylvia and Boris)
and sister were also in the United States, I invited them to participate as well.
They all eagerly accepted. One of the reasons, as Sylvia later explained, was that
they rarely had a chance to engage in an informal conversation in English, so they
welcomed the opportunity to interact in someone in the second language. Natalia
and Dmitri were in their mid-twenties. Dmitri already held the equivalent of a
bachelor’s degree in computer science from a Ukrainian university; however, he
decided to obtain a similar degree from an American university. Natalia had been
studying finance when her family decided to leave Ukraine. She continued with
her studies in the same field in the United States as a part-time student. To help
support herself, she worked at two part-time jobs: as a receptionist at a small le-
gal firm and as a server at a local restaurant. Dmitri was also a part-time student
while he worked as a server during the first year of his stay in the United States.
During their first year here, they both worked as servers at the same restaurant
with varying hours during the week. Sometimes they worked two or three hours
a day, and sometimes eight. Later, Dmitri found a full-time job as a programmer
and continued with his part-time studies.
Both Natalia and Dmitri had studied some English formally in college in
Ukraine, but they said that their studies were limited. They both had to pass the
TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) before they were accepted at an
American university. Both said that they were not enthusiastic about studying
grammar. For instance, Natalia described her knowledge of grammar as theoreti-
cal, rather than something she can apply to everyday use. In the States, she rarely
referred to grammar guides and opened them only when her ESL writing classes
required her to do so. Her husband, who didn’t take ESL courses, mentioned that
he didn’t study grammar formally, except for his TOEFL preparation. For one of
the New Year’s holidays, which were very important to Natalia and Dmitri, I gave
them a small gift – an English CD ROM dictionary and a short grammar refer-
ence book. Several months after that, Natalia mentioned that Dmitri had read the
book and was now testing her about grammar details. Nalalia and Dmitri, who
were both taking classes at a local university (different classes in different colleges
for their respective majors) read for school purposes exclusively in English. Nata-
lia noted that she also read the local newspaper and fashion magazines occasion-
ally. When I asked Dmitri whether he read any journals related to his professional
field, he acknowledged that he didn’t know any and had not looked for them yet.
Dmitri regularly read the news in Russian on Internet sites. I did not see fiction
books in English at their apartment.
2.1.4 Lydia and Peter
Natalia’s sister, Lydia, immigrated with the rest of her family and with her hus-
band, Peter, also from Ukraine. When she arrived in the United States, Lydia had
just earned her Ukrainian engineering degree. Peter held a B.S. in computer sci-
ence. When I met with the couple, Lydia was a pursuing a master’s degree in com-
puter science in her new immigrant city and was working part-time as a program-
mer for a small local company. Her husband was employed full time by the same
company. Lydia had studied grammar formally in Ukraine as she was preparing
for the TOEFL. In the United States, Lydia admitted that she didn’t have time to
open grammar books. Her classes at the university and her part-time job took up
most of her schedule. Like Boris, Aleksei, and Dmitri, Peter’s approach to English
as a second language was more experiential, rather than formal or studious and
dependent on the context. In other words, he was describing his learning of Eng-
lish more as “a feeling.” Peter had difficulty providing an example of how he was
acquiring grammar notions or other abstract distinctions.
Lydia and Peter, like the rest of the participants, had to read in English. In
addition to reading texts assigned for her university courses, Lydia read other
technical literature, for instance, computer manuals. Both she and Peter liked to
read English articles on the Internet. Although they preferred reading the inter-
national news and professional, computer-related materials, they also showed me
web sites related to American culture. Lydia also remarked that, in Ukraine, she
liked to read American fashion magazines like Cosmopolitan and would exchange
issues with female friends. She seemed slightly embarrassed about this as she ex-
plained that, in her home country, such American magazines were curious novel-
ties and one of the links to American culture. Lydia pointed out that she doesn’t
read Cosmopolitan any longer.
All of the participants had library cards. All of them, at some point, shared
that they attempted to read fiction in English or would love to be able to read for
pleasure fluently. However, some of them indicated that reading in English was
not always a pleasurable activity because of their limitations in English. Lydia, for
instance, said that she preferred to read fiction in Russian than English, but she
also pointed out that she found foreign literature (in translation) more interesting
than Russian authors. Very much like Sylvia and Vera, Lydia had read and enjoyed
classic writers like Jack London, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway. How-
ever, she preferred to read them in translation because as she said, “I read books
to relax,” and reading in English was not always relaxing, at least not to these
participants who were recent immigrants in the United States, who didn’t have an
extensive formal training in the second language, and who juggled work, school,
and family obligations in a new socio-cultural environment.
Vera’s and Sylvia’s comments revealed, at least for the older participants, a
drastic shift from intellectuals’ positions in their home countries to positions as
manual workers or lower-middle class in the immigrant country.
2.2 Collection of narrative examples
Defining narrative has become increasingly difficult in a postmodern world of dis-

course. Discourse analysts’ ideas of what constitutes a narrative have shifted from
the traditional life story where the speaker produces a temporal, well-organized
and sequenced structure of reported events to everyday, conversational exchanges
between speakers and small stories. Here, I am employing the term small stories
in the way Bamberg (2004) introduces it and Georgakopoulou (2007) elaborates
on it as narrative data produced not only in research interviews but also in casual
conversations. The narrative examples I collected resembled more strongly inter-
actions between interlocutors engaged in a dialogue.
Franklin (1997) outlines three models of the interview process and narra-
tive telling: the information extraction, shared understanding, and the discourse
model. In the first, the researcher is focused on collecting ideas and feelings
from the interviewee. This fairly traditional, objective model positions the in-
terviewer as the more active part of the process and the one with greater power.
The second type, shared understanding, is built on idea that the interviewer and
her/his interviewees are guided by some similar experiences, and the interview-
er’s personal characteristics are influencing the content of the interview. The
third, discourse model, views the interview process as an interaction rather than
a guided monologue. The power relations between the researcher and the par-
ticipants are more balanced, and the interview is a result of collaboration. In my
work, I have built extensively on the last two models. Shared understanding was
implicit from the very beginning. My Eastern European origin and my knowl-
edge of Eastern European languages created an immediate link between me and
the participants. This strengthened my role as an insider, someone who can
comprehend their experiences and struggles. Examples of the discourse model
are frequent as well. For instance, my contributions were not only expected, but
also required by the participants. Shifting the roles between an interviewer and
interviewee was not unusual as the participants might pose a direct question to
me, as in “And how did Americans treat you?” I preferred these interactions as
they gave the participants the opportunity to elect topics that were most signifi-
cant to them. In Bakhtinian terms, I welcomed their self-revelation in “a free
act of self-consciousness and discourse” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 58), which was, at its
core, a form of authorship.
Data collection for this study lasted for a little over two years. The most im-
portant part of the narratives was collected between 1999 and 2001 although I
continued to communicate sporadically with the couples after that period as well.
Each interview was tape-recorded and transcribed soon after it had occurred. The
interviews were conducted in English because, although I understand Russian
fairly well, it is not my native language, and because I also wanted to hear how
the participants used English as a second language. Nevertheless, all of the par-
ticipants switched to Russian at numerous points of our conversations, and some
portions of the transcripts were completely in Russian. The initial interviews were
semi-structured, as I had a prepared list of questions for the participants. This
quickly changed as the participants would often choose their topics of discussion
themselves, deciding to bring up an event that happened either at home, at work,
or school, and that was relevant to their use of English or to their lives as immi-
grants. In many cases, for instance, when we met, Sylvia, Vera, or Lydia would
exclaim, “Oh, this is what I’ve wanted to tell you!” or “Something happened, and
I thought, ‘Oh, I should mention this to Gergana.”
I met with each of the couples at their homes, typically at night and after
their work. I attempted to interview the participants as couples, hoping that the
interaction between the spouses would lend insight into issues of gender. Nev-
ertheless, because of the families’ busy schedules, I had to conduct several of the
interviews individually. Other sources of data were observations at the families’
homes, at social gatherings they organized, at ESL classes they attended, and
even a couple of observations at their work environments (for Vera and Sylvia
only, as observations at work were not desired generally by the participants or
their employers). Observation was not the main goal as I was visiting with the
couples; instead, it served as a secondary source of data gathering and as a way of
triangulating the narratives. Thus, although observation notes and preliminary
written questionnaires were also available, the excerpts that follow come from
the participants’ narratives.
During the data collection, my own roles have been multiple. My initial, oral
introductions to the participants positioned me as a qualitative researcher from
a specific institution in the Midwest who was interested in how Eastern Europe-
an immigrants’ acquisition of English and in the socio-psychological factors that
shape their identity in the process of second language learning. The informal roles
I assumed were more complicated. For example, Vera welcomed me into her home
as a younger woman from Eastern Europe who needed help with a project. Gradu-
ally, Vera came to perceive me as a friend, somebody with whom she could speak
English, who could understand her native language and could empathize with her.
It was not rare that during some of my visits with her we would engage in a casual
conversation about personal issues such as our families and even hairstylists.
To all four couples, I was an understanding and sympathetic listener with

whom they could share intimate impressions about American culture and their
personal experiences. Often, our meetings contained a therapeutic overtone. The
rapport between me and the participants was undoubtedly fostered by my own
background as an immigrant from Eastern Europe. These shifting roles in quali-
tative research are punctuated by the concept of reflexivity, which, according to
Davies (1999) represents the breaking of the boundaries between authors and
texts. “In its most transparent guise,” Davies points out, “reflexivity expresses re-
searchers’ awareness of their necessary connection to the research situation and
hence their effects upon it” (p. 7). To Marcus (1998), “reflexivity is associated
with the self-critique and personal quest, playing on the subjective, the experi-
ential, and the idea of empathy” (p. 359). Reflexivity was central in establishing
and maintaining rapport, particularly with the female participants in this project.
They were the ones who would participate more actively and who would take it
up upon themselves to contact me or, in general, to carry on the communica-
tion between the couples and me. In a number of ways, researchers’ investment
in projects – the selection of topics and participants – reflects our own values or
memories as human beings.
One simple example comes from the sense of connection I felt to Charlotta,
Sylvia’s elderly mother, whose physical appearance and demeanor reminded me
of my own grandmother. I volunteered to tutor Charlotta, who proved to be an
enthusiastic learner, in basic English, and I, too, came to look forward to our
meetings. Another example stems from the parallels I was able to draw between
the participants’ beliefs about literacy and my own experience as a child in East-
ern Europe. Like the participants in this study, the larger community in which I
grew up also valued education; for instance, most parents wanted their children to
succeed and saw education as a key to success. Even in their first, relatively small
rental apartments, Vera and Sylvia had displayed shelves full of books, mostly in
Russian, but some in English as well. Sylvia’s and Boris’s faces beamed with pride
when they spoke of their daughters who took “classes at the university.” In one
interaction with Natalia and Dmitri, Natalia revealed a clear connection between
what they considered to be a successful immigrant and formal education:
Different immigrants think that / to be successful / how to say that? Do you think
that / even if you go to / to work I don’t know / not qualified job you are success-
ful. It’s / different type of people. Some people think that even if at 40 or 50 [years
of age] they have to go to got some / some degree. And some people / don’t feel
that way. Just it depends on people.
There was no doubt for Natalia and Dmitri that to be successful, they had to ob-
tain formal degrees in their new countries. They claimed this even as Dmitri was
saying that studying and working in the United States was “no fun.” Education
was a central value in the lives of the participants in this project, and for them it
became an important way of enacting agency as second language speakers.
The four families lived in the same neighborhood of the city. At the time of
my meetings with the participants, the city records showed that the neighbor-
hood was a home to 2,309 residents. There was no specific information about dif-
ferent immigrant groups, and the neighborhood’s community center was not able
to provide any. The neighborhood was a racially diverse inner-city area, which
was also the home for many of the newly-arrived Russian-speaking immigrants
in the city.
Lydia and Peter’s apartment was on the same street as Natalia and Dmitri’s.
Driving along the street, one could see a series of three-story identical apartment
buildings, distinguishable only by the different numbers on the façade. These
apartment buildings represented the typical dwellings in the area. In the winter,
after 6:00 p.m., the streets were dark and quiet, with no people visible anywhere
and with a long string of cars parked alongside the road. However, in spring and
in summertime, the rectangular grass areas in front of the buildings were full of
young African American or Russian-speaking children playing and adults watch-
ing them from the small porches or stairs leading to the buildings. Although there
were small shops and restaurants in the more central part of the neighborhood,
they never seemed to have a lot of visitors and did not look particularly inviting.
The participants admitted that they never visited those shops or restaurants and
preferred to drive to other parts of town. One article in a local newspaper re-
ported at the time that even the existing businesses were rapidly disappearing and
that the area had seen an increase of gang-related problems.
The apartments in which the four families lived were fairly similar in terms of
size and layout. Vera and Aleksei lived in a two-bedroom apartment, which Vera
had tastefully decorated with art that she brought from Russia. There were beau-
tiful vases on coffee tables and decorative plates on the walls in the living room.
Whenever I visited, Vera had fresh flowers in the living room. She mentioned
once that her husband was buying them for her. Vera had also displayed a collec-
tion of fine glasses and ceramics that she had brought with her from Europe. She
was particularly proud of the elegant tall glasses she had purchased in Bohemia.
Whenever she traveled in the United States, she would look for and bring some
souvenirs from the area she visited, along with travel guides. The second bed-
room was intended for their twenty-something-year-old son who worked and
lived in Russia and who visited occasionally, but in reality, Vera used it as a study.
The Russian and English books that filled the bookshelves were displayed in this
room. Sylvia and Boris also had a two-bedroom apartment, which they shared
with Charlotta. There were several bookshelves in the living room, but not a lot
of decorations. The furniture in their apartment was second-hand and worn-out;

however, it was always meticulously clean and neat.
The younger couples – Lydia and Peter and Natalia and Dmitri – lived in
nearly identical one-bedroom apartments where college textbooks and computer
desks occupied a central place in both living rooms. The apartments in the area
were not luxurious, but they were bright with light, and their residents made them
look welcoming. I maintained a sporadic communication with the participants,
particularly with Vera and Sylvia, after the two-year period of data collection,
even after I relocated to a different geographic area. Soon after the completion
of the study, all of the participants moved out of this particular neighborhood to
different areas of the city. Vera and Aleksei purchased their own townhouse, and
Sylvia and Boris bought a single-family home in a working-class neighborhood.
Lydia, Peter, and Natalia had completed their college degrees, and Dmitri was
finishing his own.
chapter 3
Positionings in the second language

Gender, power, and emotion
The notion of positions is well established in poststructuralist discourses of iden-

tity today although as a concept it has its roots in earlier theoretical frameworks.
For instance, it could be traced back to Goffman’s description of the social norms
involved in the ways humans negotiate their spoken interactions (1967, 1971). The
manner in which the interaction is conducted shapes the relationships between
the interlocutors and determines, to a considerable extent, the power each speak-
er assumes within a verbal exchange. As a unit of his analyses, Goffman looks
specifically at the one-on-one type of conversation. When discursive psycholo-
gists introduced the more elaborate concept of positioning, they looked beyond
the immediate level of the conversation and at discourses as more general units.
Largely speaking, positioning could be viewed in terms of the orientations of in-
dividuals toward the world around them. A more elaborate approach to position-
ing comes from positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 1990; Harre & Langenhove,
1999) where positioning is defined as “the discursive process whereby selves are
located in conversations as observably and subjectively coherent participants in
jointly produced story lines” (Davies & Harre, 1990, p. 48). Positioning could be
both interactive, in which one person positions another, or it could be reflexive,
where the speaker positions herself or himself. Although positional theory takes
conversations as its starting point, its supporters make it clear that autobiogra-
phies or lived narratives can function as the discursive locations of positioning,
as well. The important role of language in positioning theory parallels the one of
discourse in poststructuralist theory.
In poststructuralist theory, one positions him or herself through language,
where relations within discourse and even the self ’s relation to language (Bourdieu
& Passeron, 1990) play a major role. The terms subject, subjectivity, and subject
positions are key ones to poststructuralists. Discourse and power are intimately
intertwined in poststructural thought, and feminists have eagerly embraced them
to show how these two operate in the construction of gender as a social category.
Feminist poststructuralist Weedon summarizes the essence of subjectivity as “the
conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of
herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world” (Weedon, 1987,
p. 32). In this framework, subject positions are ones from which language and
thoughts themselves appear to emerge. It is not possible to separate relations from
power and from discourse, as power is defined as a form of relation, and, simul-
taneously, as what structures the relations between subjects within institutional
discourses. Thus, subjectivity is an inherently socio-ideological concept.
The Bakhtin Circle similarly underscored the social nature of discourse.
“Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal dis-
course is a social phenomenon – social throughout its entire range and in each
and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract
meaning,” Bakhtin (1981, p. 259) explained in his effort to bring closer what he
saw as a formal, linguistic analysis of texts and a more socially-based approach. In
“Discourse in the Novel” (1981), he elaborates on the view of language as imbued
with ideological meaning or language as a worldview. Language is underlain by
tension, however, as some languages or dialects – social or professional – attempt
to dominate others, and there are centripetal (or centralizing) as well as centrifu-
gal (or decentralizing) forces operating at the same time. Words, utterances, and
discourses themselves can never function in a vacuum; individual utterances are
always oriented or directed to other words or judgments. Bakhtin situates this
intrinsic tension between discourses within multiple relationships because each
utterance, in his framework, expresses not merely grammatical form and func-
tion, but also understanding of the world itself:
The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-
filled environment of alien word, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out
of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects
with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a
trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its
entire stylistic profile. (ibid., p. 276)
The utterances we use in everyday life acquire their meaning in a particular social
and historical environment through the encounter with thousands of other utter-
ances. In his work on Dostoevsky (which reflects his most mature conception of
dialogue), Bakhtin emphasizes the famous writer’s talent to perceive not only in-
dividual voices, but the dialogical relations among them, their dialogical interac-
tion. Some of the voices are dominant and loud in these interactive relationships.
Others are significantly more subdued and weak. Not unlike poststructuralists,
Bakhtin acknowledges the linguistic struggle for power and rejects the possibility
of neutrality in language. This is reflected in his locating utterances within a socio-
ideological realm, brushing up with other dialogical threads. It is also reflected in
his concept of the carnival, which, as revealed in Zavala’s (1990) interpretation,
helps illustrate the impossibility of language neutrality:
Chapter 3. Positionings in the second language 51
The carnival is a linguistic market-place, the site of linguistic exchange, where

speakers are constrained in their own interests. The ambivalence of the carnival
representation suggests the inscription of a social economics and deploys the in-
terests of the speakers and the listeners and how these interests are subverted as
speakers and listeners exchange space (and images). (p. 83)
Interestingly, Zavala’s reference to language as a market for social relations closely

mirrors Bourdieu’s (1991), who writes of the economics of linguistic transactions
where discourses or utterances are the products, and speakers are their producers.
As in any other market system, not all products are valued equally, and Bourdieu
specifies that, “The value of the utterance depends on the relation of power that
is concretely established between speakers’ linguistic competencies, understood
both as their capacity for production and as their capacity appropriation and ap-
preciation” (p. 67). These relations of power which imbue the linguistic market-
place give to some linguistic competencies the value of being legitimate or privi-
leged, authorized discourses and to others the value of being illegitimate. The
social standing of the self is positioned by the linguistic plane, or discourses, it
occupies, and language determines the person’s worth. Bourdieu explains:
The sense of the value of one’s linguistic products is a fundamental dimension of
the sense of knowing the place which one occupies in the social space. One’s orig-
inal relation with different markets and the experience of the sanctions applied
to one’s own productions, together with the experience of the price attributed to
one’s own body, are doubtless some of the mediations which help to constitute
that sense of one’s social worth which governs the practical relation to different
markets (shyness, confidence, etc.) and, more generally, one’s whole physical pos-
ture in the social world. (p. 82)
What happens when our words encounter the words of another? What happens
to immigrants, who may lack not only access to the prestigious, privileged dis-
courses within their new communities, but also to basic linguistic resources?
What is their sense of social worth as determined by their second language skills,
and what emotions emerge in this process? How are they positioned by the dis-
courses of others, and how do they position themselves within a multitude of
competing, agitated discourses? This chapter examines how the participants’ dis-
cursive practices in the second language mediate their social positionings. Their
narrative experiences illustrate the complex interplay between social power, dis-
course, and gender.
3.1 “I am like in the kindergarten”: In the discourse of silence
Reflecting on the fate of foreigners, caught not only between two different dis-
courses and cultures, but also between two entirely different linguistic systems,
Julia Kristeva (1991) wrote:
Not speaking one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning that
are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber
of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped
child…Thus, between two languages, your realm is silence. (p. 15)
From a discursive point of view, the self is constituted through voicing itself with-
in a particular context. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, Gagnon
(1992) contends that, “The self is composed of voices in conversations, voices that
are given names and among whom there are rules for who speaks and in what
order” (p. 231). To Bakhtin, dialogue and, thus, discourse, is the most important
medium through which the self becomes realized. The amalgamation between
voice and self is essential to this study. In Bakhtin’s (1993) work, as Chapter Two
points out, voice is not just a reflection of societal codes and discourses, but al-
ways contains an emotional-volitional tone (i.e., the emotions, desires, and ethics
of the speaker). Tone carries the uniqueness of the speaker, his or her individu-
ality and past experiences and according to Bakhtin, is impossible to separate
from thought. In fact, tone is what allows us to unlock the potential meaning of a
thought and a human act (Bakhtin, 1993).
The eight participants in this research study were highly educated, and they
positioned themselves as “intellectuals.” Well-read, they were familiar not only
with Russian literature, but also prided themselves on having read a number of
classic Western authors in translation. Although all had briefly studied English
in college or high school, except for Boris, who had studied German, the par-
ticipants felt that they lost their voices upon coming to the United States. The
two older couples, who didn’t have as many educational opportunities as the two
younger ones, experienced this sense of loss much more profoundly. Indeed, all
of the participants reflected on it. Peter defined himself and Lydia as part of intel-
ligentsia in their home country. He said that they were “technical intelligence”
(technical intellectuals) back in Ukraine, and his wife quickly added that they
were “professionals.” As adults, Peter, Lydia, and the other immigrants had al-
ready formed both a sense of social values and their own societal worth. They
were intellectuals in their home countries; moreover, they were articulate users of
their native language. Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) argue that no one “acquires a
language without… acquiring a relation to language” (p. 116), and often, class dif-
ferences could be identified exactly in the way linguistic differences are displayed
by users of the language. Lydia and Peter demonstrated a keen awareness of the
links between one’s social status, level of education, and the linguistic choices
speakers are making, or rather, their ability to make these linguistic choices. Their
perception of how an educated person should speak was very clearly defined, as
revealed in the following exchange:
Lydia: If you are language carrier… can I say that?
Gergana: Carrier?
Lydia: You have native language / you have to speak / you know / pure
language. That means pure culture.
…
Lydia: … And also / of course I should use more / you know sophisticated
words.
Gergana: In everyday language?
Lydia: Even in everyday / show your level of education==I think so….
Gergana: Was that the same for you in Russian?
Lydia: (exclaims) Yes! Uneducated people / they speak like plain language /
nothing special / but if you / got higher education / you speak a little /
you know / literate….
As I have pointed out earlier, education was one of the most important values to
all of the participants. They perceived themselves as possessing higher levels of
this particular symbolic capital, as well as other forms of it (for example, knowl-
edge of world literature, world history, or art). The lack of linguistic resources in
the second language, however, disturbed their sense of social worth and, even
though they still possessed all of the forms of symbolic capital with which they
arrived, and their values remained similar, they found their perceptions of their
positions shifting rapidly. To Lydia and Peter, the second language they spoke
was a clear indication of the loss of status they perceived as immigrants. Peter, for
instance, commented on his awareness that his grammar or pronunciation were
not always correct:
Peter: And people and people hearing that… I think / for me for me / it’s
mm I feel myself uncomfortable. If I have feeling that / I’m speaking
wrong / wrong language. And you know / you fell yourself / it’s mmm
[…] There’s like a classes of people / and depend on this class […]
people speaking other language.
Lydia: Different.
Peter: Different different language. Sorry…
Gergana: You mean like different dialects of the same language?
Peter: No no dialect / different / the language is the same it’s English. But
uhh / every level of people / every level of education [speaks a different
language]… And back in the Ukraine we were like mm / technical
intelligence….
At the time of this interaction, Peter and Lydia were employed as computer pro-
grammers for a company in the United States, so strictly speaking, they were
still part of the technical intelligentsia. Yet, their words reveal that the jobs they
held did not give them the same social status they believed they had enjoyed in
Ukraine. As an important status indicator, they named the ability to use the Eng-
lish language fluently and with grammatical precision: “sophisticated words” were
part of this relation to language, along with grammar details, mentioned by Lydia,
such as the “sequence of tenses” in the sentence. Although the pair had never
studied socio-linguistics or sociology, their understanding of the relationship be-
tween social class and language use was unequivocal.
Fifty-year-old Vera, who at an earlier point of her life had worked as a Spanish
language teacher and, later, worked as a journalist for a long time, and whose ca-
reer had always demanded precise language use, felt the loss of voice particularly
painfully. Vera said during one of our earliest conversations:
Do you know / I’m a teacher / and all my life / and then I work like a journalist /
and all my life / I mm / I hear my language / and after mm after say one word /
I think / how I need to=how I need to say it. And now? I am / I am like in the
kindergarten. I think that / in the kindergarten / that people mm spoke / no no
spoke=speak! better than I.
Vera, an articulate language user in her first language, became a kitchen manager.
During our first interview, she shared:
I had a very, very interesting job. I liked my job. And I understand that here I
cannot work as a journalist because I don’t know English good. So good that I can
work a journalist. I understand…
At the same time, Vera felt torn between the new position assigned to her and
how she saw herself in relation to others. The contradiction is clear in the follow-
ing segment, where Vera reflected on her superior education:
And sometimes I feel that am a little higher / than these people [her new Ameri-
can colleagues]. Ne potomu-shto ya hochu sebya kakto-tam [It’s not because I want
to see myself this way / prosto ya viju [I can just see.] I see that their level is not
very high. I cannot say about all the people no no no!
The contradiction arises not only from the discrepancy of how the others posi-
tion her and her educational background, but also from the richness of her lived
experiences. Talking about the past, and having traveled all over Europe, Vera
brings up her past experiences, her uniqueness to the interactive process in the
excerpt below. At the same time, as any other utterances, Vera’s also contain a
value judgment or, in Voloshinov’s terms (1973), evaluative orientation toward
the Other:
We were for example on one exhibition / it was a very nice exhibition. This / is /
hudojestvenoe steklo [painted glass]. It was very nice but / when I saw it / I saw
in my life more interesting things / and I begin to tell these people about this /
and they say me / “Oh Vera / if you have something and you can bring and show
us and tell about this / do it please.” And I bring to… and show / the ladies who
come… / I bring some Kjel and bring some stuff from ??? and bring some stuff
from ??? It’s very nice and they never saw it / and / they… It’s interesting for them /
and I mm feel that / I am not mm kak skazat / ya ne na bolee niskom urovne chem
oni [I am not on a lower level than they are]. We have the same level.
Her struggle between discrepant discourses is apparent in the examples above. Her
husband, Aleksei, who used to be a teacher and a basketball coach in a high school,
became a manual worker at a factory. In an interview, he mentioned that he would
like to get a “better job” one day, but that “everything depends on English.”
Earlier, Vera said she felt helpless like a child, but children are not required
to make important decisions, nor are they expected to sign legal contracts, ap-
ply for jobs, or negotiate with landlords. Linguistic limitations in adults, on the
other hand, can often place them in a disadvantaged position with very real con-
sequences. Vera talked, for example, about the problem she and Aleksei experi-
enced when they decided to move out of their first rental apartment because they
did not understand what their contract stipulated. Ultimately, they lost some of
their hard-earned money in the process.
Everyday interactions in the second language became a test for all of the
participants and a source of frustration. In another example, Natalia and Dmitri
discussed their attempt to buy a television set at the store soon after their ar-
rival. They had to sign a form, and not understanding entirely, they put “a wrong
answer” on the form. Afterwards, they discovered that, instead of $600, the price
of the television set, their credit card was charged $1,200. Confused about the
sum, they decided to go to the store and speak with the manager in person, as
their phone skills were still rather low. The manager, however, didn’t even listen to
them, announcing: “Just call credit!” When Natalia placed the call to their credit
company, she was not able to understand well or explain exactly what happened.
She ended up asking a Russian-speaking acquaintance, who had lived in the States
for 20 years, to make the call. In this case, Natalia and Dmitri felt they lost some
independence.
The lack of linguistic resources in the second language is tightly intertwined
with a loss of social identity. Language infuses all spheres of life, and the partici-
pants, by losing their voices, lost their sense of worth as intellectuals. This was par-
ticularly true for the older couples, who also had to forsake their original careers,
and, moreover, had the awareness that they would never be able to practice their
chosen occupations again, exactly because of language. In one interaction with
Sylvia and Boris, the two tried to explain how language affected their professional
lives. Boris, who worked as an architect in his home country, was now employed
as a construction worker in the United States. In response to my comment that it
must be a new experience to him, Boris got up and brought some carefully folded
architect’s blueprints. Unfolding them in front of Sylvia and me, he exclaimed that
this is not at all new to him. He stressed that he knew this type of work very well,
and that he was used to doing it. Showing the complicated charts of a building,
and gliding his hand across the paper, Boris said in, for him, an uncharacteristi-
cally heavy and passionate voice:
(translation):
I know all that. I know my profession! The problem is I cannot explain what I
know, I cannot show that I know it in English. And if I cannot show it, then, I
don’t really know it to the world.
Boris’s words powerfully invoke the belief that if one cannot talk about an experi-
ence, one cannot really have it. In Bakhtin’s philosophy, one becomes a subject
only by participating in a dialogue with others. We become conscious selves by
using language, and this is exactly how we author our voices (Ryklin, 1992). There
is nothing more frightening to the speaking subject than not being understood
by another human being and his voice not being answered to. Knowledge itself,
to Bakhtin, must be embodied or incarnated, translated into “language of par-
ticipatory thinking” (1993, p. 49). Boris’s knowledge remained untranslated. His
professional expertise could not be validated by another in the second language,
and thus, an important aspect of his subjectivity was lost.
3.2 “Sometimes people don’t like immigrants”:

Othering language practices
The term “Other” has become increasingly popular in postmodern sociological

and cultural studies (Riggins, 1997). As Riggins specifies, discourses of otherness
can be used by both dominant and subordinate minorities. At the same time, in a
very Bakhtinian sense, the author warns against the illusory nature of the distinc-
tion between the self and the Other and suggests that the two are “so intertwined
that to stop talking about ‘them,’ one must stop talking about ‘us’ (p. 6). The fol-
lowing section will examine how the participants were positioned in the discur-
sive practices of otherness.
Being the Other becomes a poignant feature of Vera’s everyday reality. Dur-
ing one of our meetings, she shared a frequently occurring event at work of how
some native speakers of English were frequently excluding her through their
language practices:
Vera: Do you know / sometimes they stay and they are talking in their
native language / and I cannot understand because they talk very very
fast / and I don’t know about / what they are talking / and they ask
me something / I cannot answer them because I don’t know about
what they talk. And / they are looking / “Mm…” Do you know? Nu /
tyajelo… [It’s hard.] It’s very hard. And then / I heard mm how they
talk with each other / between them / about me / and I understand
what [they are talking about]!
Gergana: They talk about you in front of you?!
Vera: No. They say maybe / othodyat nemnojko storonku [they go a little bit
away].
Gergana: What do they say?
Vera: Nu vot / hochesh shto-to skazat / nechevo ne znaet / ponimaesh? [Well,
she wants to say something, but doesn’t know anything, do you
understand?]
Language is a powerful tool for exclusion from the discourse of the everyday by
these speakers of English. These practices of exclusion challenged not only her
linguistic skills, but her whole sense of personhood. Vera’s critical reflection of
exclusion, along with her awareness of worth as an educated person with rich
lived experiences (as shown in the previous section in this chapter when she nar-
rates her knowledge of art) is significant because it marks the beginning of her
transformation and becoming an agent. At the same time, she was cognizant that
the practices of otherness she experienced applied not just to her, individually,
and that they were not necessarily personal. She was aware that they affected for-
eigners in general. In the excerpt below, she related her observations of how some
English-speaking clients treated the other Russian-speaking immigrants with
whom she worked:
Vera: Net. Mne ne priyatno! [No. I don’t like this!] Do you know when I
work… / and we prepare so nice barmitzva / surprise parties / and the
people they look on / Russian people like / like on the people for the
level / na boleem niskom urovne [as if they were on a lower level].
Gergana: Look down? You feel they look down on you?
Vera: Yes.
Gergana: How did you feel that?
Vera: I cannot explain in English. I can explain it in Russian. But I can feel
it. Ponimaesh kak [do you understand how] / kogda / vot ona est’ /
and brosaet==ona videt shto / ya postavila special’nie==devochki
prinesli mm the cans for / garbage cans. Ona smotrit na tebe / and
brosaet na pol. Vot smotrit / and brosaet na pol [when she eats and
she throws==she saw that I just put some special==the girls brought
garbage cans. She is looking at you and is throwing the empty place on
the floor. Just looks and throws it
.…
Vera: (translation) Do you understand? Because this means that we will

clean up the mess….
Gergana: Do you think that they do that because you are Russian==
Vera: ==Yeah! Yeah==
Gergana: ==Or they’d do it to anybody?
Vera: No! Because sometimes… and I see when [American caterers] work /
they never do / never! They never put it on the floor! Their napkins or
sometimes the food / and / they never do it. Only when the Russian
people work.
Vera had already specified that all her Russian-speaking colleagues and friends
used to be doctors, teachers, and economists in their home country. Her story in-
dicates that the power relations between the foreigners, on the one hand, and the
“legitimate” participants in this event, on the other, are strongly polarized. Ironi-
cally, Vera indicated that the American women who treated her and her friends
in this manner were housewives (it was mostly women, who behaved this way,
according to her), and very few of them had college degrees. She pointed out
that they had “only high-school diplomas.” Yet, because of Vera’s status as a silent
foreigner, these women positioned her as “vtorym sortom” (second hand). Vera’s
statement “No! I don’t like this!” in the beginning points to the tension between
the dominant and subordinate discourses and suggests that she is not going to
remain passive.
Crawford, Kippax, Onyx, Gault, and Benton (1992), in their analysis of emo-
tion and gender, explain that if someone really has power in a situation, anger is
not a necessary response. Just an expression of dissatisfaction would be enough
to alter the offensive circumstances causing this feeling. However, the anger as
emotion emerging out of powerlessness is a response to what people perceive to
be unfair and unjust. Vera’s powerless position in the event she describes produces
the type of anger that sometimes victims experience. Anger as an emotion may be
a product of feeling powerless and positioned unfairly by others. However, anger
doesn’t have to be an unproductive and useless emotion. Vera’s initial sense of
resistance, which was an act of agency in itself, originated in this very emotional
response to being denied a voice.
Byram (1994) accurately points out that, while prevalent, the issue of stereo-
typing foreigners has been ignored by both textbook writers and teachers. Be-
ing the Other is a prevalent theme in my conversations with the participants.
Sometimes, the topic sneaks into our talks through their questions for me, as in
Dmitri’s: “Do Americans treat you on an equal level?” At other times, it emerges
powerfully in the narratives on their experiences portraying feelings of anger and
vulnerability. In the following excerpt, Natalia speaks about her arrival to the im-
migrant country and her astonishment at the ignorance of those who met them:
Natalia: Sometimes / you know / I was shocked. When [laughs nervously]

when we came / we go to [names an immigration service] / and it was
American people who / give us handouts. And it was like: You should
uh have a shower every day. You should==
Dmitri: Yes.
Natalia: Dress good / just clean. As if we were from…They think [raises her
voice] / I don’t know what they think about us.
Gergana: How did you feel about that?
Natalia: I was shocked!
Dmitri: We should use toilet paper or something like this stuff [laughs
sarcastically].
Not unlike Vera and her Russian-speaking colleagues, this younger couple was
caught into the contradiction between who they are, how they perceive them-
selves and the humiliating “Other” position in which they had been placed. Yet,
even as she admits she is shocked, Natalia fell into another contradiction: She
rejected the way she was perceived as the Other, but, at the same time, she ex-
cused those who have positioned her this way by saying that they didn’t know
they were offensive.
Bakhtin argues that we are always assessing the others’ words, but to really
comprehend words’ meaning in everyday life, we need to understand the entire
speaking situation, who the speakers are, and what intonation or expression
they are using. In “Discourse in the Novel,” when pondering how the speak-
ing subject enters the realm of ideological discourse, or becomes an ideological
being, it is through the process of “selectively assimilating the words of oth-
ers” (p. 341). Discourses that aim to determine our own ideological relations
to the world or to position us, are authoritative or may even become internally
persuasive. In Vera’s narrative above, we can hear the English-speaking women’s
authoritative discourse, and we can see Vera’s struggle with it on an ideological
plane, where the authoritative discourse remains “sharply demarcated” (ibid.,
p. 343) on the backdrop of Vera’s own consciousness. The struggle between Ve-
ra’s positioning herself as an educated, cosmopolitan person and the positions
being assigned to her as a silent being, clash in Vera’s narrative. For Natalia, on
the other, hand, the authoritative, ideological discourse of the Other had be-
come internally persuasive.
Natalia’s husband, Dmitri, was less forgiving in his reflections on the same
topic. About the Midwest, where they lived, he said, “Sometimes / people / I can
note that / I can note that people don’t like immigrants.” His comment comes
from both personal experience and those of other immigrants he knows. Once, as
he was working as a server at the restaurant, for example, the music was playing
too loudly, and he couldn’t hear well what a customer was saying. He explained:
Dmitri: I served a couple / mmm / and they asked me / about something. And
I can’t understand=I couldn’t understand / and he told me that / please
call somebody who understands English. And Natalia followed me
and==
Natalia: I followed him and the man just / excuse me and called me / and he
just==
Dmitri: And Natalia couldn’t understand==
Natalia: No no! You didn’t hear it! It was too noisy because it was a band over
there and / it’s not that he didn’t understand.
Dmitri: But people / I don’t know people / heard our accents and / they==
Natalia: Just “Wow! Just nobody / nobody can speak English in this restaurant!”
Just / it was… [lowers her voice].
As Dmitri says, at the moment the clients heard their foreign accents, he and Nata-
lia were not only situated in a lower social level by their “legitimate” interlocutors,
but they were also denied the opportunity to speak. Similarly to Vera, Dmitri and
Natalia address the issue of being a foreigner beyond the level of the personal. The
couple shared their observations that, to foreigners, even when they are educated,
skilled, and have a good command of English, the immigration location service
“never give you a good job. Just send you in factory, just, not a professional job,
never.” Dmitri’s explanation was that nobody cared about the people themselves,
and “it’s totally business.” This was one of the reasons that both he and Lydia de-
cided to get a second college degree, this time from an American university, so
that there would be no doubt about the validity of their education.
In a separate interview, Lydia and Peter described their experiences of dis-
empowering practices of otherness and the social implications for immigrants
in general. They told me, for example, about a Ukrainian family, a couple in their
early fifties, that had recently immigrated. Unfortunately for them, their English
skills were rather poor. “Pretty typical story,” is how Peter described this family’s
situation. The husband was a scientist in Ukraine, who lost his university position
there because of the economy. In the United States, he took a menial job at a fac-
tory, where, according to Peter, he was rinsing equipment in some chemicals. The
woman, who was highly educated, found employment employed in another local
factory. She not only worked hard and put in long hours, but she also invented
something that helped speed up the line of production. Still, her invention was
never acknowledged and even caused conflict between her and co-workers:
Peter: They work like / she works this woman works like crazy. And if the
plan was like / 10 pillows / make 10 pillows for one day for 8 hours /
she makes 20 and 30…
Gergana: She is trying to do a good job.
Peter: Yeah she is trying to do a good job but / not at that place… She got this
very very ??? They didn’t… She saw something wrong and she mm like
uh gave a suggestion to her manager / and with her suggestion they
they produced more pillows and more==
Lydia: But she didn’t get anything from it.
Peter: Yes but they didn’t…
Gergana: They didn’t promote her or increase her salary?
Lydia: Never. People even start hate her because / they start to produce more
pillows and they close overtime on Saturday. And she was sorry about
that they closed Saturday.
Peter: Yeah Saturday Saturday’s like uh mm… one and a half times… For one
hour they pay like not twice but…
Lydia and Peter’s story portrays a shift of social positions similar to Vera’s for the
newly arrived Ukrainian family. Finding themselves in a context of unfamiliar
discourses – not only English as a second language, but also the discourse of be-
ing working class – renders them powerless and without the chance to express
their voices. Yet, even in reflecting on these power shifts, the couples exhibit ele-
ments of agency in response to these changes. For example, Vera angrily claims
in the same language, in which she felt excluded, that she is not going to accept it.
Dmitri and Lydia, as an active response, decide to invest in an American college
degree. Their narratives show that the couples are being critically aware of their
new surroundings, and this is a prerequisite for social agency.
3.3 “He cannot do anything because he has no language”:

English as a source of positioning
As we saw, language is a key constituent in the practices of otherness described

above. For example, Natalia’s and Peter’s foreign accents set off an instant power
polarization and served as a premise for their exclusion by the two native-speak-
ing customers. As Peter was describing the situation of the newly arrived Ukrai-
nian family, and particularly, the husband who used to be a physicist and is now a
menial worker, he said, “But he cannot do anything because he has no language.
And they are really suffering from that.” English as the second language func-
tioned as a regulator of power structures for these immigrants. That language
directly determines the subjects’ positions in the second language society is evi-
dent in the experiences of all participants and in all aspects of their lives. Vera
explicitly pointed to English as the most significant factor mediating her decisions
and limiting her choices. She had always loved to travel, and in the States, she and
her husband continued this tradition. Once, as the two had just returned from a
trip to the Smoky Mountains, I expressed a desire to visit the place myself. Vera
immediately offered brochures of hotels in this particular area and other parts of
the States. She said she always came back with lots of flyers to hand out to friends.
Then, only half-jokingly, I suggested that she should perhaps work as a travel
agent. I didn’t realize it would touch a painful chord in Vera. Her reply was that
she, indeed, was a licensed tourist guide in her country and had often worked as
such during her summer vacations. She added that she had enjoyed it very much.
However, Vera admitted she would not even consider doing this in the States be-
cause of her English. She said she knew her English is never going to be as good
as her first language and added, “I don’t want to do anything if I can’t do it well.”
Summarizing how she felt about her second language and her employment, Vera
simply said, “I cannot change nothing.” After a pause, she recalled a Russian prov-
erb stating, “Everybody should know their place.” Evidently, Vera saw her own
“place” as a place strongly determined by English.
Natalia also found that one’s language and position are directly related to her
most commonplace experiences. The restaurant, where she and Dmitri used to
work as servers, had a scheduling book for all shifts. Often, servers would request
a day off as long as they alerted the manager in advance. When Natalia and Dmitri
had to do this on one occasion, they discovered that it wasn’t going to be as easy as
they thought. Natalia explained that the manager refused, and she felt powerless
to negotiate this otherwise ordinary situation because of her position there:
Natalia: They cannot / they couldn’t. They told me, “We have a party.” Just one
server told me / “I am going to have a drink mm… evening. Just I
am not going to come.” And he didn’t worry about / ??? but / I had to
worry. You know / I am not at this level / I am not at this position as
the servers.
Gergana: What do you mean?
Natalia: I mean / I have more chances to be fired.
Gergana: Why do you think so?
Natalia: Because sometimes I have trouble with my English [her voice is
emotional]. Our guests don’t have a complaint about me / but /
sometimes / I don’t know. I feel this. I don’t know why.
Gergana: Do you have a reason to feel it?
Natalia: It’s like only / English / the only reason why I think so.
Natalia pointed out that although the “request book” was not a guarantee for get-
ting the schedule one wanted, the other servers always did, while she was the one
who had experienced a problem. As the excerpt above illustrates, she felt power-
less and vulnerable there because of her imperfect language skills. She felt she was
more easily dispensable than her co-workers.
Language was vital for Lydia and Peter’s professional working environment
as well. As this study progressed, Lydia got a part-time job as a computer pro-
grammer at the same company that employed her husband. Despite their ex-
pertise in the field, the two found that they could not participate fully in both
the professional and informal discourses on the job. For example, when I asked
them whether they spoke openly in meetings and discussions, Peter admitted
that he had tried to, but “not very often.” He said he was more likely to answer
a question when he was directly addressed and added, “That’s probably because
of language.” Lydia, who expressed a similar insecurity to participate in discus-
sions, said, “I never go to discussion even if it’s interesting for me. Even if, I
mean, only if it’s with friends… [where] nobody will blame me for my English.”
Lydia’s use of the verb “blame” clearly speaks to her linguistic vulnerability at
work. It directly influences her relationships with others. One of her first assign-
ments was to develop a program using a brand new tool on the market. Part of
her responsibility was to collaborate with a native-speaking programmer, who
had the same status and position at work as she did. However, even though their
relationship was supposed to be the one between equal colleagues and far from
hierarchical on a purely professional level, as the two held the same education
and positions within the company, their social positions were not equally inter-
preted by Lydia. She felt uncomfortable asking questions and was intimidated
by the native speaker’s linguistic superiority. She thought that she would appear
“foolish” if she didn’t understand what he said. Thus, she restricted her verbal
contributions and quite possibly missed the chance to show her true ability as
a programmer.
Being the linguistic Other has disempowering implications not only in the
working environment but across all institutions. Peter and Lydia’s narratives
about immigrants frequently provide such examples. As the two participants were
helping an older Ukrainian family to settle in, Peter took his friend to take his
American driver’s test. Peter believes that his friend’s inability to communicate
in English immediately placed him in an unfavorable position, biasing the tester.
In the following excerpt, Peter explained how the lack of English prevented his
otherwise very intelligent Ukrainian friend from succeeding in a fairly simple
interactive situation:
Peter: Hmmm / simple situation. When I brought / when I brought our
friend / to the police exam / for the driving / uhm / there were
American woman and she / she’s asking this / this Russian woman /
she didn’t understand completely.
Lydia: She asked, “How are you?”
Peter: No. She asked wife / Natasha / she asked her and she / she was /
answered her / she was answering for her question with very very
slowly and thinking about words / and from the first / like from the
first sight it was obvious that / she was never pass this exam.
Gergana: Because she wasn’t able to answer?
Peter: Yeah communicate.
Gergana: What was the question? Do you remember?
Peter: How are you? What’s the make of the car? What’s the license plate?
This is formal question and / when the husband come to / came to this
counter / this American woman smiled and [said], “How are you?” He
didn’t understand. And he answered her / like he was expecting / he
was expecting the question about the make of the car. He answered her,
“Honda Accord.” And / this American woman / did everything to / fail
his exam…
Gergana: Just on the basis of language?
Peter: It was my opinion. It was my opinion.
Peter added that English was also the reason his friend passed the test several
weeks later, when he was able to understand better and to maintain some con-
versation. These narrative examples from a variety of contexts ascertain that one’s
positioning occurs through discursive events and is firmly embedded in language
use. They also illustrate how the positions created in discourse could be fairly
unbalanced, a phenomenon that Peter described as the “other part of the living in
the States.” In Peter’s own words, this was the part where one fails because one’s
“English was bad.”
3.4 “I was afraid”: Gender and the discourse of emotion
Scholars of gender have found the notion of emotion problematic in psychologi-

cal and sociological studies. There is no doubt today that emotion has its neuro-
biological basis, but at the same time, most scholars agree that emotions or, rather
the way we perceive or talk about them, are culturally embedded as well. Lupton
(1998) traces the gendering of emotion by reviewing numerous studies that ex-
plore the various aspects of the role of gender in the experience of emotion, and
she shows that stereotypes about emotionality in men and women are abundant.
Even very young children, for instance, preschoolers, tend to perceive women as
more emotional than men. Moreover, in our Western society, some emotions (like
sadness or anxiety) are stereotyped as more feminine, while others, like anger, as
more masculine. In another summary of research regarding the link between gen-
der and emotion, Shields (2002) asks, “Are there gender differences in emotion?”
and concludes that there are (p. 40). She immediately goes on to say that “What is
interesting about these differences… is that they are far more context-dependent
than the prevailing emotion stereotype leads us to expect” (ibid.). Emotion, very
much like gender itself, along with our interpretation of it, is a socio-cultural con-
cept, where historical periods, class, and ethnic background may play a role.
Poststructuralists, who locate experience within language, argue that emo-
tions are also constructed by specific discursive practices (Abu-Lughod & Lutz,
1990), and discursive psychologists take a rather similar approach. The latter
situate the discourse of emotions within the lived discourse of participants and
in their narration of actions and interpersonal relationships (Edwards, 1999).
Moreover, emotions in this framework, as discursive phenomena, are seen as a
type of social action. Very much like in Bakhtin’s work, in discursive psychology
emotions are not individual phenomena but are constructed within specific dis-
cursive practices with specific others. To poststructuralists, power and emotions
are entangled, and emotion discourses, particularly to feminist poststructuralists,
can serve to “establish, assert, challenge, or reinforce power or status differences”
(Abu-Lughod & Lutz, 1990, p. 14).
Analyzing Bakhtin’s essay, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, Hicks (1996b) em-
phasizes that, “In the act of being in which persons relate to objects and other partic-
ipants in terms of distinction of worth, rational cognition and emotional-volitional
tone are co-occurrent” (p. 107). Voice inevitably carries an emotional-volitional
tone. In “Toward a Philosophy of the Act,” emotional-volitional tone is inseparable
from human action and even from very abstract thought. Bakhtin writes:
Everything that is actually experienced is experienced as something given and as
something-yet-to-be-determined, is intonated, has an emotional-volitional tone,
and enters into an effective relationship to me within the unity of the ongoing
event encompassing us. An emotional-volitional tone is an inalienable thought,
insofar as I am actually thinking it, i.e., insofar as it is really actualized in Being,
becomes a participant in the ongoing event. (1993, p. 33)
It is exactly the emotional-volitional tone that orients us and confirms meanings

in everyday life. In other words, emotions are a fundamental part of everyday
personal experiences.
When the participants of the study arrived in their host country, they found
they were not able to participate fully in the dominant discourse of the new envi-
ronment. Feminist Kaschak (1992) introduces the concept of sensitivity in gen-
der studies. Building on postmodernism and feminist research (notably, Gilligan,
1983), she argues that, for historical reasons, women have had to remain more
sensitive to their environment and, particularly, to their relations with the oth-
ers. Research shows that, overall, immigrant women are more susceptible to
sychological distress than their male counterparts (Anderson, 1985), and studies
p
confirm these tendencies for immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Aroian,
Norris and Chiang (2003) indicate that certain factors, such as lower levels of
education and older age made immigrant women particularly vulnerable to psy-
chological distress, yet the women in this particular project held the same level
of education as the men, and like their male partners, were employed outside the
house. Vera, Sylvia, Natalia, and Lydia exhibited patterns of greater sensitivity to
their positioning in the second language context than the men in this study. Not
only did the women tend to reflect on these positioning practices more frequently,
but they also engaged more often in discourses of emotion.
As illustrated in the beginning of this chapter, Vera experienced the language
practices of otherness in the work environment as practices of exclusion and hu-
miliation. Moreover, she overtly claimed that the native speakers treat her as “vto-
rim sortum” [a second hand] or on a lower level. In the following excerpt, Vera
contrasted her experience with that of one of her relatives, Kostya, a male immi-
grant in the same city where she lives:
He says that I need to teach them Russian. It’s interesting. My sister’s husband
Kostya / he works on the factory… And he begins only / maybe 3 or 4 months /
and he works very nice / and / in 2 months / he begin to work like a supervisor.
He don’t know one English word. But / he is the supervisor now. And only…
and / no one / Russian worker. But / when Kostya come every morning / they cry,
“Kostya, privet!” [Kostya, hi!] [laughs]. He teach them. He teach them! And now
they know / 15 Russian words. And he said, “Vera, my English is very bad. I don’t
know English. But / be sure / that / in 5 years / they begin to speak / only Russian
[laughs]. I say, “Kostya, you need study English!” He said me, “I am a supervisor!
He need to learn my language.”
Despite the facetious overtone of Vera’s narrative, the disparity between how the
two view positioning through language comes across strongly. Kostya not only
didn’t demonstrate the vulnerability she does, but also assumed a superior posi-
tion toward the native speakers by virtue of his job title. Vera, on the other hand,
who at the time of this narrative was also a manager in her work context, felt that
she was the one who should be able to speak the second language to the legitimate
Other. Natalia and Lydia also have used the adjective “uncomfortable” many times
when referring to their interactions with native speakers. Unlike Natalia, however,
Dmitri claimed that he didn’t feel uncomfortable because “this is a country of im-
migrants.” His comment closely parallels Boris’s statement in response to Sylvia’s
expression of fear when communicating in English. In a separate interview, Boris
said: “American people / all American people / was / immigrate [immigrants].
Leave / a few people / now English.”
These gender tendencies were obvious when the participants described their
daily interactions in the second language or at work. In the excerpt below, I was
asking Dmitri about his use of English on the job. The positions the two assumed
were clearly discrepant:
Gergana: So you have to do a lot of talking on the phone?
Dmitri: Oh yeah.
Gergana: How’s that going for you?
Dmitri: Probably ??? parts of my time.
Natalia: Stressful…(laughs)
Dmitri: Mm no, not stressful==
Natalia: It would be [stressful] if somebody don’t understand me or if I don’t
understand.
Dmitri: Not stressful… It’s just… you try to explain / to non-technical people /
and they don’t understand. This is just something ??? No offense but…
In this case, similar to Kostya, Dmitri took up the discourse of a professional –

someone confident in his rights, while Natalia appropriated the discourse of the
Other. That Dmitri asserted his rights was evident in many other examples from
our conversations. For instance, while Natalia emphasized that she would be
stressed out if she had not being understood, Dmitri tended to accuse others as
causing miscommunication:
Gergana: We were talking about [name of store] that you bought something and
something was wrong and you were trying to talk to them and they
didn’t understand. Do you remember what you meant by it?
Dmitri: It was just qualification. That’s all. Professional skills.
Gergana: On their part? They couldn’t understand you because they were not
qualified?
Dmitri: Yes. Enough qualified. I think so / because // it was very young
person / very young so / I don’t think he was experienced in this
stuff… I didn’t have to explain about it / so / it’s not my fault…
In a different interview, Peter and Lydia’s verbal exchange about a phone conver-
sation in English mirrored Natalia and Dmitri’s. Lydia acknowledged that, if she
asked somebody to repeat something, and she still didn't understand, she would
not ask again, but rather she would “Just say okay” and then try to “recall” what
the other person said. In contrast, Peter stated, “If I still don’t understand, I tell
them send me the words or whatever but explain me… They must explain me.
It’s their job.” Like Dmitri, Peter felt confident in his own rights of a participant
in the interaction. Although his misunderstanding might create inconvenience,
it didn’t cause the feelings of discomfort experienced by Natalia, Lydia, and
Sylvia. These excerpts reveal the differences in the female and male participants’
i nterpretations of their positionings in discourse and show the women’s greater

sensitivity to this process.
Sylvia provides a telling example of how emotions are constructed as a rela-
tion to the Other and in relation to language itself. The discourse of emotion is
quite prevalent in her narratives. If emotions help our everyday experiences ac-
quire their meaning, then fear, nervousness and shame shaped Sylvia’s everyday
language experiences in English. The word “afraid,” for instance, appears 59 times
in her narratives, and the word “nervous,” over 20 times. In the following inter-
view excerpt, for instance, Sylvia described a grocery shopping experience:
Sylvia: I need to ??? plums / and I asked about it my sister and other people,
but nobody could told me / exactly / uh in details. Nobody can / could
could tell me about it in details. And husband and I went to [a grocery
store], and there we could find out prunes. And chose / chose non-
pitted and I bought two different kinds of prunes. I was afraid that /
the cashier / wouldn’t understand us.
Gergana: Did you try to say something?
Sylvia: Mmm…
Gergana: Did they understand?
Sylvia: She understood.
Gergana: How did that make you feel?
Sylvia: Nervous / nervous. I confused because / I always think that we
storonnyie [strange] [groping for the English word] that we look like…
Gergana: Say it in Russian.
Sylvia: Smeshnie [funny] [to the others].
Gergana: Why?
Sylvia: Because I didn’t remember exactly how it’s named pruned and
pronunciation approximately.
The inability to participate in the discourse with the grocery clerk at an equal
linguistic level produces a feeling of shame in Sylvia. Shame is an emotion that
is frequently present in Sylvia’s narrative. In another excerpt, she was explaining
what had occurred earlier that day, and her voice was heavy with emotion:
Sylvia: Today, for example, the head of [an institution] called us / and she was
looking for my daughter / my older daughter Lydia. And we speak / we
spoke to each other. And I told her that Lydia is not available [hesitates
and looks at me to confirm that her word choice is correct].
Gergana: Yes, sure.
Sylvia: And then she / told me / many information. But I understood 50%.
And I… after it / I called Lydia in her office and [told] her about it.
And she called back the head of [the institution]. And the head was
ve:ry surprised: “Why do you call me? I just told with your mother!”
It’s a shame! [almost crying]
Gergana: You felt ashamed?

Sylvia: Yes / and till now / I don’t know / what I need to speak to tell my
daughter.
The previously articulate engineer was not able to understand what it is supposed
to be a fairly simple, ordinary phone call. Thus, Sylvia experienced shame not only
for herself, but also on behalf of her daughter.
Taylor (1985) explains shame as “an emotion that a subject experiences in
relation to a dimension of his existence as a subject” (p. 53). He further explains
that “the very account of what shame means involves reference to things – like our
sense of dignity, of worth, of how we are seen by others – which are essentially
bound up with the life as a subject of experience” (p. 54). Sylvia felt shame because
of her sense of accountability (as discursive psychologists would say, and Bakhtin
would use the term responsibility) for two other human beings. The first was her
immediate interlocutor, and the second was her own daughter. Sylvia felt that she,
as a participant in an interaction, had failed them both. Her feelings of shame, in
this case, were derived from her sense of responsibility and valuing the Other’s
own feelings (real, perceived, or even imaginary) more than she valued her own.
Postmodern feminist Bartky (1996) claims that shame in speech is a mark
of powerless discourses. However, she also states, drawing on Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness, that shame requires an audience (p. 227). Shame is a feeling experi-
enced before the Other. This is strongly reminiscent of Bakhtin’s dialogical self:
We need the other to contextualize our experiences; it is through the Other that
our emotions become felt and validated. These examples show that language, for
Sylvia, is not just a reflection of thought processes or a vehicle for expression. In-
terwoven with emotion, it is an integral component of her being and a powerful
force molding her perception of selfhood.
The other women in the study also talked about emotions related to the use
of the second language. In one example, as Natalia was speaking of her part-time
job as a server at a restaurant, she mentioned:
Just now / almost I don’t have a problem with English. But / sometimes when /
I’m too busy oh! / I’m getting nervous, and I can’t say anything.
To Vera, the loss of voice was poignant, too. Speaking of her arrival in the United
States and how she experienced the new culture, this female participant portrayed
her emotions very explicitly:
It is very difficult mm… psychologically. Psychologically. Yeah. It’s very very dif-
ficult and very / nu kak skazat’ / obidno [how do I say / humiliating]. Because /
mmm / after the TV program [in her home country] / I look each word / that I
need to / about what I need to talk. And now? I need look each word / when I talk
with anybody… Because the vocabulary is very small.
Bartky (ibid.) writes that women are more prone to feeling shame not because
shame is gender-specific, but because of their historical social location in pow-
erlessness. I don’t claim that men do not experience fear, shame, or nervousness:
These feelings are universally human. However, a gender-related pattern emerged
from the data when the men and women in the study discussed (or ignored, for
that matter) emotions. This pattern was especially prominent in Sylvia and Boris’s
interchanges. While Sylvia consistently described herself as afraid, nervous, and
ashamed because of her limitations in English, Boris confronted her and contra-
dicted her emotional position. In one telling excerpt, when we were discussing
Sylvia and Boris’s weekly language practices, Boris mentioned that he had to con-
verse with a salesperson on the phone:
Boris: Mm / they / one woman / who // give furniture / for / mm / new
people [for a new family that arrived from Ukraine]. I speak with
mmm== [searching for the word]
Sylvia: (supplies the word) ==With her.
Boris: With her. So…
Gergana: (to Boris) Did you understand her?
Sylvia: Not everything.
Boris: No / no. But / everything / what / about mmm... everything about
your...
Sylvia: Calling.
Boris: Calling / we / we: / we reshyli.
Sylvia: (translates for him) Decided.
Gergana: So you got the main idea?
Boris: Yeah / yeah.
Sylvia: She couldn’t call mm to my daughter. And so she decided to call us /
and / and I understood so / that / she says that / nobody / nobody
answer / there / mmm / husband / didn’t understand.
Boris: Nobody / I / listen / next to her / no listen.
Gergana: (to S) So you feel guilty if you don’t understand something but you (B)
don’t feel guilty if you don’t understand something?
Sylvia: Take it easy.
Gergana and Sylvia: (laugh).
Sylvia: I am afraid=
Boris: =I no feel guilty=
Sylvia: I am afraid all the time=
Boris: I no feel guilty. American people / all American people / was /
immigrate. Leave / a few people / now / English. A few. But live here?
Live? Why not for me.
Sylvia: Sighs.
Boris: Why / I / must / be guilty? Why?
Sylvia: He hasn’t any / complexes. It seems to me / I / kak skazat’ / neudobstvo

[discomfort]. Ya prichinyau / lyudem / neudobstvo. [I cause people
discomfort.]
The passage above demonstrates Sylvia’s and Boris’ incongruent emotional expe-
riences. The curious chorus in which the two engaged, overlapping each other’s
lines in the narrative passage, serves only to underscore how discrepant their dis-
courses of emotion are. Moreover, Sylvia’s comments clearly illustrate that her
guilt originated in the dialogical process with her interlocutor – she feared that
she created discomfort for the other speaker. Boris, on the other hand, openly
rejected the emotional discourse of guilt. He didn’t position himself as inferior
because of the lack of linguistic resources in English. To my question whether he
ever felt nervous when he had to speak English, Boris replied:
Boris: (Laughs) My boss / first time / very mm a lot nervous ??? On vjilsya
[he strongly experienced that].
Gergana: Who was nervous? You or your boss?
Boris: (Indicates that it was his boss.)
Gergana: Why?
Boris: Shto ya ne ponimayu. [Because I didn’t understand].
While Sylvia was painfully sensitive to the potential reaction she might generate
in the other speaker, Boris didn’t share her empathy. Following up on the same
thread, the interview continued, and Boris explained how he viewed emotions
when it came to the use of the second language:
Boris: No. I mm I ??? nu ya tak ustroen. Ya ponimayu shto nervy eto
bezpoleznaya trata. Nujno pitatsya ponyat’. [Well, this is how I am
constructed. I understand that to get nervous is useless. It is important
to try to understand.]
Gergana: So you are trying to solve the problem?
Boris: (in confirmation) Shto tratit’ nerv? [Why waste nerves?]
Although I have focused on selections from Boris and Sylvia’s discussions on

emotions and discursive practices, they were not the only ones illustrating the
gender pattern. Vera, for instance, often spoke of how she felt because of the loss
of voice, as when she described herself as a kindergartener. On another occa-
sion, when speaking about the quick exchanges between her English-speaking
colleagues, she commented she felt like “durachka” (fool) among them, not un-
derstanding fully what they are talking about and not being able to contribute to
the dialogue. Her husband, Aleksei, on the other hand, never spoke of emotions
associated with the use of the second language. Having lived in the States for two
years at the time of this particular interview, he admitted that he still failed to
understand most of his co-workers. His description of his lack of understanding

was very different from Vera’s:
Sometimes I don’t understand too much workers. I don’t understand / I don’t
understand / this language. La-la-la-la [indicates how English sounds to him]. Is
one mm worker / Bobby / Bob / when mm speak with me / we / he / he is very
very very slow speak. Very very good. I understand. No problem! I speak with
Bob / Bob understand to me.
Similar to Boris, Aleksei was more concerned with the process of getting his mes-
sage across and understanding the language that was directed at him. The dis-
course of discomfort, guilt, or shame was not evident in the body of his narrative.
From the four male participants, only Peter expressed emotions linked to
his language practices. In this, he situated his feelings exclusively in the context
of his job environment, when he said he was concerned sometimes about his
“bad English”:
Gergana: What did you mean “bad English”?
Peter: Bad English? That I didn’t understand what / people say sometimes I
didn’t understand my assignment / so / I felt uncomfortable / so. Also
I felt uncomfortable when people get together / and chatting with each
other. I didn’t know jokes. You know but… I went through that. Now /
I feel much better.
The excerpt shows that Peter related the better command of English to a higher
degree of success on the job. He was not so much concerned about the Other in
the interaction process; rather, he was concerned about how his English skills
were affecting the potentiality for advancement in his own career. In contrast,
when Lydia described feelings of discomfort, she felt uncomfortable because of
her sense of accountability for the Other.
In this chapter, I have attempted to illustrate how language mediates practices
of otherness. My goal was to make the participants’ voices and emotional-voli-
tional tones heard through their lived narratives. However, by relating their own
stories to these of other immigrants, the participants demonstrated that the lived
experiences they described were rooted in a larger socio-ideological system rather
than being isolated cases. In Bakhtin’s view, every time we speak, we respond
to utterances that have already been produced before, and, thus, we enter into a
dialogue with utterances previously said on a given topic. When the participants
speak about immigrants and attitudes toward immigrants, they respond to and
address not just a few concrete others and their utterances in a specific interaction,
but they evaluate a type of authoritative and dominant discourse as a whole.
The chapter also illustrated how discursive events form the underpinnings
for the emotional construction of the self. Therefore, it is not possible to sepa-
rate the cognitive from the affective aspects of second language acquisition as the
self is a complex construct where different factors are interacting on a fluid con-
tinuum. Patterns in the data also suggested that, although men could experience
the loss of linguistic resources emotionally (e.g., Peter), it was the women in the
study who engaged in discourses of emotions much more frequently, specifically
in discourses of fear, nervousness, and humiliation. Moreover, it was the female
participants who tended to be more acutely aware of the other speakers’ reactions
and get psychologically involved in the dialogical process.
chapter 4
Gender, language learning,

and discursive practices
All of theoretical reason in its entirety is only a moment

of practical reason, i.e., the reason of the unique subjectum’s
moral orientation within the event of once-occurrent Being.
This Being… can be determined only in the categories
of actual communion, i.e., of an actually performed act,
in the categories of participative-effective experiencing….
Bakhtin (1993, p. 13)
The previous chapter examined the positionings of the immigrants in their narra-
tivized discourse, and the relational nature of the Bakhtinian self was considered.
It also introduced the gendered discourse of emotions, illustrated through the nar-
ratives of the participants, and particularly, the ways they positioned themselves
to a linguistic Other. This chapter zeroes in on how the participants positioned
themselves within the couples, the women and men’s attitudes toward accuracy
in the second language, and how these attitudes are represented in their metalin-
guistic discourses. It also introduces the notion of responsibility or otvetsvenost’
that is very prominent in Bakhtin’s early work and illuminates how responsibility
is a major feature of the women’s interactions not only with linguistic others (for
instance, speakers of English), but also the interactions with their own spouses.
Gender is a multifaceted issue with a significance that cuts through vari-
ous disciplines: psychology, sociology, anthropology, communication, and even
neurobiology, to name a few. The traditional area of sociolinguistics has also ex-
amined the complex interface between gender and language use and has offered
different interpretations for some of the gender-related observed phenomena.
Whatever the area of investigation is, however, gender researchers today agree
that gender as a term is different from sex, as the former is embedded in a host
of social variables, while the latter reflects biology. Butler (1990) has argued fa-
mously that gender itself is not fixed or essential but is a category that we perform.
She describes gender as “the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts
within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the ap-
pearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (p. 33). Many scholars (e.g., Bem,
1993; Cameron, 1997; Epstein, 1990) have questioned the traditional dichotomy
in gender research. Writing specifically of the gender and language connection,

for instance, Cameron (1997) addresses Simone de Beauvoir’s famous question of
whether there really are women, and she offers a critical analysis of the body of
research in this area, moving from the more traditional thought expressed by Jes-
persen and Lakoff, for instance, to feminist postmodernism. Cameron embraces
the current acknowledgment among feminist scholars that gender is only one of
the complex social divisions that mitigate the relationship between power and
language use. Other variables such as race, socio-economic status, and culture
shape one’s identity as well and interact with gender.
In the more traditional approaches to the connection between gender and
language, a difference in the ways men and women use language has been ob-
served by Jespersen (1922) when he commented on how women tended to have a
more limited vocabulary than men or to employ simpler syntactic structures. Lat-
er, Lakoff (1975) was among the first to provide an analysis of women’s language,
and in an approach that came to be known as the dominance model she claimed
that women use weaker expletives than men, empty adjectives like “lovely” or
“pretty,” more hedges than men, and interrupt less frequently than men do. Lakoff
has been criticized for basing her statements on anecdotal evidence and not on
systematically collected data. Labov (1972, 1991), a pioneer in American urban
dialectology, in empirical studies conducted in New York City, has shown that
women, overall, do tend to be more status- conscious than men and use more lin-
guistically prestigious grammatical markers than men do. Similar findings have
been brought up by Trudgill (1972, 1974) in England, where women were the
ones to employ the more socially prestigious phonological markers than men.
Although these studies were, doubtless, important in constructing the knowledge
of the language-gender relationship as they supplied much needed empirical evi-
dence, they lacked a theoretical explanation for the described differences in the
ways men and women approached language use.
The cultural approach, inspired by Gumperz’s work (1982) in interethnic
communication and exemplified by Tannen’s writings (see, for instance, Tannen,
1991), argues that men and women demonstrated different communication styles
in interaction and posited that these cultural differences are a result of early so-
cialization practices in girls’ and boys’ lives. According to this approach, women
tend to cooperate better than men, while men exhibit a more competitive inter-
actional style. Unlike the dominance approach, which views women’s speech as
inferior to men’s (in other words, men, who generally held more social power, also
controlled the conversational floor), the cultural approach doesn’t necessarily see
the difference in style as a difference in social standing. Rather, it assumes that
women’s talk can be interpreted positively, and, instead of lacking confidence, it
is viewed as supportive and facilitating. The cultural approach, however, has also
Chapter 4. Gender, language learning, and discursive practices 77
been criticized because of its emphasis on differences and over-generalizations.

Some researchers (Freed, 1996; Freed & Greenwood, 1996), for example, have
shown that women are not necessarily more polite in speech than men or don’t use
hedges such as “you know” more often than men do. Outlining the sociolinguistic
research of gender and its different frameworks, Freed (1995) concludes that the
language-gender connection should not be restricted to one specific discipline,
but it should maintain a strong interdisciplinary approach. She also recognizes
that the way we construct gender is often embedded in a specific speech commu-
nity or culture. Cameron (2007) strongly rejects the notion that men and women
differ fundamentally in their communication styles; for example, male speakers
are not always the more aggressive ones, nor do women tend to cooperate more.
She calls such perceptions myths, providing examples not only from Western cul-
tures, but also from other communities. She notes, for instance, that among one
Malagasy-speaking community in Madagascar, confrontational speech styles are
held in contempt, and, thus, they are left as a resource to the women.
Scholars in the field of second language acquisition have echoed these the-
oretical trends. In an impressive review of studies in bilingual and second lan-
guage settings, Ehrlich (1997) asserts that the relationship between gender and
language can never be a direct one but is determined by the social beliefs of a
particular societies. In another review article, Davis and Skilton-Sylvester (2004)
have outlined the history of research of gender in the field of second language
learning and, similarly to scholars of gender in the first language, have argued
for an approach that recognizes the individual learners’ constant forming and
re-shaping of identity based on their unique contexts and communities. Despite
the increasing body of literature on gender in second language learning (Norton,
2000; Norton & Pavlenko, 2004; Pavlenko, Blackledge, Piller, & Teutsch-Dwyer,
2001), the need for more research has been clearly acknowledged, and second lan-
guage authors have claimed that gender as a category remains “under-researched”
and “under-theorized” (Piller & Pavlenko, 2001, p. 3), mirroring more general
statements about the area of gender and language. It largely reflects, for instance,
Cameron’s (1998) cogent argument that researchers should move beyond the area
of sociolinguistics, which has failed to provide adequate explanations, and schol-
ars across different fields “need to develop more sophisticated theories of gender
than those which have been common in our field since the mid-1970s” (p. 33).
“For linguists,” insists Cameron, “to be excluded from the conversations going on
about gender among philosophers, literary theorists, historians, sociologists, etc.,
is in my view an unfortunate thing for all parties” (ibid.).
Admittedly, Bakhtin was not a scholar who wrote about gender explicitly or
even seemed concerned with this factor. How can his insights help us better un-
derstand gender and language practices in immigrants’ discourse? How can he
help us connect notions of the self to other theories of gender – linguistic, to be

certain, as there is still need for innovative, interpretative, and experience-based
approaches to the language-gender relationship – but also larger, socio-psycho-
logical and even moral, ethical categories? Moreover, how can his philosophy help
us see immigrants and learners of English as a second language as unique hu-
man beings, and at the same time, as part of their socio-historical contexts, where
gender may be just one of the many facets of their complex histories and subject
positionings? These questions will be at the center of this chapter.
4.1 Dialogue, situated ethics, and responsibility
One of the distinguishing features of the Bakhtinian subject’s position is that it is

not only always expressed through a relation to another, but it is a distinctly moral
position as well. The unique relation of alterity that exists between the self and the
Other is at the core of Bakhtin’s understanding of morality or the ethical nature
of this relationship. Bakhtin’s dialogism, as Gardiner (1996) claims, is grounded
in what Gardiner calls neo-humanism and entails notions such communication,
intersubjective understanding, and responsibility. “As such,” Gardiner contends,
“Dialogism provides us with a ‘situated ethics’ that represents an alternative to
a coercive moral absolutism no less than an inchoate postmodern relativism”
(p. 123). Bakhtinian scholar and philosopher Gardiner juxtaposes postmodernist
theorists’ interpretations of the Other, where while the Other has gained an im-
portant presence, it is often used to underscore “pure difference, or else subordi-
nate the other to a project of self-actualization that that is essentially Nietzschean
in inspiration” (ibid.). Gardiner further criticizes postmodern theories account-
ing for the relation between the self and others as he sees them negating the very
ethical concept of responsibility through dialogue. To him, situated ethics and
responsibility, which are located in the very possibility for dialogue, are also an
often neglected aspect of Bakhtin’s moral philosophy of the self and language.
One of the most prevalent themes in Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the self is
that subjects are never self-contained; they are constructed through relationships
between the self (the I-in-me) and the Other (the not-I-in-me). At any time of our
lives, as humans, we are responsible for the others whom we encounter, whom we
need to “heed” and to whom we need to respond. This process of answering, to
Bakhtin, inevitably entails an ethical dimension and a unique moral responsibil-
ity. Bakhtin articulates his idea of responsibility most explicitly in his early essay
Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1993). While Bakhtin doesn’t reject Kant’s moral
philosophy and, in ways, draws upon it, he also finds it too theoretical and ab-
stract. Bakhtin criticizes formal theories of ethics because they fail to provide an
approach to the “living” acts as they are “performed” in an actual world by actual
human beings (p. 27).
In his work, Bakhtin wanted to address events in the everyday world and re-
veal responsibility as part of the human experience and even authoring, agentive
practices. Each human being, according to the Russian thinker, occupies a unique
plane, and it is only from the uniqueness of our experiences that we can address
the world. This doesn’t mean, however, that humans perform their acts in social
isolation, independent of other factors. In his later works, Bakhtin writes of dis-
courses addressing others’ words and viewpoints. Even in his earliest works, when
dialogue is not yet the term that has claimed its place in Bakhtin’s later writings,
an orientation toward something else, for instance, the specifics of one’s historical
context, is strongly present. Answerability, in this sense, is Bakhtin’s early notion
for dialogism. He writes:
The actually performed act – not from the aspect of its content, but in its very
performance – somehow knows, somehow possesses the unitary and once-oc-
curring being of life; it orients itself within that being, and it does so, moreover,
in its entirety – both in its content-aspect and it its actual, unique factuality….
The answerability of the actually performed act is the taking-into-account in it
all the factors – a taking-into-account of its sense-validity as well as its factual
performance in all its concrete historicity and individuality. (p. 28)
Bakhtin stresses that a person is answerable (responsible) for his or her actions
and that, in fact, because of our unique experiences and unique positions in the
world, there is no alibi in being. To avoid responsibility for one’s actions or to
seek an alibi would equal becoming what Bakhtin terms samozvanets (literally,
one who names him or herself or “a pretender”). An ethical subject, according to
Bakhtin, would engage in uchastnoe myshlenie (participatory thinking), and to
be able to do that, subjects have to be able to enter in someone else’s position and
then return to their own positions as, after all, it is from our unique positions that
we can understand the Other’s. Emerson (1995) summarizes this state of partici-
patory outsidedness in the following manner:
Strictly speaking, I cannot “analyze” the content of another consciousness at all.
I can only address it – that is, offer to change it a little, and to change myself a
little as well, by asking a question of it. To know a given content, therefore, I must,
from my own outside position, participate in it, converse with it, and assume that
in turn I will be altered by my interaction with it. (p. 407)
Language, in Bakhtin’s own words, developed to serve participatory thinking and

performed acts, and emotional-volitional tone is one of the most important aspects
of language. Bakhtin claims that “An emotional-volitional tone is an inalienable

moment of the actually performed act, even of the most abstract thought, insofar
as I am actually thinking it, i.e., insofar as it is really actualized in Being, becomes
a participant in the ongoing event” (1993, p. 33). Thus, in Bakhtin’s concept of
the self, subjects are at the same time an inseparable part of history and unique
individuals. Responsibility is essential of Bakhtin’s understanding of the self and
the acts that selves perform; personal responsibility is how unique, unrepeatable
selves engage in a relationship with the Other. It is also how they unite with the
world, in general.
In the following sections of the chapter, I attempt to strengthen the connec-
tions between discourse as a type of performative acts, moral responsibility as a
relation to the Other, and gender as a relational performance. I also situate the
link between gender and language in the very concrete discursive practices of
eight specific immigrants, who come with their own unique subjectivities and
socio-historic backgrounds.
4.2 Discourses about language learning and accuracy
Chapter Three already touched on some of the language learning practices of the
eight immigrants. Specifically, it described their reading practices and attitudes
toward literacy in both their first and second languages. It also mentioned that
Sylvia, Vera, Boris and Aleksei (in other words, the older participants) started tak-
ing free English language classes, but it was Vera and Sylvia who attended these
more often. According to Vera’s words and her husband’s admission, he just didn’t
have much time for classes because of his schedule, which often extended after
6:00 p.m. Natalia was the only one from among the two younger couples to take
formal courses in English as a second language as part of her college studies, spe-
cifically two ESL writing courses, before she was allowed to take regular English
composition courses at her university. When discussing how important accuracy
in the second language was for her, Vera was unequivocal. She said:
It is very important for me to use correct English because all my life I use correct
Russian. I was teacher, then journalist and my job oblige me to use correct lan-
guage. Besides that, I think that each person who respect themselves use correct
language.
Aleksei’s response about how important it is to use accurate English was rather
different: “I think it’s not important right now. In the future, it will be more im-
portant.” Addressing the issue of accuracy, Sylvia noted:
It’s important for very many aspects of my life. First of all it’s dealing with other
people. The possibility to speak correct, to understand correct, to respond correct
and in time at different life situations will depend on English language correct
level. Who will want [to] speak with me if I am not understood and if I don’t
understand other people?
Sylvia’s response is interesting because her focus is on the Other, on understanding

and responding to others, both very Bakhtinian concepts. Her husband’s explana-
tion of why it is important to use correct English was in Russian, and it stressed
the importance of getting a job in his new country. Lydia’s elaborate discussion of
why accuracy is important to her also entails a sense of the Other, an acknowledg-
ment of the person with whom she is communicating, and an explicit reference to
the emotions she associates with the use of the second language:
It is important for me, and there are several reasons for that. First of all, I like to feel
comfortable and self-confident in any situation. And if I cannot speak to people
properly, it makes me feel stupid. And second, I respect people. Speaking correct
language, I always admired these speaking pure Russian or Ukrainian, without any
slang. I consider them as carriers of culture, at least language culture. And that’s
another reason I want to speak pure English – I want to be cultured person.
The adjectives comfortable, self-confident, and stupid are marked by Lydia’s emo-
tional-volitional tone when describing why using correct English is significant to
her. Her husband, Peter, also talks about culture, but without emotionally charged
adjectives. Thus, the connection between the women’s emotional discourses dis-
cussed in the previous chapter and their perceived need for accuracy in the sec-
ond language is apparent.
From observing the families in their home settings, I know that Sylvia and
Vera both used English grammar textbooks, but I never saw their husbands use
them or open any English-language books. Their narratives also showed that,
at least within the two older couples, the women displayed a higher preference
for investing in learning the structure of the second language. The women also
employed metalinguistic discourses much more frequently than their respective
spouses. Sylvia, who actively studied grammar rules and new vocabulary items,
exemplified the good language learner. Sylvia not only studied grammar texts, but
she also attempted to read some her favorite writers in English. For instance, as
she was struggling to read one of Agatha Christie’s novels, popular in the former
Soviet Union, she showed me the many phrases and words that she had high-
lighted in the texts. Some of them were underlined as well. This was one of Sylvia’s
strategies to focus her attention on difficult grammar points, for instance, verb
tenses. Sylvia said:
And so far / I / unless I make out make out in grammatical form [unless I under-
stand the grammar of the expression] / I don’t continue. I want to understand.
When she came across a new expression, for instance, she would open a diction-
ary and try to understand what it means because, as she put it herself, she was in-
terested in the “tonkosti” (nuances) of the language. In contrast, Boris, her spouse,
rarely, if ever concerned himself with structure, but both Sylvia and Boris agreed
that he was better at guessing than she was. Sylvia admitted that she didn’t like
guessing because she was worried that she would not get the correct meaning
when she was interacting with someone, for example, especially on the phone.
She contrasted how she felt about this with Boris:
Sylvia: [He doesn’t get] confused. Ne stesnyaetsya [he is not worried].
Boris: [If I don’t understand] ask. One time two time three time! I must
understand what speak me. I ask two times / two three times / no
problem! Sylvia / not. She mm neudobno [feels uncomfortable].
The excerpt reveals not only learning preferences, but also attitudes toward the
communicative event and the other participant in it. Sylvia maintained a watchful
gaze at the Other, with whom she is speaking, worrying about how her potential
misunderstanding might affect the communication process. Boris, on the other
hand, stayed focused on the message, rather than on the ways of conveying it or
whether he might inconvenience the other person by asking him or her to repeat
it. Their interaction above illustrates the connection between a rather Bakhtinian
orientation toward the Other (a sideways glance) in Sylvia’s case and her acute
interest in accuracy in the second language.
Sylvia’s dictionary use similarly reflects her close attention to structure. Al-
though all of the participants owned a dictionary, Sylvia was the most avid user.
Every day, she would take a bus to work, and during the 45-minute ride, she would
read a book in English. Sylvia told me that when she encountered a new, unfa-
miliar word, she would look it up in her small, electronic, talking dictionary. She
would check both the meaning and the pronunciation. She said, as she was laugh-
ing, poking fun of her own behavior on the bus: “All bus is hearing! They [the
other passengers] know that I am crazy…” I have seen several Russian-English
and English-Russian dictionaries at Vera and Aleksei’s apartment, too. During
my observations, I only saw Vera using them. She used them quite frequently
during her first two years in the United States and, particularly, during the time
she was taking English-as-a-second language courses. Vera summarized her use
of a dictionary:
[I use a dictionary] when I read, when I translate the sentences, and any time I
speak with anyone, I use the dictionaries. But I bought here the Oxford diction-
ary, and I have Russian dictionary, and I look in one dictionary, then in the sec-
ond dictionary, and I… kak skazat’ sravnivayu [I compare their definitions].
Aleksei said that he didn’t rely on dictionaries. He would often resort to guessing
or asking questions of others. Sylvia and Vera, when feeling comfortable with
their interlocutors, would also elicit linguistic information. Sylvia, for example,
tended to ask her daughters, who had a better command of and a higher degree
of exposure to everyday expressions in English. Her inquiries were usually about
grammatical structures. She would ask Natalia or Lydia about structures she had
heard during the day, for instance, about the structure “there is.” Once, she heard
the expression “There might have been,” and the same night, she “discussed” it
with her daughters. It was typical of Sylvia to interrupt our conversations to ask
me about a grammar point or a word as in the following example:
Sylvia: (talking of her mother) But / the doctors forbid / or forbidded [stops
and looks at me questioningly]?
Gergana: Forbade.
Sylvia: Forbade / almost all medicine.
Vera would also frequently elicit linguistic information from me. She would typi-
cally ask whether a grammatical structure that she used was accurate or would
inquire about the meaning or appropriateness of word usage. In the following
brief interactions transcribed at different points of time, she was asking about
different verb forms:
a. Vera: It’s more than I receive. But so much friends. And every of them have /
they have… Have or has [asking me]?
Gergana: Have.
b. Gergana: So you want to invest in a mutual fund?
Vera: I will not. But they will! [pausing] Won’t or will? What is correct? They
won’t or they will [looking at me questioningly]?
Gergana: They will is like they will in the future. They won’t / [means] they will not.
Vera: No. They will! They will / buy the…
My data do not contain examples of Aleksei or Boris asking any questions related
to language structure or function. In fact, Vera would sometimes get frustrated
that her husband wouldn’t even try to use some of the resources she had provided
for both of them, as illustrated in the following exchange:
Gergana: I see the dictionary on the table. Were you using it or Vera?
Aleksei: Vera.
Gergana: Do you use it sometimes?

[Vera comes and brings closer two other textbooks with grammar, texts,
and exercises. She says she likes them. Then, she points to Aleksei.]
Vera: But / don’t do nothing.
Aleksei: Why?
Vera: Why? Shto ty sdelal odno uprajnenie? [Did you do a single exercise?]
Aleksei: Ya / chital [I read].
Vera: Chital nichego [You didn’t read anything]. [She adds that English
wouldn’t come to him by itself; he needs to make an effort.]
In a manner akin to Vera’s, Sylvia pokes fun at her husband for not studying Eng-
lish. “Lazy boy,” she called him once, laughing, as she was comparing her attempts
to read grammar or fiction books in English with his lack of interest in these activ-
ities. In general, the women were the ones who would monitor their own language
production. Vera and Sylvia frequently monitored their second-language speech
and exhibited a higher metalinguistic awareness. Vera monitored, for instance,
the use of verb tenses about which she was reading in her grammar texts, as in
“His life is very interesting… was… no! Is very interesting!” and Sylvia similarly
monitored the use of articles or determiners. Overall, the women in this project
engaged with the second language in a more analytical manner, and they were
more concerned with how correct their grammar or linguistic expressions were.
It was also the women who used more self-monitoring strategies; in fact, there
were no instances of the men employing any self-monitoring. All these examples
suggest that the women also displayed a higher level of metalinguistic awareness
than the male participants.
4.3 Metalinguistic discourses
Metalinguistic awareness refers to the speaker’s or language learner’s knowledge

about phonological, lexical, or syntactic features of the language. In second lan-
guage research, there has been a positive correlation between higher levels of
metalinguistic knowledge and successful performance in the second language.
Curiously, there is a dearth of research related to metalinguistic awareness and
gender when it comes to second language learning. Narrative data reveal that the
participants frequently engaged in metalinguistic discursive practices related to
the use of the second language. Women typically employed metalinguistic dis-
courses more often than their respective spouses. Vera, in particular, used specific
grammatical terms when interacting both with me and her husband. She demon-
strated her formal awareness of grammar in the following excerpt when Vera and
Aleksei were discussing their wider interests in culture:
Vera: Not only in the Socialist Union / because I love ??? I studied in the
university so much about Spain / and about Italy / and about Fra…
France [to me]?
Gergana: Yeah France.
Aleksei: French.
Vera: (to Aleksei) No / French eto yazyk (is the language). Strana / eto [the
country is] France.
Aleksei: (skeptical) Hmm… American peoples / all time I listen / speak
“French French French.” Why?
Aleksei: Pravil’no govoryat po frantsuskii / strana Francia. Yazyk / French. [They
say “to speak French.” The country is France. The language is French.]
Gergana: French is the adjective.
Vera: (to Aleksei) Da, da! And France sushtestvitel’noe [noun].
Vera’s formal knowledge of grammar far exceeded terms like adjective and noun.
Once, I found Vera working on her English language homework, and we started
discussing the sentences from her homework. In the following segment, Vera was
reading them to me and asking for my feedback.
Vera : “No one in the English class knew the correct answer to the instructor’s
question.” Ya tak napisala potomushto reshila shto eto conkretnyi
klas, konkretnyi vopros, konkretnyi prepodavatel’ [I wrote it this way
because I decided this is a specific class, specific question, and specific
instructor].
Gergana: Where did you learn that rule?
Vera: I learned it here [in her ESL class]. Our teacher said us that if anyone
concrete, we need take the article, ‘the,’ not ‘a’ no ‘an.’
Vera was a very reflective language learner. Her predisposition to reflect on the
language learning process was, to a large extent, a result of her professional back-
ground. Studying Spanish in college and teaching the language itself, she says,
“Because I am a teacher, and I know how, how to teach anybody to do something.”
She was keenly analytic about her learning approaches toward the second lan-
guage, and she would comment on the different methods that her Spanish teacher
used in Russia when she was a student there as she was comparing these with the
methods she was encountering in her current English language classroom. More-
over, Vera critically analyzed what worked for her as a learner. Once, for example,
she was describing to me how irrelevant the ESL course she was currently taking
at a local college was to her needs:
Vera: … I think / it’s not good me… And I cannot understand / why [the
teachers] give us all the time… sochineniya… kak skazat’ [ how do you
say ‘compositions’]?
Gergana: Compositions?
Vera: No.
Gergana: Essays?
Vera: Essays. I write / I don’t know much is this. And all the time [the
teacher] said, “Oh, your essay is so-o interesting / it’s very very nice.”
But I cannot speak! Why I need to write it?
Vera: And / they gave us the words / so much! / they are / unusable words.
We don’t use them. Why I need study them? Maybe / we need study
the words / all the words / but / for the first time / the usable words.
Gergana: Something for communication.
Vera: Yeah / and then / the unusable. I forget / now I forget these words /
but if I translate these words in Russian / it will be like // for example /
I can say ogon’ [fire] / and [I can say] plamya [flame]. Nu chashe my
govorim ‘ogon’ [more often we say ‘fire’] / my ne govorim ‘plamya’ [we
don’t say ‘flame’]. The same in English. Ona nam dala takie slova /
kogda ya govoryus [she gave us such words that when I speak with]
Ame=with American people / they look on me with / large eyes
and say, “What is it?” And I say, “Sorry, I ask you what is it.” And I
need prepare the sentences / fine I prepare / but sometimes I cannot
understand mmm znachenie [the meaning].
Vera’s words show an awareness not only of the importance of knowing vocabulary
but also of the different stylistic contexts in which words could be used. Through-
out my communication with her, Vera stressed the importance of improving the
ability to speak, to express her voice in her everyday discursive realities.
Sylvia, whose engineering professional background was very different from
Vera’s journalistic career in Russia, also engaged in linguistic analysis. Whenever
she read anything in English, for instance, she would take “reading” notes. She
showed me her “reading” notes that contained numerous examples of English
verb tenses, their grammatical meaning, and practical usage. Natalia and Dmitri’s
interviews also reveal elements of metalinguistic discourses. In the segment be-
low, I was following up on a previous conversation with Natalia, who had men-
tioned that, occasionally, Americans did not understand her very well:
Gergana: You also said, and I think Dmitri also said that, that sometimes
Americans have problems understanding you, “but not just English.”
There are also other things that perhaps you don’t know about them.
What did you mean by that?
Natalia: Just sometimes mm the sense of / humor / it’s not the same / and I
don’t know…Maybe he meant about / how [Dmitri] / it’s not accent.
You should put / subject verb / agreement you know? And if he say /
[mix] them=they can’t understand.
Here, Natalia is explicitly referring to a concrete grammatical requirement in

English: subject-verb agreement. It is apparent that she has knowledge of formal
grammar. As all other participants, Natalia and Dmitri would often initiate the
topic of second language use. In the following case, as Dmitri was reflecting on
his lack of second-language fluency, Natalia jumped into his interpretation of the
problem to offer her own and different explanation:
Dmitri: I don’t use slang / because I don’t know slang / and they use slang all
time / and it’s a problem / just / because we don’t know slang…
Natalia: But / Dmitri / we can understand what they [Americans] try to say / I
mean / the whole point / but we / we / sometimes we can’t understand
some words / but we can understand what they try to say.
Dmitri: (impatient) It’s phrases! It’s sla:ng!
Natalia: No! It’s not slang Dmitri.
Gergana: Can you give me an example because it’s difficult for me to understand
when you say phrases. Is it idioms? Do you know what an idiom is?
Dmitri: It’s not / it’s not…
Natalia: It’s not idioms.
Gergana: Is it how they organize…?
Natalia: Yeah / how we put words in sentence / you know? I can say in Russian /
any order words…
Dmitri: It’s different way for Russian [speakers] uhm / to say something==
Natalia: ==I can say / in Russian / “I go to school” / and I can say “School I go.”
Gergana: Aah that’s word order.
Natalia: You know? And in English / I can’t say / I can’t say. “I go to school.”
That’s all. The only way!
This example illustrates Natalia’s metalinguistic awareness of syntactic features of

English as she compares them to her native language, giving specific examples.
Moreover, she is conscious of her husband’s language inference and rejects the
incorrect use of the term “slang” in this case. This was clearly not their first dis-
cussion of English. Realizing that what he indicates is not truly slang or idioms,
she offered a clarification for both Dmitri’s and my behalf. In another narrative
passage, Natalia again explicitly discussed her and Dmitri’s knowledge of English,
and they had just mentioned that writing could be difficult for them:
Gergana: Writing is a problem for American students, too…
Dmitri: But I have a very good / this guy / Mike / he’s very good educated
person so uhm he checks some grammar all time / my grammar.
Gergana: How does he check your grammar?
Natalia: Is it for university or something?
Dmitri: No/ for… because / actually we should write / a lot of times [at his
computer job] / because…. (pausing and searching for words)
Natalia: What is it? Reports?
Dmitri: I cannot explain // explanation for some problems and how to solve it
and other stuff / and uhm / I mean / on the first stage / first stage / he
checked it a lot. Right now / maybe it’s getting better I don’t know.
Natalia: Did you have a lot of mistakes?
Dmitri: It wasn’t a lot of mistakes. Just a lack of prepositions. Everywhere in my
sentences. What he was doing / he was insert “a” and “an.”
Natalia: Articles!
Dmitri: Oh sorry / articles.
Natalia supplied the correct linguistic term for which Dmitri was searching in the
passage above. At the same time, she actively facilitated the interaction by asking
Dmitri clarification questions. Once, we were discussing whether the two helped
correct each other’s grammar in English:
Natalia: I don’t hear him.
Dmitri: We don’t know grammar. How can we correct each other?
Natalia: No / we know grammar. We know grammar but we can’t... like for
example I know grammar but I don’t / know how to use it. Have
been tried / do you know that. I know but I don’t use it. I know /
theoretically.
Gergana: So you know the theory but you don’t use them. So what tenses do you
use?
Natalia: Present past=
Dmitri: Present / Why do you need something else (laughing)?
Natalia: Present perfect, present progressive, past progressive, perfect.
Dmitri: Future.
Natalia: Future.
Here, while Dmitri facetiously suggested that they didn’t need to use anything
else but the present tense, and they could still get away with conveying meaning,
Natalia didn’t accept his bid for a joke. Instead, she actually listed other aspects of
the verb with which she was familiar. This and other examples show that knowl-
edge of English grammar was important to her.
Lydia and Peter’s reflection on their use of English also show that she was
employing metalinguistic discourses more frequently and was more interested in
how accurate her English was:
Gergana: So you say that it’s important for you / to speak correct English.
What do you mean when you say correct English? Do you mean like
grammar?
Lydia: It means every word should be on / on its place and / in the right
form… yeah / I forgot how it’s called. One and two… how do we call
it? Part…?
Gergana: Can you give me an example?
Lydia: Yeah just the word “did, done.” Yeah three forms of the forms.
Gergana: Yeah the forms.
Lydia: And you know / Peter often says like / “She have.” It’s not correct so /
that’s what I mean.
Although she was not always confident of her knowledge, Lydia was able to ar-
ticulate it by providing specific terms and examples. In addition, she brought up
phrases used by her husband, which indicated that she monitored not only her
own speech but his as well. Not unlike the other participants, Lydia and Peter
often raised the topic of language learning. In the excerpt below, I was following
up on Peter’s earlier reference to grammar:
Gergana: You talk about grammar. So my question is: How do you improve
grammar? Or when you say “grammar,” can you give me some example
of that?
Peter: Grammar? It’s / it’s like a feeling. I can / I can spell probably 80%
English words right so=
Lydia: Probably yes. But grammar is not only spelling.
According to Peter’s own admission, he never focused on studying grammar.

Here, when I asked him about an example, he referred to his intuitive, experi-
ential approach, similar to those of Dmitri and Boris. The example he provided
was incorrect from a linguistic point of view because it involved writing systems
rather than the morpho-syntactic structure of the language. At that point, Natalia
interrupted him and interjected that grammar was not about spelling. Both Lydia
and Peter actively reflected on the second language learning and processes. They
had learned to focus on these features of their interlanguage which impeded the
construction of meaning. In the following case, it was pronunciation:
Peter: Yeah. The pronunciation is not automatically [learned] / because there
are a lot of words. As we learned these words from school they sounds
to us / they sound similar. Completely similar. But when we try to
explain to Americans something / they like…
Lydia: They often don’t understand.
Peter: They often don’t understand and=
Lydia: For example if we’d say, “We are going to Bally.” This I understand
because they have to know something about the Bally fitness center.
Gergana: Yeah if you don’t know the name…
Peter: No but they do.
Lydia: They heard but / they just don’t… [searches for words]
Gergana: Associate it with it?
Lydia: Yeah. And they are thinking, “You are going where?” Belly. They think
of belly. We just pronounce it wrong.
Peter: Wrong way and we couldn’t pronounce it now in the right way. They
[say], “Ah, Bally!”
Lydia: What did I say?! (meaning she said the same word as their American
interlocutor).
Peter: The same. And we couldn’t pick up this=
Lydia: Sound.
Peter: Yeah this sound / and ???
Lydia: Snickers and sneakers (gives another example).
Gergana: What?
Peter: Snickers and sneakers.
Lydia: Snickers like candy=
Peter: Snickers like candy bar and sneakers like shoe.
They have purposefully and accurately isolated the specific phonetic segments
that have created a misunderstanding in the second-language communicative act:
the tense vowel /i/ and the lax vowel /I/, on one hand, and the front middle /ε/
vs. the front low / æ /, on the other. The passage, however, reveals another ten-
dency as well. Lydia supplied the more specific linguistic information along with
the examples containing the particular problematic vowels. Peter was not the one
providing examples or even initiating the topic; he was, rather, echoing Lydia’s
statements.
4.4 Gendered discourses of linguistic expertise
Traditional sociolinguistic studies have shown that Western women tend to prefer
more prestigious linguistic forms and that the women are more status-conscious.
Of course, these studies were describing tendencies in very specific communities
and even sub-cultures. Bilaniuk (2003) investigated Ukrainian women’s attitudes
toward status and the role of language. Two thousand participants completed a
questionnaire that asked how they perceived the Russian and Ukrainian language
spoken where they live. A different part of the questionnaire asked the partici-
pants to rate different speakers’ speech on categories such as pleasantness, in-
telligence, and happiness and to associate them with several languages. Some of
results of Bilaniuk’s study were relevant to the notion of prestige and linguistic
forms. She found a tendency for women to favor English more strongly when
they evaluate intelligence and pleasantness. Men, on the other hand, associ-
ated authoritativeness more strongly with English. Another aspect of Bilaniuk’s
research suggested that women were more perceptive of the shifting status and
role of languages in their communities. She found the reason for that to be pri-
marily social: “If women’s social positions make them more sensitive to symbolic
and linguistic capital, this should lead them to be more critical of a language of
questionable status than men would be” (p. 62).
As the section above reveals, the women in this study were the ones who
were likely to provide specific language examples to elaborate on not only their
own, but also on their spouses’ perceptions of second language learning. A case
in point is Natalia, who clarified linguistic meaning for Dmitri and me in one
of the previous excerpts. Both Natalia and Lydia provided corrective feedback
for their husbands when the latter used words or terms inaccurately. It doesn’t
necessarily follow, though, that the male respondents did not engage in reflective
practices. Both men and women actively reflected on their learning of English
and everyday language situations. In Aleksei’s, Dmitri’s, and Boris’s cases, though,
these reflective practices were more general. For instance, Boris would say that he
knew something because he had heard it spoken somewhere, and Dmitri would
attempt to describe an aspect of the language that might pose a problem for him.
On the whole, however, the women’s discourses about language were more lin-
guistically precise and specific. This greater inclination to engage in metalinguis-
tic discourses combined with their greater concern for accuracy in the second
language points to another phenomenon in the study: The women tended to be
the linguistic experts and held the linguistic authority within the couples.
Overall, the male participants readily abdicated linguistic authority to their
wives. As we saw in the previous section, women would use their metalinguistic
knowledge to provide terminological clarifications when interacting with their
spouses and me. In other instances, the men would solicit their wives’ linguistic
assistance directly and ask for vocabulary items in the second language or for
translation from English to Russian. Vera and Aleksei’s narrative excerpts provide
numerous examples of this particular phenomenon. I usually tried to speak with
the two at the same time, but sometimes Vera’s attention was occupied by some-
thing else. In one such instance, as Aleksei and I were discussing his ideal job, he
paused in the middle of a sentence, trying to find the appropriate words:
Aleksei: (laughing) Hmm… Vera help me!
Vera: Shto shto? Ya ne slyshala. [What what? I wasn’t listening.]
Aleksei: A ty slyshai. [Well, listen.]
In this case, Vera was summoned from the kitchen so she could translate for
leksei. During another meeting with the couple, I asked them about their lives
A
in Russia. Vera, who was usually fairly talkative and always willing to share,
prompted Aleksei to speak this time:
Vera: (to Aleksei) Govori [speak].

Aleksei: Ty je prishla pomogat’ [you came to help].
Vera: No / ya ne pomogu. I don’t help you. I only / hear you.
The examples reflect a pattern: Vera was clearly the linguistic expert in the family.
Very much like Vera, Sylvia provided corrective feedback for her husband
in numerous cases, and the following excerpt illustrates this tendency in their
interaction:
Boris: Rent. Now I work in West Chester/ then build 20 houses. Each houses
have 16// to 28 apartments. Big....
Sylvia: Two storied / three storied.
Boris: Two three storied. Uh... then work … mnogo…
Sylvia: (translates) Many.
Boris: Many people. Other specialist [pronounced as [spesialist].
Sylvia: (supplies the American pronunciation) [spew6list].
In a similar exchange, Sylvia corrected Boris’s verb form:

Boris: And we was in / art museum.
Sylvia: We were.
Boris: And we were….
Boris also acknowledged his wife’s linguistic authority as he repeated the cor-
rect verb form after her correction. As apparent in the examples above, Sylvia
provided correction for Boris’s speech in both grammar and pronunciation, and
she translated words for him. It was especially interesting that she did this in an
automatic, unconscious manner.
Such patterns of female linguistic authority were characteristic of another
couple in the study, too. Lydia was the one providing corrective feedback for her
husband as demonstrated in the following examples:
Peter: And you know / you feel yourself / it’s mm how to say? There’s like
classes of people / and depend on this class mm depend on these
classes / people speaking other language=
Lydia: Different.
Peter: Different different language. Sorry… Different language so…
…
Peter: If if a person / my opinion / if a person so sweet / you just keep your
eyes opened.
Lydia: Open.
Peter: Open.
These patterns of interaction are very similar the ways Vera and Sylvia provided
linguistic feedback to their husbands in terms of grammar and lexical choices.
Peter not only recognized Lydia’s language authority but also anticipated it. It is
conspicuous in the exchange below:
Peter: And American is living=American is living / I think / majority of them
/ are living for themselves=for theyselves. And that’s it. And people
are not so hooked up. And / it’s very / I think it’s very=shto (what)?
(looking at Lydia).
Lydia: Nichevo (nothing).
Peter: Shto-to nepravil’no (something incorrect)?
Lydia: Ya nichevo (nothing).
Peter was accustomed to Lydia’s feedback, and, in his own words he found it “help-
ful.” In the last excerpt, although Lydia did not interrupt him in any way, he was
anticipating her comment. In other cases, Peter, very much like Boris and Aleksei,
would pause in the middle of his sentence, and would ask Lydia directly about a
specific English word or help with translation.
This section shows that the female participants in this study were function-
ing as the linguistic experts within the couples; they were the authorities on
English vocabulary or grammar. It might seem ironic, then, that despite their
greater proficiency when communicating in English, the women were the ones
who would feel shame or fear of making mistakes. The previous chapter showed
that this contradiction was especially prominent in Sylvia and Boris’s case, where
Sylvia’s emotions included guilt and shame whenever she experienced difficulty
in the second language, and where Boris vehemently denied the validity of her
emotions. When, for instance, Sylvia mentioned that she felt guilty when others
had problems understanding her English, Boris asked, “Why? Wha:y?,” repeat-
ing his question twice to underscore that he doesn’t agree with his wife. As he
later explained, Sylvia should not feel guilty as all Americans were immigrants
themselves, perhaps not such a long time ago. Interestingly, I couldn’t identify in-
stances in the data which showed the women asking their husbands for language
assistance although they would often address me and ask for different types of
linguistic information, and as in Vera’s example, would even request help with
their homework. On the one hand, the female participants positioned themselves
and were positioned by their husbands as the linguistic experts or linguistic au-
thority within the couples; on the other, they saw their positions as vulnerable and
inferior to the linguistic Other exactly because of their abilities in the second lan-
guage. As Cameron (1998) points out, traditional research regarding gender and
language does not offer much theoretical explanation of this seeming discrepancy.
In the following section, I am going to draw on Bakhtin’s notion of responsibility,
as outlined in the chapter above.
4.5 “Because I feel a responsibility”: Discourses of responsibility,

second language use, and gender
Responsibility, to Bakhtin, was not a mere abstract notion or a formal require-

ment (Nielsen, 2002, p. 61). At the core of the Bakhtinian understanding of ethics
was the dialogic nature of discourse: “Any understanding of live speech, a live
utterance, is inherently responsive, although the degree of this activity varies ex-
tremely” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 68). The female participants in the study consistently
employed discourses of responsibility toward various others, and the relationships
between themselves and others were marked by a sense of dialogic responsibility,
illustrated in their own interactions and in their narratives.
The concept of responsibility in gender-related research emerged from the
field of psychology, through the widely-recognized work of Gilligan (1983), a
feminist researcher who was among the first to draw attention to how men and
women construct their relations with others in “different voices.” The themes of
responsibility, morality, and gender run prominently through Gilligan’s book, in
which the feminist psychologist claims that women define themselves in “terms
of their ability to care” for others (p. 17) and through relationships with oth-
ers, while men develop their sense of selves based on authority and individual
achievement. Women’s sensitivity to the needs of others is related to their voice
of vulnerability. Gilligan also points out that, for women, these positions are not
devoid of conflict:
The conflict between self and other thus constitutes the central moral problem
for women, posing a dilemma whose resolution requires a reconciliation between
femininity and adulthood…. It is precisely this dilemma – the conflict between
compassion and autonomy, between virtue and power – which the feminine voice
struggles to resolve in its effort to reclaim the self and to solve the moral problem
in such a way that no one is hurt. (p. 71)
Gilligan’s approach has had its critics, claiming that her work is conservative, that
it underscores essentialism in gender research, and that it promotes traditional
concepts of women. Others have seen Gilligan’s approach to women’s voices as
highlighting voices of deficiency and female inferiority. Another generation of
feminist researchers, however, has appreciated the insight that Gilligan’s inter-
pretation has offered. Heckman (1995), for instance, sees the value of Gilligan’s
controversial book exactly in the description of how the women Gilligan has in-
terviewed represent themselves in moral terms. Heckman claims that Gilligan’s
work should be viewed as moving beyond the discourse of dichotomies and hier-
archies. The center of her work is a discussion of ethics and the pertaining to them
moral, relational voices. “What Gilligan’s approach entails is not a contemporary
form of Aristotelian or communitarian ethics but, rather, a new moral language

altogether,” argues Heckman (p. 25).
The aspects of Gilligan’s concepts on gender and moral responsibility that I
have found particularly valuable to my own narrative analysis have been her focus
on voice and relationality, and in this, I have found parallels between her approach
to psychological research and Bakhtin’s own conceptualization of selves. Both
Bakhtin and Gilligan viewed ethics as an inherent component of the self ’s devel-
opment. However, although Gilligan’s model is largely gendered, and she doesn’t
situate morality in discourse, to Bakhtin, ethics is embedded in discourse and
dialogue. The very way Bakhtin locates discourse is in relations: “Discourse lives
on the boundary between its own context and another, alien context” (Bakhtin,
1981, p. 284). One of the most fundamental features of discourse is its addressiv-
ity or addressivnost’. The self or the “I” functions in a context in which there is a
meaningful addressee; it will only “manifest,” to borrow Holquist’s (1990) words
as “condition of being addressed” (p. 27). In Bakhtin’s discursive ethics, response,
addressivity mark the orientation toward the Other. In his framework, where lan-
guage is a metaphor for human consciousness, our discursive selves are always
answerable or responsible to something or someone outside of us.
The women described above implicitly evidencing this sense of responsibility
through the concern for accuracy in the second language. In the following sec-
tion, I present other examples where the female participants reveal their sense of
responsibility in discourse either explicitly through their narrative descriptions or
more implicitly through their ways of interaction and meaning facilitation.
When Sylvia discussed why accuracy in English was important to her, she
clearly referred to the Other, to understanding and responding to another human
being. In her narratives, responsibility was a fairly important word and took on
different shades of meaning. One of the meanings, as defined by the participant
herself, was the responsibility for understanding discourse. Once, for instance, as
we were discussing who speaks more often at stores when Boris and Sylvia went
shopping together, Sylvia didn’t have to think long about her answer:
Sylvia: [Boris] considers that all things I must to speak. Because I feel a
responsibility.
Gergana: Responsible for what?
Sylvia: For understanding. For somebody’s understanding. Chustvuyu shto
ya otvestvena shto on ponyal [I feel responsible for the other speaker’s
understanding].
Interestingly, Sylvia used the Russian adjective “otvetstvena,” which has exactly the
same root as Bakhtin’s term “otvetstvenost’.” When she talks about responsibility in
“understanding,” Sylvia doesn’t refer merely to Boris’s understanding of English.
“Understanding” is another term with a special meaning in Bakhtin’s framework.

“On” (“he,” the Russian generic subject pronoun) in Sylvia’s narrative above en-
compasses anyone with whom she might have to speak, in any language.
Similarly, in another conversation, Vera unequivocally stated that she was
the one to speak when shopping together with Aleksei at different store. Her
answer, direct as it was, “I, who!” indicated that this was a common pattern for
the couple:
Vera: (in an indignant tone) I / who!
Aleksei: (laughs) Vera.
Vera: Only I! He stay / and he think / he need do something / or no. It’s
better for him to stay and look. Or no / and use the cart. This is his job.
My is asking / talking with salesmen and other people.
While Dmitri’s second language skills were not conspicuously lacking compared
to Natalia’s, once Natalia admitted that if one of the two needed to speak with
their manager at the restaurant, for instance, she would be more likely to do it
because Dmitri would get more upset easily (not so much with the linguistic com-
ponent, but more with the content of the conversation). Some traditional socio-
linguists (Fishman, 1978) have described the phenomenon of women having to
work harder on maintaining and encouraging interaction in communication, but
theoretical explanations have not been sufficient for this in language research.
Here, the explanation that I am offering and that goes beyond any specific disci-
pline is the notion of dialogic, discursive responsibility.
Sylvia’s use of the word “responsibility” was unambiguous in a number of in-
stances. In one such example, she narrated how she had to translate for a recently-
arrived immigrant family, when one of them was admitted to the hospital:
Mmm for example / today I had to accompany / my old relative / to the clinic….
Our relatives / learn English bad / so they asked me / to translate. And I had to
I had to go with them to [the hospital] and mm to accompany her and alone
alone / for the test / and very serious test / cardio / test for mm about two hours.
And ultra sound heart and / it’s a very great / responsibility because because / I
know / I understand that mm my English is not good enough. I / I didn’t quite
understand English. I was afraid that I I / cannot translate correctly / yes? And
to understand correctly. And the doctors and the nurses and told me about the
procedure. Yes / and asked me / to translate…. But all that was over good [It all
ended well.] Yes? Nervous / nervous / nervous / because I had responsibility!
Great responsibility!
Sylvia had indicated many other times that she felt “nervous” when she used Eng-
lish, but here, she directly related her state of nervousness and fear to the “great”
sense of responsibility she felt to concrete others: in this case, both her elderly
relative and the medical personnel. Women’s fear of hurting others is something
that Gilligan specifically addresses in her book. Interestingly, Sylvia located this
fear of causing trouble for another – a very ethical concern – in her second lan-
guage use. In other, similar cases, Sylvia expressed a concern about endangering
family members. She frequently mentioned that she felt “afraid” because one of
her “mistakes” might hurt her family: “Because I am afraid that [if I] say some-
thing wrong, it will be mistake, very serious mistake and big trouble for us in the
future.” Responsibility, in this case, always emerged within the dialogic relation-
ships with others.
Sylvia’s references to moral responsibility toward someone else in discourse
were quite explicit. Dialogic responsibility, however, as a discursive phenomenon,
does not have to be articulated or named explicitly. It can manifest itself through
the interactions between the self and others, as it manifested itself within the
couples and in their interactions with me. One way in which the women dis-
played discursive responsibility was through their efforts at meaning facilitation.
In many of the excerpts in the previous sections, the women translated for their
spouses and provided grammatical clarifications. The responsibility for talk and
for repairing breakdowns in discourse was evident in my interactions with the
other couples as well. This sense of responsibility went beyond purely linguis-
tic matters – translation of words and grammar clarifications – and into a more
general facilitation of discourse itself, as a process of communication. This was
most apparent in my interactions with Natalia and Dmitri, in which Natalia had
assumed the responsibility for communication from the very beginning. In one
characteristic excerpt, for instance, having not seen them for a few weeks, I was
attempting to follow up on my previous conversations with the couple:
Gergana: We haven’t seen each other for a couple of weeks so I am just interested
in whether something happened, anything concerning English and
American culture.
Dmitri: Actually, I don’t have any problem.
Natalia: Something new? It’s not a problem.
Gergana: (to Dmitri) Who did you talk with then?
Natalia: (to Dmitri) The teachers? Your professors in school?
Natalia assumed control of the interaction, trying to elicit responses from her
somewhat reluctant to speak husband. However, this was not an isolated example.
In another interaction, Dmitri was sharing a story about his workday:
Dmitri: I just / I just love one guy from General Electric. Uhm / one of the
Russian lady / from our company / is project manager / project leader
for this / this particular project and / he asked me to tell him a couple
Russian words / and impressed.
Natalia: He wants to impress her?

Dmitri: He impressed her. “Privet!” [the guy had said]. She was surprised==
Natalia == A lot of Americans / want to / to know Russian words==
Dmitri: ==She didn’t expect it!=
Natalia: But they always want to know bad words! Always bad words
(laughs)….Just bad... I don’t know. Something not good. And Dmitri
told me / always tell me / “Don't say any bad words in Russian! Don't
say it!”
Dmitri: And don’t translate.
Natalia: Oh I don’t. I don’t any more (the two of us laugh).
Natalia: What else, Dmitri? What are doing during the day?
In the last sentence, Natalia again assumed responsibility for her husband’s con-
tribution to the conversation, as she did in another interaction, when she inter-
rupted her softly speaking husband to ask him to speak up so we can hear him
and move closer to us (he was sitting at his computer). In these excerpts, Natalia
was not only the linguistic expert in the second language; she was also acting as
a responsible moral self who responds to a perception of a need – a need that is
both ethical (toward someone else, in this case, me), but which is also undeni-
ably discursive, borne of communication. The interactions with the other couples
showed similar patterns of meaning facilitation, where the women were the pri-
mary agents. In one example, Vera, who had stepped a few feet away from Aleksei
and me, intervened to make sure that the communicative event was not broken,
and meaning was still being carried on.
Aleksei: Sometime / when I was in / store // I have a problem. I see / ah no / I
look / look look / ??? I take take take [food]. It’s all. When I go to ???
after I ??? (pausing and searching for words)
Vera: (comes to us) Shto? Po russki? [What? Say it in Russian?]
Aleksei: Ya seichas’ vspomnyu [I just remembered]. Ah, I needed ??? credit. I
have a credit card. Good. I’m ??? no problem.
The heightened sense of orientation to the needs of another (or answerability) dis-
played itself in several purely discursive features as well, for example, the use of
apologies or the use of the pronoun “we” versus “I” in the women’s narrative data.
Traditional sociolinguistics have claimed that women employed these more often
than men (for a summary, see Holmes, 1995) although Holmes reports that, at
least when it comes to apologizing, Western men tend to apologize more often to
women to whom they feel close. Apologizing is more related to power as a social
category. It was very noticeable in Sylvia’s speech that she apologized frequently.
She apologized to me, when I first entered their apartment, stating, “Please ex-
cuse our bad apartment.” She also frequently referred to apologizing to others
in her everyday interactions (e.g., “Many times I apologize. I am sorry. I didn’t
nderstand”), and she would describe how she had apologized to someone at work
u
or in another situation. In fact, as she put it, she apologized “every time” and about
“everything.” Her need to apologize was generated by her perceived lack of com-
munication skills and in the inconvenience she believed that she caused to the
Other. In contrast, her spouse, Boris, didn’t feel the need to apologize. He asserted
his position as one of the many non-native speakers in this country quite clearly:
Boris: In America, in America it’s very very many people who cannot speak
English. Nothing. But // they come to store, to supermarket==
Sylvia: == I such woman (in defense of herself and how she feels).
Boris: [nobody is afraid] only my wife afraid.
And, yet, even as Boris was asserting his rights as a non-native speaker, he admit-
ted in the rest of the excerpt that Sylvia was the one who spoke more often at the
store than he did.
Another discourse feature of what I call the responsible dialogical self is
Natalia’s use of the pronoun “we.” It became apparent fairly quickly during my
interactions with the couple that Natalia typically used “we” and in many more
contexts than Dmitri. Natalia avoided the plural pronoun only when the context
explicitly excluded her husband, while Dmitri engaged in just the opposite prac-
tice. He used the pronoun “we” only when he directly involved Natalia. When
describing their typical day, for example, the two said:
Natalia: We wake up and just… go to school and then I am going to downtown
because it is my job…
Dmitri: I wake up and, let’s say, I am doing my work, usually… a lot of it.
In the excerpt above, while Natalia and Dmitri were discussing the same topic,
Natalia’s preference for “we” for the same context contrasts with Dmitri’s use of
“I.” Other examples illustrated the same pattern. I believe it was one of Natalia’s
ways of assuming responsibility for talking. In other exchanges, when the ques-
tion was addressed to both of them, it was usually Natalia who would respond,
and she would include Dmitri by using “we” in her replies. Natalia’s orientation to
the Other here chooses a different linguistic item, while Dmitri would employ a
more individualistic discourse by preferring “I” in the very same contexts.
And yet another discursive marker of the discursively responsible self is the
expression “you know,” especially when used in its affective, rather than referen-
tial meaning. Holmes (1995) observed several different functions of this particu-
lar discourse marker or filler. In some cases, for instance, it may be used to attract
sympathy or to emphasize common values and experiences between speakers. In
this sense, “you know” has an affective meaning. According to Holmes, “you know”
in its affective function is used more often by women than men, but interestingly,
she does not notice such a difference when it comes to its referential function.
Others (Freed & Greenwood, 1996) have not found such a gender differentiation
in the use of “you know” between men and women. Freed and Greenwood stud-
ied homogeneous pairs. As mentioned earlier, Natalia’s and Dmitri’s skills in the
second language were fairly symmetrical in terms of both grammar and vocabu-
lary knowledge. What I noticed, however, was that the expression “you know,”
occurs 57 times in Natalia’s narratives in its affective sense. In Dmitri’s speech,
I only observed four instances of the affective “you know.” Some excerpts from
Natalia’s narratives, recorded at different points of investigation that illustrate the
use of this marker, are listed below:
a. Yeah you know / I just / lately I / realize that // it’s not difficult for me to talk to /
at my job as secretary and the phone / with people who come in and waiting for
lawyer. And I talk to them / that’s fine. And it’s not difficult to me to talk to / my
clients in restaurant / and / it’s more difficult to talk with other servers because
something / is more important / you know some / such things I don’t know.
b. They / you know / they are thinking about / they are paying / big money /and
they want to / have good service / but everybody is human just / they can’t
understand.
c. Oh! You know the kind of education / when you / don’t have to attend classes…
In (a) and (b), the use of “you know” is affective, and in (c), it is referential and
not a bona fide discourse marker. One of the few examples of “you know” as an
affective marker in Dmitri’s narratives is listed below:
And before the uhm mmm before our coming to America / I just didn’t have
any time. So I just pack them and / you know / so actually he just ??? expropri-
ate them.
The marker “you know” as a way of engaging the immediate interlocutor’s atten-
tion occurred more frequently in the discourse of female participants than in the
men’s. Vera and Aleksei’s patterns of interaction illustrated a similar tendency.
In Vera’s narratives, “you know” frequently appeared as “do you know,” and it
obviously served the same affective purpose – the emphasis of shared values and
shared experiences:
a. Because / maybe I don’t understand some mm principal words / the details. I
understand about what mm they talk. I understand all. But / some details / and
it’s very important / because / do you know / it’s an example.
b. Do you know / it’s very difficult to him in my mind / that he stands up / every
morning / at 4 o’clock.
I suggest that the marker “you know” in this context is related to other findings
about women’s discursive responsibility. In Vera’s excerpts, in particular, “you
know” functions to elicit sympathy. It is also related to the women’s attending

more closely to the process of conversation in general. The traditional term for
the ability to use discourse markers such as “you know” appropriately in a second
language would be “communicative competence” in second language acquisition
studies. Although I am not rejecting this term and its framework in any way, I
stress the connection between the more frequent use of affective markers and
conversational ability, in general, to the notion of discursive responsibility, which
I have introduced earlier in this chapter. “You know,” like the pronoun “we,” is a
discursive feature of the dialogic, responsible self.
This section of the chapter demonstrated that the women in the study were
more finely attuned to the discursive needs of the Other – either me, as a concrete,
immediate interlocutor, or as in Sylvia’s examples toward a generic Other, any one
with whom she needs to communicate. The next section connects gender with
culture in the second language environment.
4.6 Gender and discourse in culture
Bakhtin teaches us to view the dialogic situation in its specificity and to take into
account the complex, unique histories of the participants in any discursive event.
In this case, it is possible that the women responded more easily to me as they
perceived me as another Eastern European woman. Further, my earlier claim is
not to say that the women were answerable, but the men were not. Rather, it was
that the men and the women employed different discourses in responding to oth-
ers as these others were located in their immediate environment and also in a
more general, second language milieu. And to use Bakhtin’s words, the degree of
answerability in these situations varied.
The complex connection between gender and discourse, as the introduction
to this particular chapter points out, cannot be viewed singly as a linguistic cat-
egory. It is, in the very least, shaped by larger socio-cultural factors and expecta-
tions of what femininity and masculinity in a particular community signify. The
social role of women is constructed differently in different cultures and even sub-
cultures. Studies on immigrant women from more traditional societies (e.g., Asia
or South America) may reveal a different cluster of social factors and psychologi-
cal concerns from immigrant women from other communities, from Western or
Eastern Europe (D’Avanzo, Fryer, & Froman, 1994; Fox, Cowell, & Johnson, 1995;
Vega, Kolody, & Valle, 1987). One study of gender differences among immigrants
from the former Soviet Union yields some very interesting insights, although its
focus is, ultimately, on psychological issues among immigrant men and women
from this specific part of the world. Aroian, Norris, and Chiang (2003) claim that,
typically, immigrants from the former Soviet Union are highly educated, and both
the men and women were professionals in their home countries. Interestingly, the
researchers assert that former Soviet immigrant women are “unlike” (p. 41) most
of the groups of immigrant women. These women have been as well educated as
the men, and they have been part of the work force. Furthermore, women have
held jobs in highly specialized and professional sectors for a long time in the his-
tory of their countries. At the same time, they were still the ones, who, tradition-
ally, assume a greater role in domestic responsibility for their families. It was pos-
sible to carry such multiple roles for a long time partly because of the structure
of the family in the former Soviet Union, where multigenerational families were
often the norm (in other words, extended families might live under the same roof,
and, thus, the woman, who was working outside the home, could receive help
from an older relative).
The women in this study grew up with the model of such egalitarian roles, at
least when it came to occupation, in the two former Soviet Union countries. Sylvia
and Vera prided themselves as accomplished professionals in Ukraine and Rus-
sia, respectively. Lydia pursued a second master’s degree even though she already
had one from her native country. Natalia, who was the youngest, continued her
college studies in her new immigrant country. And, yet, at the same time, these
highly educated and professionally successful women took up the responsibility
of language learning and language practices within their home environment. They
were the linguistic experts within their families, but they were also the ones do-
ing the linguistic work, feeling “responsible” for communication with the Other,
facilitating discourse, and translating for their spouses. Their larger social roles
have been transferred to language or discursive roles. This amalgamation of social
and linguistic roles is fairly apparent within the two older couples. Sylvia and Bo-
ris both had occupations outside their home, for example, but it was Sylvia’s job to
get up and prepare breakfast in the morning. Lydia also mentioned getting up at
6:00 a.m. so she could cook breakfast for herself and Peter. Vera summarized the
many types of responsibility that had affected all areas of her domestic life with
Aleksei in the following way:
We live together 26 years / 26 and a half. And all
the time / all the time / I need / look / what he need do /
and what he need eat / and oi... and what he need dress.
The responsibility for second language use has become also part of her domain.
In this chapter, I have attempted to draw connections between gender, lan-
guage, and responsibility from a dialogic perspective, and while trying to bridge
linguistic factors with socio-psychological ones. Gender researchers have urged
investigators of gender in all fields to embrace interdisciplinary approaches as well
as to consider novel theoretical interpretations of gendered discourses. I believe

that Bakhtin, by considering individuals in their uniqueness, and simultaneously,
in their inherent, social positionings through their relations to different Others,
allows us to move beyond the male-female dichotomies that gender researchers
have bemoaned. Who we are is always determined in the relation to another, and
this relation occurs in a concrete world of lived experiences. To acquire a subjec-
tivity, the self “must become another in relation to himself, must look at himself
through the eyes of another” (Bakhtin, 1990, p. 15). Selves cannot really escape
their socio-cultural history and positions. The participants in this study them-
selves made frequent references to culture. They invoked the notion of culture
by talking about what about it means to be a “cultured” individual to them, and
what culture is, and their meanings were always infused with language. The next
chapter examines the intersection of selves and cultures, along with how our con-
struction of cultural conceptions may be gendered as well.
chapter 5
Between the self and the Other

Culture and subjectivity in immigrants’ worlds
To be means to communicate dialogically.

M. Bakhtin (1984, p. 252)
Bez yazyka nel’zya voiti v kul’turu potomu
shto kul’tura ponimaesh cherez lyudei.
[You cannot enter a culture without language
because we understand culture through people.]
Boris, Ukrainian immigrant
Irina Reyn’s (2008) novel What Happened to Anna K. is a fictional story about the
immigrant version of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina’s character. Anna K. was transplant-
ed in the United States as a young girl of 11, and the author reminisces on what
makes up the Russian-ness that occupies a significant part of her character’s life:
We cannot continue the story of Anna K. without tackling the issue of the Russian
soul – velikaya russkaya dusha. Much ink has been spilled on it, no one can ad-
equately articulate what it entails. It is generally agreed that the term is hazy and
amorphous, an exclusive gift for the suffering Russians. Does it have anything to
do with the bitter cold? Communist timetables? Policing grandmothers? The ad-
dictive qualities of vodka? Wars fought with little training, shoddy clothing, and
primitive equipment? An affection for murderous dictators? Ambivalence about
the Westernizing innovations of Peter the Great? …. Does it have something to
do with this toska everyone talks about, an irrepressible longing for the Mother-
land, a misty-eyed nostalgia for God-knows-what, God-knows-when? And what
happens to the Great Russian Soul when it’s transplanted? Can it flourish in Rego
Park, Queens, for example? The Russians around Anna had their own – immi-
grant – interpretations of the phenomenon. (pp. 13–14)
Reyn poses a question that many real-life immigrants have attempted to answer:
What does it mean to have a soul that belongs to a certain culture or ethnic group?
How can we define Russian-ness? What does it mean to be an American, or Bul-
garian, or French, for that matter? Reyn’s account of the Russian soul is not with-
out a touch of sarcasm, and she has quite purposefully included some of the more
prevalent stereotypes about Russians in America. In asking what it means to be
Russian (or any other nationality), one faces another question: What does it mean
to have or carry a particular culture? Can we really find it in what we drink, what
we eat, what climate we live in, in what we wear? In Peter’s narratives – not fic-
tional – food does, indeed, appear briefly as a motif, for instance, when he was
puzzling over the “American” understanding that egg omelets are served only for
breakfast and not for dinner at restaurants, or when he talked about his initial
fascination with ketchup, which he poured over everything. But this was not what
truly defined culture for the participants in this project. What is culture to begin
with? Where is it located?
The notion of culture has been particularly challenging for anthropologists
to define. Traditionally, it has been defined as shared knowledge and systems of
meanings (Geertz, 1973). Franz Boaz, one of the fathers of American anthropol-
ogy, describes culture as a body of traditions and beliefs that exist in each society.
In this understanding of culture, cultures are as different as societies are. Accord-
ing to the culture as knowledge model, the individual can possess some knowl-
edge about cultural systems. For example, a person may know what type of food
to eat or how to dress for a certain social occasion. Goodenough provides us with
a classic and often-cited definition in cultural anthropology:
As I see it, a society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe
in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, and do so in any role
that they accept for any one of themselves. Culture, being what people have to
learn as distinct from their biological heritage, must consist of the end product
of learning: knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. By this
definition, we should note note that culture is not a material phenomenon; it does
not consist of things, people, behaviour, or emotions. It is rather an organisation
of these things. It is the form of things that people have in mind, their models for
perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. (1964, p. 36)
Definitions like this reflect fairly structuralist views in anthropology. The early
models of culture depict this construct as external to the individual, something
that she or he acquires as a shared system of knowledge. However, more current
theorists of culture and psychology have rejected the idea of acquisition of culture
as a list of objective norms and rituals and have proposed a more individualized
version of culture. Wolcott (1991), drawing on Goodenough’s work and his term
propriospect, suggests that individuals have a private, subjective view of the world
and stresses not so much the collective aspect of culture, but the unique cultures
that individuals create based on their own personal experiences. The same way
that individuals have their own idiolects when they use language, and, indeed,
can employ more than one idiolect depending on the context, they can have more
than one propriespect (private culture). Wolcott specifically takes issue with the
Chapter 5. Between the self and the Other 107
traditional views in which the acquisition of culture is treated and with the terms
enculturation and socialization. Citing earlier work by Herskovits (1948), who
coined the term enculturation to indicate the processes through which an indi-
vidual acquires the accepted ways of behaving and thinking, Wolcott criticizes
anthropologists for the largely macro-cultural focus of this term (along with the
term socialization), and accuses them of being too “preoccupied… with the con-
tent of culture… rather than the processes of how these customary ways are ac-
quired” (Wolcott, p. 257). The biggest drawback of looking at the acquisition of
culture as enculturation, to Wolcott, is the fact that no two human beings experi-
ence the world in an identical manner.
Other theorists such as Rosaldo (1984) have also claimed that “culture, far
more than a mere catalogue of rituals and beliefs, is indeed the very stuff of which
our subjectivities are created” (p. 150). Rosaldo connects culture with the con-
struction of human selfhood which originates not so much through artifacts or
rules, but in the daily practices of persons. Culture has been especially challeng-
ing for anthropologists to conceptualize in the postmodern era. In fact, it has
been much easier to declare what culture isn’t. A good example comes from Agar
(1994), who defines culture in terms of what it is not; in other words, culture is
not a closed, coherent system of meanings. Recently, some cultural theorists have
commented on the breakdown and even of the demise of this concept (Gonzalez,
1999). Summarizing the reasons for these pessimistic musings on culture in an-
thropology, Gonzalez writes:
The idea that something external to the human organism, something called “cul-
ture,” could contribute to perceived human diversity was at the time [of the end of
last century] pivotal shift in paradigm. However, the initial power and potential
of culture concept seem to have been detoured through a reductionist abuse of
the term. (p. 431)
Gonzalez goes on to introduce other, more current approaches that, nevertheless,

have proven somewhat less than adequate as well, for example, the view of culture
as identity or culture as discourse.
Recognizing this difficulty in defining culture, anthropologists Holland and
her colleagues have forwarded instead the concept of figured worlds. “Figured
worlds,” as these scholars write, “take shape within and grant shape to the copro-
duction of activities, discourses, performances, and artifacts. A figured world is
peopled by the figures, characters, and types who carry out its tasks and who also
have styles of interacting within, distinguishable perspectives on, and orienta-
tions toward it” (Holland et al., 1998, p. 51). In their work, Holland et al. build
heavily on Bakhtin’s philosophy of the self, and particularly, on his notion of dia-
logism. Selves construct their figured worlds by responding the voices of others,
by orienting themselves to others’ perspectives, and to particular socio-cultural

realities. Bakhtin stresses the importance of everyday acts and everyday actors
(agents), and in a similar way, the actors in Holland and her colleagues’ figured
worlds, shape and re-shape their figured worlds by creating relations to the events
of the everyday, and interpret these events based on current and past experiences.
On the one hand, anthropologists may view culture as an external construct to
the individual; on the other, they may embrace the view that culture is fairly in-
dividual. What if, however, culture, just like subjectivity, is neither external nor
restricted to the individual but is located in the discursive spaces between the self
and the other? This is the view that I advance in this chapter to illustrate how dis-
course in the second language affects the immigrants’ relationships with others.
Here, I attempt to demonstrate that, for these language learners, it is exactly the
interaction in the second language that molds their perceptions not only of selves,
but also of their second-language culture.
Linguists have long been interested in the intersection between language and
culture, and some, such as Grein and Weigand (2007), have located this connec-
tion within a larger cross-disciplinary and dialogic approach (in a more global
and not Bakhtinian sense). Using an approach that she calls the Dialogic Action
Game, Weigand (2000) takes into account linguistic expressions, cognition, and
perception into how the speaker acts in the course of a dialogically oriented com-
munication. Weigand assumes three important principles that guide the commu-
nication process and the language use in it: (a) an action principle (the speaker
uses a specific communicative means to carry on communicative goals); (b) a
dialogic principle (language could be described as an action and reaction), and
(c) a principle of coherence. The specific communicative act is at the center of
this analysis. I have found Weigand’s dialogic principle particularly relevant in
the analysis of communicative acts. From a bit larger, discursive point of view,
“any action or activity is socially meaningful only in relation to other alternative
actions or activities…. The specific meaning of an action is interpretable only in
relation to the set of socially relevant contexts that are constructed for the pur-
poses of that interpretation” (Lemke, 1995, p. 269).
Bakhtin (1981) expresses a similar view of discourse as a social event. Our
meanings, and, thus, our selves, can be understood only against the backdrop of
other people’s utterances or against other people’s value judgments. Dialogism
is not just a verbal exchange between two speakers, but a generalized view of
the world that stresses “interaction and interconnectedness, relationality, and the
permeability of both symbolic and physical boundaries” (Gardiner, 2000). Cul-
ture and humans’ understanding of it are similarly formed on the borders be-
tween multiple selves. In an article that contrasts Russian culturology with theo-
ries in the West, Emerson (1996) outlines three major approaches to culture. The
first assumes that people are rather similar, and although certain behavior pat-
terns differ from one society to another, the traits that compose humans’ values
are principally the same. The second approach adopts the view that each culture
is unique and, thus, different from others. Emerson brings up foreign-language
programs to explain how this second approach functions. For instance, Ameri-
can students may go to Paris to acquire both French and its culture. The sec-
ond approach Emerson mentions is fairly ubiquitous in current methodologies
of teaching English as a second or foreign language as well. Future teachers are,
for example, repeatedly told that one has to teach both the language and culture,
where culture could be taught just like math if only the teacher uses the appropri-
ate, culturally-relevant materials. Bakhtin, however, is taking a third approach.
To him, individuals not only maintain their own uniqueness in the world, their
own particular positions, but this is also how they interact with or influence it. To
Bakhtin, the answer to the question of whether cultural systems are located “in-
side” or “outside” the minds of individuals is rather irrelevant. He looks at culture
as a result of dialogic processes and, thus, as a border phenomenon. Specifically,
culture is encoded in his concept of outsidedness (vnenahadimost’):
In the realm of culture, outsidedness is the most powerful factor in understand-
ing. It is only in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully
and profoundly, but never exhaustively, because there will be other cultures that
see and understand even more. (Bakhtin, 1986b, p. 7)
In other words, Bakhtin claims that if one wants to understand another culture,
one doesn’t need to become an insider, but, instead, should remain outside of
its space. To engage in a meaningful interaction with another, to engage in the
process of dialogue, one has to remain distinct from that other interlocutor and
preserve her or his own uniqueness or subjectivity. In Bakhtin’s view, a dialogic
encounter between two different cultural realms does not imply that that these
two should merge or become identical. In fact, the Russian thinker emphasizes
just the opposite:
There exists a very strong, but one sided and thus untrustworthy, idea that in or-
der better to understand a foreign culture, one must enter into it, forgetting one’s
own, and view the world through the eyes of this foreign culture… Of course, a
certain entry as a living being into a foreign culture, the possibility of seeing the
world through its eyes, is a necessary part of the process of understanding it; but
if this were the only aspect, it would be merely duplication and would not entail
anything new or enriching. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 6)
Dialogue and outsidedness are not merely linked but, indeed, depend on each
other. If dialogue enables us understand a certain culture, outsidedness creates the
very possibility of dialogue (Morson & Emerson, 1990). In order to understand
something, even our own subjectivities, we need to be able to see it through the
eyes of another, someone “separate from ourselves” (Emerson, 1996, p. 110). How-
ever, outsiders should still possess certain skills; they cannot function as clueless
observers. Neither Emerson nor Bakhtin talk about language acquisition in this
particular case. In the case of the eight participants in this study, an important
skill was reflexivity. The most important insider skill that they needed, however,
became language.
Interestingly, Lotman’s (1992) cultural semiotic theory expresses a similar
view. Every culture, in his view, assumes that there is something else outside its
space. Without this other space, we cannot maintain a sense of cultural self. More-
over, culture is not a constant or entity but is dynamic and marked by tension or
napryajenie, to use Lotman’s original term, which becomes critical to any exchange
of information. As Lotman suggests, “The more difficult and incomparable the
translation of one non-intersecting part of space with another language, the more
valuable this paradoxical communication becomes in terms of information and
social terms” (cited in Andrews, 2003, p. 15). Similar to Bakhtin, Lotman accepts
that there are at least two aspects of culture. The first aspect assumes the necessary
presence of the “other space” in the understanding of culture; the second aspect
suggests that culture and natural language are intertwined within a given cultural
space. Meaning, therefore, to both Bakhtin and Lotman could be revealed only in
the encounter with another – another self or another culture. What would be of
particular interest to language scholars and teachers is the emphasis that any ex-
change and production of information must be manifested through language. The
inveterate link between language skills and cultural understanding was strongly
perceived and explicitly expressed by the participants in this project.
5.1 “Americans are very different”
Figured cultural worlds are, by definition, populated with others. In a figured

world, actors perceive and interpret, and are also being perceived and interpreted.
The authors of narrativized worlds equally require the presence of the Other to
construe cultural meanings, and in their interpretations of positionings in the fig-
ured words, they are active, reflective, and responsible. In the culture-as-dialogue
view, a degree of sameness is central, but differences are also essential. Bell sums
up this theoretical stance succinctly: “Cultural understanding… depends upon
drawing boundaries, constructing categories and differences” (1998, p. 53). Our
cultural conversations are often about differences. Our understanding of the Other
often begins with looking into how we are different from each other, maintaining
our own position so we can analyze the perceived differences and, perhaps, tran-
scend beyond these differences. This section offers a look at how the participants
construct differences or otherness in their narrative discourse.
A good speaker of English, according to the participants, would also know
American culture as well. When the participants spoke about culture, they re-
ferred to the knowledge of small, seemingly unimportant aspects of everyday
life. Conversations with colleagues left Peter wondering, for instance, about what
or who Oscar Mayer was. He said that his American colleagues knew the Oscar
Mayer’s commercial “from the day [they were] born.” Lydia likened this knowl-
edge of popular culture to films that they had seen as children, that “everybody”
in Ukraine and Russia knew – young children, parents, and grandparents – and
that are “impossible to explain to Americans.” Lydia recalled how she was read-
ing American magazines like Cosmopolitan in Russia, translated into Russian, so
she and other young girls could get a glimpse of American culture. She admitted,
though, that in spite of her curiosity, it was not “big fun” to read about America
because she could not relate to many of the situations that were described in the
articles. She remembered one particular story about a woman shopping in the
United States and locking her car key in the trunk. Lydia explained that it might
be “exciting for American [readers], but it nothing really means for Russians” be-
cause most young girls did not own cars at this time in her home country.
Some of the cultural differences the participants mentioned, like the commer-
cials and films, were more superficial. Other differences were based in the ways
people relate to one another in the two cultures. Almost all of the participants saw
Russians as more open and warmer than Americans. Sylvia, for instance, summa-
rized her perception of American relationships in the following way:
[Americans are] very different. It seems to me / the Russian people are / are more
opened / yes / than American. American people can hmm smile / and laugh / but
/ is difficult / to be friends with Americans. They don’t like to / tell about them /
their life / their family / their / kids. I don’t know.
In a separate interview and in a very different context, Vera used almost the same
words Sylvia did to illustrate the difference in behavior between Russians and
Americans:
Nu v printsipe / oni ochen’ drujelyubnie Amerikantsi. Otchen’ otkrytie. Etim de-
jurnieem ulybki/ ya etim ne veruyu. My kogda priehali / tak interesno bylo. Ya
poshla na appointment k vrachu / i jdu. Idet med sestra / idet takaya ugryumaya /
i to kogda menya videla / tak (shows a big smile). “ Hi!” I poshla. Eto neiskrennee.
Nu s drugoj storony / priyatnee videt ulybku.
(translation):
As a rule, Americans are very friendly. Very open. But I don’t trust their regular
smile. When we came, it was very interesting to me. I had to go to a doctor’s ap-
pointment and had to sit in the waiting room. There was a nurse, walking with a
frown on her face, but when she saw me (Vera shows a big smile). “Hi!” And she
left. This is not sincere, but on the other hand, it is nicer to see someone smiling.
Vera was looking at the “American smile” – a new to her cultural phenomenon –
from the perspective of Russians. She made a quick connection from the way
Americans behave in what seemed to her to be a somewhat artificial manner to
how she analyzes Russians’ behavior and socio-historic reasons behind it:
Eto Russkie / po nature / ochen’ drujelyubnie lyudi. Ochen’ dobrie… Ochen’! Ya
seichas mozhet sdelat’ drugomu cheloveku / sovershenno neznakomu dobro s
udovol’stviem sdelat’. Nu ulybaetsya budet malo. Mozhet byt’ zhizn’ tyazholoe
/ potomushto / nu / i potom uzhe znaesh shto / eto / kak skazat / ot tovo shto
usloviya zhizni ne ochen’ horoshie / ne raztyagivaetsya rot v ulybke. Hochesh / a
ne poluchaetsya!
(translation):
Russians are very friendly by nature. Very friendly. Very! I could just do a favor
for somebody who is a perfect stranger to me, and I will do it with pleasure. But
smiling doesn’t come easily. Maybe because of how difficult life is… maybe be-
cause life conditions are not so good, but one’s lips don’t stretch in a smile. You
want to, but it doesn’t work!
Vera said that in the beginning of her life in the United States, she was even irritated
by what she called a “phony” smile, but she came to accept it as part of American
culture and a specific “philosophy.” Although Vera stressed that she did not like
it, she also said that she understood the reasons Americans did it (for instance,
they didn’t want to show their “troubles” to relative strangers). Vera pointed out
that to Americans, a Russian person may seem unfriendly, just because she or he
is not smiling, but Americans wouldn’t understand why Russians, particularly her
generation, are not quick to smile and reserve their smile for friends. According
to Vera, it is not just because of a special mantalitet or mindset, but it is related to
the type of life she and others her age had had in Russia. Interestingly, Sylvia, in a
separate conversation, also mentioned the “American smile,” and how she did not
always find it sincere.
Even when Vera and the other participants thought they understood Ameri-
can values, they didn’t express any willingness to accept them as their own. Natalia,
for instance, focused on the difference in family values and the relationships be-
tween young adults and their parents in Russia. She said she understood that in the
United States young adults did not live with their parents or even close to them, but
she did not want to adopt this particular cultural norm for herself or for her future
children. “If you are living here, it don’t mean… you should follow everything,
follow every [American] rule,” Natalia stated. Lydia and Peter had reflected explic-
itly on the values they see in everyday American relationships. They spoke about
what they phrased as “commercialization” of the culture, in which money seemed
most important, more important than relationships themselves. Peter, for instance,
placed money and entertainment at the heart of popular American culture:
Peter: And the main problems of American / how to get money / how to
entertain themselves. And our friends / our American friends [say]
“Oh you just come to our place and we have a lot of fun and… “ I don’t
know / I think that / when they go the restaurant they are not getting
so much fun.
…
Gergana: What is your idea of fun? What is fun for you?
Lydia: Meet with other people.
Peter: Meet with the friends yeah. That’s really good.
Lydia: With people who are interested in / mm / to communicate to speak.
Lydia goes on to say that “fun” is an entirely American word, and that it doesn’t
have the exact equivalent in the Russian language. To her and Peter, good emo-
tions are grounded in the relationships with others. Given the economic reali-
ties of post-communist Russia, no one can really dismiss the value of money and
wealth there, and Lydia and Peter’s somewhat idealistic observation of their home
country might have been be more nostalgic than factual. Nevertheless, it occu-
pied a strong presence in their discourses of cultural differences. They claimed
that they knew how Americans have fun (for instance, going to a bar or club for
drinks), or how to behave like an American, although they were not comfortable
with that. Lydia used the verb “imitate” saying that they could imitate, but they
would “never” become American. Lydia explicitly stressed that she would try to
“preserve” her culture. These observations were a result of repeated discussions
between Lydia and Peter. It was apparent that they had already reflected on the
issues of culture, relationships, and values. Experience, reflexivity, and subjectiv-
ity are linked. Subjectivity refers to the ways through which people assign mean-
ings to events and values in their lives, to the ways they see themselves on the
backdrop of others’ meanings and values. Reflection is the process in which we
analyze our experiences, and by nature, it is personal and individual. At the same
time, because experience is a shared territory with another, it is also socially con-
structed and defined. To postmodernists, subjectivities are inscribed in different
discourses, and experience itself is made possible through language. The idea of
the languaged nature of reflection, experience, and selfhood is strongly present in
Bakhtin’s philosophy as well.
The concept of acculturation is still among the most pervasive in the litera-
ture on immigrants (Berry, 1997). Ethnographers, however, have long introduced
another term, more akin to Bakhtin’s dialogism. Transculturation (Ortiz, as cited
in Nielsen, 2002) refers to the process in which dominated groups evaluate and
select only elements from cultural products. In a sense, it is a transcultural ex-
change of values, during which one does not become the Other, but becomes
different from what he or she was before the encounter. All of the participants,
in one way or another, referred to American mentality and Russian mentality.
Boris, for instance, declared of his wife and himself: “We never will be American
[in] mentality.” At the same time, Boris claimed that the only way to understand
American mentality is through Americans, through members of this particular
culture. “You cannot enter a culture without language because we understand
culture through people,” he reflected (emphasis added). Boris’s use of the verb
“to enter” and the preposition “through,” when he is referring to American cul-
ture and his perception of it as a foreigner are not accidental. It reflects both the
concepts of outsidedness and embodied, communication practices in the under-
standing of the cultural space of the Other.
5.2 “When I communicate, I live” (Kogda ya obshayus’, ya jivu)
Outsidedness, or the presence of another’s consciousness, is a necessary condition

for selves to become aware of who they actually are or who they are becoming.
In this sense, selves are always selves-in-relation, always constructed through the
real or imagined interaction with some else’s words, through someone else’s eyes,
and evaluations. The subject, to Bakhtin, is “constituted in terms of aesthetic cat-
egories; the I-for-others is the I-for-myself the way it looks from the outside, in
the other,” as he explains in one of his early conceptualizations of the self (1990,
p. 100). Vera’s experience exemplifies the dialogical nature of the self. During our
first meeting, only weeks after she arrived in the United States, she expressed the
impossibility for her to “stay at home.” She immediately started looking for work
not only for financial reasons, but also because of her inveterate need to be around
other people and to feel actively engaged in her surroundings:
Kogda ya obshayus’ ya jivu [When I communicate with others, I live]. When I
cannot communicate, ya naverno umru [I will probably die]. Eto prosto cherta
haractera i eto mamino vospitanie [This is simply my personality, and it is also the
effect of my mom’s upbringing].
Vera herself reflected on the need to be with others quite unambiguously, as she
traces it back to her childhood and her parents’ home. Speaking of her childhood
in a relatively small Russian town, Vera recalls that her mother, who held “two uni-
versity degrees” (a fact important to Vera), had a very active social life and used to
“help all the people.” Vera describes her childhood home as always full of people,
with friends or relatives living with them “all the time.” When her mother died,
Vera explains, the tradition remained alive. In Russia, Vera and Aleksei frequently
entertained close friends in their apartment or small “dacha” (an equivalent of a
summer house), where they used to share intellectual conversations. This is one
of the main reasons Vera enjoyed working as a journalist: This particular career
allowed her to meet and interact with a number of people from different back-
grounds and with different personalities on a daily basis. Vera’s new job as a kitchen
manager in the United States was, no doubt, drastically different from her previous
occupation. However, two years after she started this position, she stated:
Now I receive satisfaction / from my job / and I will not change it. It’s nice and
many people call for me / and many Russian people now call / and they say, “Oh
we’ll do the wedding [party] or graduation.
Vera bases this satisfaction on the interaction with different people and bases her
new identity on her experiences and communication with others.
In the short but powerful statement that when she communicates with others,
she lives, by equating the role of language with life itself, Vera provides a strikingly
Bakhtinian definition of what it means to be human. In her immigrant settings,
Vera lacked the social circle of friends that she enjoyed in her home country. Re-
stricted by her skills in English, she also found herself limited in the types of jobs
she could obtain and the social status of the people with whom she could interact
in the second language. For instance, Vera once shared that it was difficult for her
to maintain the same intellectual circle of friends in the United States as she did
in Russia simply because her new life did not allow her frequent opportunities
for meeting and maintaining relationships with highly educated native speakers
of English. Gradually, however, and mainly through her job, Vera began to meet
Americans and to re-interpret her social connections, this time in the new lan-
guage. Describing how she perceives herself and Americans, Vera said:
Because I have many friends / and some people who come / for example to our
synagogue / they are very friendly / and mm I can talk with them about their
kids / about my country / about their rights in the country here. Sometimes we
can talk about mm politic / and sometimes about the sports and… and I know
that mm now / I can feel that I am / I am like American people. When I go for ex-
ample to / some parties / American parties / no one Russian people / and I don’t
feel that I am / alone here. Kak skazat innostrannka [how do you say foreigner]?
I don’t feel that I am foreigner / because / all the people talk with me / and I can
talk with them.
These dialogic relations were possible for Vera when she found that she could
share someone else’s values. For example, she was not able to establish a relation-
ship with her husband’s American colleague from the factory when he invited
Aleksei and her to dinner. Their educational backgrounds and values were very
different, and no dialogue was created. In contrast, Vera spoke with enthusiasm
about a new American friend, who shared her professional interests:
Some people is very interesting and now I have one friend / she is a journalist /
and her name is XXX / and she is my age / and she is very nice… We talk with
her about all / about the job and about the different journalist job in Russia / and
here in America / and about many things and she is… when she talk with me / I
not feel that we are from different countries from different cultures.
Thus, shared lived experiences were at the core of Vera’s relations with others. It is
through dialogical relations with others, with people who shared her background,
interests, and values, that she found and established her voice in the second lan-
guage. When I asked why it was so important for her to study and improve her
English, Vera looked surprised that I would ask such a question. Her reply came
without a pause:
Because I cannot live when I cannot speak… Yazyk eto jizn’ [Language is life].
And I need to study, and I will work, and I will take relations with another people,
I need to understand them and I need to speak.
The ability to talk is the primary ability that Vera emphasizes in creating relation-
ships with others. Being able to participate in everyday conversations gives her a
sense of belonging and a renewed strength of voice.
The primacy of language is palpable not only in Vera’s case. Other partici-
pants made explicit connections between being able to use the second language,
and Vera was not the only one to construe her identity through communicating
with others. Lydia and Sylvia, rather similarly to Vera, find satisfaction in their
work as they interact with people. As Sylvia was looking for a job, she was offered
several possibilities. One of them, an immediate opening, was a house-cleaning
position; another was working as a caregiver for a young child. Sylvia, however,
declined both. She realized that neither of the two would give her the opportunity
to speak with people, and especially, to use English. Instead, she chose to wait, and
eventually, she found a job at TJ Maxx, a discount store, because, as she herself put
it, “It’s interesting to communicate with… to socialize.” Sylvia’s new job required
long hours of standing, but she liked it exactly because it enabled her to meet and
speak with different people outside of her home and use the second language she
was attempting to learn. During one interview, she was excited about an interac-
tion she had with a customer as she narrated:
Sylvia: And one day mm interesting / sluchai?

Gergana: Case, situation.
Sylvia: Case case situation happened. One / one lady / tried on many
dresses / many dresses / more than ten. One cart bring / then second
cart=many / many. And she asked me to to to help her… (shows
zipping a dress).
Gergana: To zip her up?
Sylvia: To zip her up / and then / [she asked me to advise her about] one
dress / how it / how it suits / or how it fits her / because she didn’t like /
kak skazat’ / voratnik [how do you say neckline]?
Gergana: Mm, the neckline.
Sylvia: Something / and I showed her / she could / raztegnut [stretch] / and
then / the dress / kak skazat / smotritsya / look looks better. And she /
she was very glad. And she became to ask me about mm about…
I was very surprised that she mm was / she understood me / she
understood me / and I understood her / understood her. And she was
from England! Yes. And she told me / about that she mm many years /
lived in France / before USA / and she was very interested / how /
how I feel / I feel life in USA / and about my difficulties… And / and
then / she told that / for European / men it’s very difficult to live / in
USA. And she / obnyala [hugged me]! She understood / how / it’s very
difficult for me / and European women… And I was very glad / that
anybody understood me.
The verb “understand” becomes a key lexical feature in her narration, and it is no
accident that Sylvia uses it repeatedly in the excerpt above. In just one sentence,
to emphasize the meaning of their mutual understanding and lived experiences,
Sylvia said “understood” four times. Her experience as a foreigner, as a woman
from another culture, was validated by the acknowledgment and the experience of
another European woman. The previous chapter illustrated Sylvia’s struggle with
the language and stressed how the lack of English language skills dis-empowered
and silenced her, especially in her work environment. In this same work environ-
ment, through the eyes of the other woman, however, this interaction enabled
Sylvia to see herself not as the silent second language learner, but as a woman
carrying the experience and values of a different culture.
While similarity among people is not required for dialogue to take place,
sharing experiences and values with others was important for both Vera and
Sylvia in their relating to others. In this sense, Baxter (2004), a communication
theorist and a Bakhtinian scholar, acknowledges the role of what she terms “chro-
notopic similarity” (p. 110) in sustaining coordinated interaction. “Chronotopic
similarity,” Baxter writes, “is the stockpile of shared time-space experiences that a
pair constructs through their joint interaction events over time” (p. 110). It could
include attitudes, values, habits, and interests, and it is based in the notion of
relational dialectics.
When thinkers of the Bakhtin Circle discuss signs, they claim that these ac-
quire their meanings only on “interindividual” territory (Voloshinov, 1973, p. 12).
However, they also stipulate that for any true meaning to emerge between individ-
uals, the latter have to belong to the same social unit or group, in other words, to
share an ideology. (Ideology in the Bakhtinian sense is not necessarily laden with
political connotations, and, thus, it can refer to members of a group sharing the
same ideas, values, profession, or religion.) Sylvia and Vera made clear that they
found meaningful interactions not just with anybody, but with others with whom
they shared experiences. Vera rejected the possibility of positioning herself along
Aleksei’s colleague and his wife, but she aligned herself with another journalist
even through both Aleksei’s colleague and the journalist were English-speakers
and carriers of American culture. Similarly, Sylvia aligned herself with another
immigrant woman. Peter and Lydia also based relationships in lived experiences
when they recall the circle of friends they maintained back in Ukraine:
Lydia: I think that / they became friends because you had so much
in common==
Peter: We had so much in common and we==
Lydia: You’ve been through many stuff like==
Peter: Many events.
Lydia: Yeah / and here / people don’t have so much / so many things to do
together.
Peter: We tried each other / a lot of times and / in the ??? good friends / bad
friends. Not bad friends but…
“Trying” each other in different shared situations is the ultimate test for a dialogic
relation, when one has to interpret someone else’s meaning or action and answer
adequately. When Peter and Lydia discusses such “tried” relationships, both re-
ferred to the friends they had in their home country. When I asked if they had any
American friends, Lydia replied that this was their bol’naya tema (a painful topic).
5.3 “Bol’naya tema”: Culture and the languaged self
The self-in-relation is also a languaged self. Vera’s excerpts in the section above
stressed the primacy of language in the creation of dialogical relationships with
others. Other participants also made explicit connections between being able to
use the second language and understanding their new milieu. Lydia, Peter, and
Boris find that language is the component that structures and restrains not only
their social experiences, but also their understanding of American culture. For
instance, Lydia and Peter told me they found it difficult to create the meaningful
connections with friends that they used to enjoy in Ukraine, where they would go
backpacking, play the guitar, or just sit and talk. While they mentioned that they
had made several friends in their new country, Lydia quickly interjected that their
new American friends would probably never become like the friends they used
to have. Lydia found that the main reason for that was the use of language. As an
explanation of what friends are or, rather, what they are not, she said:
But when I have to think what to say to person / and how to get it / he is not a
friend. As long as I have to care of my words and what I am saying and what I am
thinking and what I am doing / this is not a friend.
Lydia and Peter often initiated the topic of friends during our meetings; it was a
topic on which they frequently reflected. It becomes clear from Lydia’s example
above that she locates the very possibility for a dialogical relationship with oth-
ers within language. Moreover, she explicitly points to her second language as a
“limitation” that she experiences when she cannot “communicate freely” in the
following example:
Lydia: And / I cannot / joke / I cannot… If I even want to say something /
I have to think of it first / how to say it in English. And it’s not / time
already / it’s already…
Peter: Gone. The situation is already gone.
Lydia: Yeah. And so / it’s limitation. And making friends is also a matter of
communication. The more you communicate with people / the more
interest you / figure out / common things.
The section “Dialogical Self ” above provided an example of how important

shared understanding was to Vera and to Sylvia, and how the latter used the verb
“understand” to refer to understanding as one of the prerequisites in being able
to relate to another human being. Lydia and Peter also brought up the notion of
understanding while they gave it a greater linguistic twist when it came to making
friends with others in another language. I should note that, unlike the older cou-
ples, Lydia, Peter, Natalia, and Dmitri had received more structured and more ad-
vanced instruction in English as a foreign language in their home country. Lydia
and Peter had studied how to greet someone when they meet and even some basic
rules of accepted behavior:
Peter: Usually / we know / we got classes / about this how to meet people /
how to say “How do you?” “How are you?” All this formal stuff. How
to==
Lydia: Smile.
Peter: Yeah / how to smile / how to handshake / because it’s normal for
Americans to handshake with a man and woman. In Russia it’s not
very common.
Despite this basic cultural knowledge, meeting people and establishing relation-
ships with them was made difficult by restrictions in the second language in their
new country. Despite their language classes and knowledge of English, they “still
had situations where [they] didn’t understand and people repeat what they are
saying,” as Lydia explained. They both clarified what they meant in the following
brief exchange:
Peter: … Americans don’t like when somebody’s bothering them.
Gergana: What do you mean “bothering”?
Lydia: Make them explain.
Peter: Make them / I’ll tell you that American is very patient / is very
very friendly and they explain you everything / on basis that you
understand what they talking about. But if person don’t understand
you / they / they lose / lose their interest / for this person.
Gergana: So if you cannot communicate, you are not interesting.
Peter: So that’s why you / you are losing==
Lydia: Chance to make friends.
Peter: Yeah / you are losing chance to make friends / to get a job to do /
whatever.
Lydia and Peter’s statements strongly parallel Natalia and Dmitri’s in a separate
interview. Natalia and Dmitri also shared that they had difficulty making Ameri-
can friends because Americans are not interested in people who cannot speak at
the same level as they do. The level they refer to in this case is purely linguistic, as
Natalia and Dmitri were also well educated, and our meetings suggested that they
cared about a number of socio-cultural and even socio-political issues related not
only to their home but also to their home country. Natalia, for instance, read the
local newspapers in English, and in several cases, she discussed an article she had
read and expressed a strong opinion on the topic.
In other words, although they could maintain an abstract conversation in
their own language, on what they perceived to be an educated level, they could
not maintain the same level of sophistication they wished to convey in the second
language as well. Natalia shared with me, for instance, that, when asked about the
political situation in Ukraine, she found she could reply only in a couple of Eng-
lish sentences, while she would not have had any difficulty explaining this in Rus-
sian. She felt embarrassed not by her lack of knowledge or her lack of opinion, but
by the lack of fluency in the second language which prevented her from express-
ing them as eloquently as she could in her native tongue. Communication in the
second language constrained Natalia’s everyday ability to relate to the Other or to

Americans. She claimed that if she spoke English as an American, she “wouldn’t
feel lonely.” When I prompted her to explain, she elaborated:
I mean / it’s not that I am feeling lonely / because / because I don’t have anybody.
But I / I can’t say everything I want / if I ??? with somebody / I want to talk with
Americans about something. I don’t know why but / but something stopped me.
I don’t know why. I can’t say anything / you know / and that feels just / I can’t say
anything. I don’t know English at all. And I say, “I don’t speak English.” That’s all.
Even when Natalia wanted to speak to Americans, the lack of confidence in her
English language skills prevented her from interacting, and she preferred to re-
main silent. The example also shows that this was a conscious decision on her
part, and that she is capable of analyzing this metacognitively.
Boris’s experiences echoed Natalia and Dmitri’s statement that if one cannot
maintain a conversation at the same level with the Other, he or she is not “inter-
esting” to connect to. He even used the same adjective as they did:
The American people is different / very different. Vot / moi kolegi rabochie / mne
s nimi proshee / oni / vot kogda nam dvaem / trayom / my kak-to obyasnyam-
sya / na slovah / na pal’cah / kakoi-to razgovor / imeet. Nu / svoim nachal’stvom /
mmm / oni / im ne interesno so mnoi / ya dazhe ne mogu ih obvinit’. Im prosto so
mnoi neinteresno. Vot i vse. Poetomu oni / ya kogda govoryu / to oni ponyat sho ya
govoryu ne mogut. Ya dolzhen dva tri raza / oni dogadyvatsya / potomushto moim
proiznosheniem / im prost neinteresno so mnoi. Nu / po / dulu / po neobhodimost’ /
a dal’she / ya ih ponimayu […] Nu / v printsipe / oni obshayutsya na urovne dosta-
tochnost’. A na bol’shem urovnem / poetomu oni ne obshayutsya.
(translation):
Americans are different / very different. My colleagues and I / when we are to-
gether / they / when there are two of us / or three / we communicate somehow /
with words / with gestures / we have / some communication. But for example my
superiors mmm / I am not interesting to them / and I cannot even blame them.
I am just not interesting to them. This is all. Because they / when I speak / they
don’t understand what I say. I need to say the same thing two, three times / they
have to guess / because of my pronunciation. It’s not interesting for them with
me. Well / about work / out of necessity [we can communicate] / but beyond
that…. It is my fault / it is not their fault.
Boris expresses a belief that is very similar to the one expressed by Lydia and Peter:
if one is not able to speak to the Other, to be understood, and to understand, one is
not “interesting” or worth talking to. Although the connection between language
and culture is evident, cultural differences are not what Boris, Natalia, and Peter
believe to be limiting their ability to establishing social relations. Rather, they find
the opposite – it is not being able to communicate fluently in the second language
that influences their perspective of American culture and their perceptions of
Americans themselves. Boris said that Americans are “different;” yet, he admits
that because of language, he has not even had the opportunity to get to know
them. In a similar vein, Natalia also admits that, at least initially, she perceived
Americans as very “different.” However, as she continued to improve her English,
she realized that the difference is only created by a lack of communication:
Natalia: Like when I came here / I just felt / I don’t know American people [are]
not like Russian people / they / think another way / they ??? another
way / everything is different / and / I didn’t like them. But / the more I /
met them / the more I understand that they are the same / absolutely.
Gergana: Same like you are?
Dmitri: Uhm.
Natalia: Everybody is / definitely different but / they have the same feelings /
the same thoughts / just everybody is / just human!
Dmitri: (agrees) Uhm. The same interests.
Natalia: It’s just because / when I came I couldn’t / communicate / that’s why I
felt / like.... (emphasis added).
Natalia elaborated further by giving the example of another immigrant:

Like // some ??? when I work / we have uh Moroccan? Just guy from Morocco /
in restaurant and I ask him if he is going to stay here / and he told me “No, I’m
going back to Morocco / because I don’t like uh American / and I don’t like to /
live here / I don’t have American friends.... I told him / “You know I thought the
same way / when I came here because I couldn’t find a friend / I couldn’t commu-
nicate / I couldn’t speak to / people / and / obviously it seems like / they don’t care
and something / I don’t know / and I told him that / just / when you speak English
enough to / talk to them / to show them that / you are the same person==Because
maybe Americans see different people in me too. That I am / I don’t know... but
now it’s easier for me.
“To be means to communicate dialogically,” writes Bakhtin (1984, p. 252). It is

not possible for the self to know its essence without being able to address another,
to hear its own voice acknowledged and revealed through the voice of someone
else. This belief is at the core of Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogism: “Only in
communion, in the interaction of one person with another, can the ‘man in man’
be revealed, for others as well as for oneself ” (ibid., p. 252). The immigrants’ nar-
ratives in this section poignantly mirror Bakhtin’s own words, while they infuse
them with a new meaning, for a context that Bakhtin didn’t describe in his own
writings – the context of second language acquisition. What happens when the
self finds himself or herself in a foreign language, and the Other conveys not only
different values or dialects, but also employs a completely different linguistic sys-
tem? The skills that Emerson refers to in the beginning of this chapter and that
prove essential in the understanding of culture in the case of these immigrants
turn out to be language skills. In Bakhtin’s philosophy, language and conscious-
ness are impossible to separate. This specific section suggests that language is
the main skill that determines the level of interactions in the participants’ social
relationships and that, not secondarily, it strongly shapes their perceptions of the
second culture and the speakers of English. Without ever having read Bakhtin
or even heard about him, without ever having taken a single course in linguis-
tics or cultural anthropology, the participants in this project find that they can-
not separate their understanding of what culture or even what consciousness
is from language. When contemplating, for example, his ability to understand
Americans and their culture, Boris provides, in essence, a Bakhtinian account
of why he views Americans, or the Other, as quite different, and why he cannot
understand them fully:
Very mm difficult for me / is / I don’t understand mentality / American people.
Umm… I poetomu [and that’s why] English for me / is difficult. I think / every /
each language / is a mirror [of] / mentali==people’s mentality. If I / understand /
if I will understand / mentalitet American people / I / my English // be // better.
…
For me is / English / somoe glavnoe / somoe glavnoe [English is the most important
for me].
On the one hand, Boris believes that he doesn’t understand English as well as he
wished he did because he didn’t understand the “mentality” of Americans. On the
other hand, he claimed that it is language that also carries culture within itself:
A vot / vvyti v zhizni Amerikantsov ochen’ slozhno neznaya yazyka. Slozhno i s
yazyk / no bez yzyka / nam to mnogo slojnee […] Potomushto / kul’tura / ona
ne bezmolvna / ne bez yazyka. U nee est yazyk… A kogda ty ne ponimaesh eto
yazyka / nu ne vvedesh v etoi kul’turu.
(translation):
It is very difficult to enter American life without knowing the language. It is difficult
when one knows the language, but it is much more difficult for us without the lan-
guage… Because culture is not wordless, not without language. It has language…
And when you don’t understand the language, you cannot enter the culture.
According to the culture-as-knowledge model, the individual can possess some

knowledge about traditions or rituals. To Lydia and Peter, however, knowing
about how to greet someone in English was not enough and didn’t help much
with creating meaningful relationships. Boris is even more explicit in the role of
knowledge about a certain culture. He states rather overtly that knowing about
the history of a country, for instance, doesn’t help explain the languaged nature of
meanings in a society:
(translation):
I know about America. I think I know enough (from translated sources). But
without the language, one cannot enter into the culture because we understand
culture through people.
The Russian architect refers here to the books he had read by American authors, the
books about “America,” and the many movies he had seen produced in the United
States. His words, echoing Bakhtin’s, reveal that culture is a not an entity, nor is it just
a list of facts that one can memorize. Instead, it is a dynamic, multi-sided process
created through specific language practices. It is not something that an individual
can own, either, but it lies between the self and concrete or imagined others.
5.4 Gendered zones of dialogical selves
In Chapter Three, I suggested that the female participants were the ones who as-
sumed the responsibility for communication within the couples. They appeared
more engaged with the Other, and thus, demonstrated a level of dialogical re-
sponsibility that was higher than the responsibility demonstrated by their spouses
in their discourses. In illuminating this gender distinction, I drew on Bakhtin’s
notion of answerability and his view of the languaged self as an ethically, morally
responsible being. The participants’ narratives and my observations reveal that
this gendered distinction applied to the interactions between the couples during
the interviews, to their interactions with me, and, in general, in the constructions
of zones of relationships with others. The brief section below focuses on how gen-
der played a role in their networks with others.
It was clear from the very beginning that, of the couple, Vera was the more
socially active. She was the one for whom the phone rang most often, and she
was the one to introduce her husband to others. Once, for example, as Vera was
working later than expected, and I was interviewing Aleksei in their apartment,
the phone rang. It was for Vera. Replacing the receiver, her husband said, “Vera,
Vera… It’s always Vera!” When I asked whether there were ever calls for him,
Aleksei replied, “No.” Later there was another call, again for his wife. These were
not isolated cases. Frequently, during my meetings with the couple, our talk was
interrupted by phone calls, usually for Vera. On the few occasions when the calls
were, indeed, for Aleksei, the callers were telemarketers. Vera is laughing when
she said to me:
Today / when I come home / maybe a little people call me // and I think maybe /
ten people more need call. They know that in this time / maybe I don’t at home.
They don’t know. Only my relatives know. But at 9:00 / and 9:30 [P.M.] / they
begin to call. Every day the same.
The calls were both in Russian and English, made by friends, relatives, or col-
leagues, but the Russian calls dominated the English ones. Once, for instance, I
called Vera to re-schedule an appointment. The connection happened to be bad,
and she could not hear me. Vera stated very clearly, in Russian, that she could not
hear anything, and she asked the caller to hang up and try calling again.
Phone calls were not the only indication that Vera was the more actively in-
volved in developing relationships outside the couple, particularly in the second
language. The scope of her dialogical contacts was larger than Aleksei’s. Accord-
ing to Aleksei himself, his only interactions in English take place at work and are
fairly limited in topic:
Aleksei: I speak in English / in English / mm with my mmm / with my [co]-
workers / on the job. Is mm maybe / three or four / workers with uh I
spoked. Bob / Mark / Mark II / and Jennifer.
Gergana: What do you talk about?
Aleksei: O chem (About what)? We spoke mm about / about sports / maybe /
maybe 70 percent.
Gergana: How often do you speak with them? Like how many hours a week?
Aleksei: Week… Maybe one day I spoke / maybe / maybe one hour. All time I
work work work.
When I asked Aleksei if he had lunch sometimes with a co-worker, he said this
was not a typical practice for his workplace, and people tended to eat lunch by
themselves. Outside the work environment, Aleksei didn’t socialize with co-work-
ers. Like Vera, he had indicated that their backgrounds were too different. Trans-
planted to a lower-working class environment, Aleksei admitted that he didn’t
always understand his new co-workers’ behavior. For example, he didn’t share
their habit of going to bars after work and realized that this limited his oppor-
tunities to interact with his colleagues. In such cases, Aleksei’s lack of dialogical
relationship was imposed by the disparity in educational and social background.
However, Aleksei’s new social position was also restricted by language, or rather,
by his inadequate skills in English, which didn’t allow him to work as a teacher in
the U.S. Thus, ultimately, language restrained the development of Aleksei’s social
contacts as well as for the other participants.
Outside his work environment, Aleksei had not formed any contacts in Eng-
lish. Vera, on the other hand, often spoke of meeting people under a variety of
circumstances. Her zones of dialogical contacts at work were fairly extensive. She
had to speak not only with her supervisors but also with the workers she oversaw
as a kitchen manager. Over the years Vera had been in the States, the number of
her clients – both Russian and American – calling her to organize a social event
for them had increased. Vera had also made friends outside of her job. She told
me, for example, that she had struck up a conversation with an American woman
at her hair salon, and the two talked about their families. She also mentioned that
she had a friend, who is a medical worker, and whom she met at her workplace.
Vera and Aleksei and the medical worker’s family started seeing each other on
weekends and developed a long-lasting relationship. This example is important
not only because it illustrates Vera’s need to relate to others, but also because it
indicates a pattern in this couple’s social relations: It was Vera who took charge of
the relationships the couple created and maintained.
If Vera and Aleksei’s case suggests that Vera was more actively involved in
creating social relations, Lydia and Peter’s seems to suggest just the opposite when
it comes to everyday interactions:
Gergana: Can you approach strangers and talk with them / like if you were at
the store or / can you ask questions? If you go to the store / who asks
questions?
Lydia: He [Peter].
Gergana: He does. How come?
Lydia: Not because / my English / because I don’t like to ask…
Peter: I like to talk to people.
It is evident from both Lydia’s and Peter’s reflections that he liked to “talk with
people.” About his colleagues, Peter said:
Peter: They need me. They need me. I usually there were a cubicle / I usually
talk to them / like I climb through the cubicle and / now they told me
that / nobody now climbs through the cubicle and watch us and talk to
us. It’s very boring atmosphere (laughs)…
Lydia: He is / wonderful==I don’t know. I never met such a person / v etom
otnosheniem [in this sense] kak everybody likes him everybody! And
he is talking to anybody!
Gergana: Even in English?
Lydia: Yeah even in English, even in our own language. I cannot do that.
Lydia also said that it was her husband who tried to push her, her parents and her
sister’s family to use as much English as possible when they arrived:
Lydia: He’d cry on everyone, “Why don’t you speak English? Speak! Speak!”
Peter: I was crying to everybody.
Lydia: My mom and dad / and Natalia / and everyone?
Gergana: So you would just ask people / just to practice? (to Peter)
Lydia: Yeah.
Peter: Yes.
Gergana: So you would go to the store / to ??? / and try to speak with the clerks
and assistants?
Peter: I tried to practice.
Gergana: Was that a successful kind of practice? Did they understand you and?
Peter: No not all the time but / I [tried].
Lydia: The third time or fourth time….
Peter: I ??? do that because it’s their job. It’s their job to speak to me / to
explain me / in simple words / even if I am foreigner / they never / they
never refused to talk to me / because it’s their job. It was like / taking
taking classes / for free (laughs).
Gergana: Why did you think it was so important for you to practice?
Peter: To find a job==
Lydia: ==Because / you cannot live without language.
It appears, at least initially, that Peter was more willing to engage in interaction
with others than Lydia, judging by his readiness and even eagerness to speak in
English “with everybody.” True dialogism, however, involves answerability. Peter’s
words ultimately reveal that his purpose to speak is fairly one-directional, and it
doesn’t include perception of or even care for others (e.g., store assistants). To my
question in the above excerpt, Lydia and Peter’s responses overlap as they speak
at the same time in the last two lines. Given the simultaneity of their replies, it
becomes all the more noticeable how disparate their answers are. At the moment
Peter stresses that getting a job is the ultimate goal for improving his communi-
cation in the second language – a fairly utilitarian motive – Lydia contextualizes
English on a much larger scale and identifies language with life itself. This is high-
ly reminiscent of Vera’s statement, “Yazyk eto jizn’” (language is life) cited above.
As the previous chapter illustrated, the female participants’ heightened sense
of answerability to the other emerges in numerous examples within all four cou-
ples. The example above of Lydia and Peter is strikingly similar to Sylvia and Boris
in terms of how they relate to the Other through language. In the excerpt below,
Sylvia discusses her relationships with a native-speaking superior in her newest
job position as a clerk at a local bank:
(In a slow, contemplative tone): I see that my manager (sighs) mm repeat repeat!
more and more / but I see that he mm he begins to / nervous and… I already
thought that I need to: to suggest him / to write me but I am afraid… I am afraid.
The excerpt illustrates that Sylvia is concerned about the other person’s – her
manager – reaction to her, the inconvenience she believes she imposes on him.
This comes as a salient contrast to her husband’s perception of an identical situa-
tion at his own workplace, who said:
Sometimes / if I don’t understand / she=they [co-workers] said me / one time two

times three times. I don’t understand. They said, “Come! I show you.” OK! No
problem… “What do you want? What do you mean?” (He imitates his co-work-
ers when they don’t understand him.)
In contrast to Sylvia, Boris laughs in the example above as he is imitating his

co-workers when they don’t understand him. This is very similar to Peter’s ex-
ample above, in which he is not worried whether the workers at the store are go-
ing to understand him, and Peter locates the responsibility for this understanding
within others. It is their job to understand him. In this sense, Peter’s orientation
toward the Other (the speakers of English at the store) in the narrative above is
largely monological. Although in Sylvia’s excerpts the sideward glance toward the
Other is always present, Peter positions the Other as external. Peter’s own dis-
course subverts the potential discourse of the Other as it orients it entirely toward
his pragmatic purposes.
“The event of the life of the text… always develops on the boundary between
two consciousnesses,” writes Bakhtin (1986b, p. 106). Texts and selves are dialogic,
boundary phenomena. This chapter illustrates how Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism
operates among second language learners and how the participants construct
their understandings of culture through relating to others. It shows how they
build relations based on shared lived experiences. At the same time, it emphasizes
the primacy of second language skills in developing relational identities. It indi-
cates that, in this case, the lack of fluency in the second language, by restraining
the subjects from fully participating in discursive practices, not only limits their
dialogical possibilities but also influences their perceptions of values and culture.
The examples of these participants suggest that, as second language educa-
tors, we should re-consider the relationship between culture and language. Cul-
ture, very much like language itself, is better defined as praxis rather than a body
of knowledge that learners have to master. We should adopt a view in which cul-
ture emerges not within the individual or outside of him or her, but within a third,
boundary space that is constructed between the self and the Other through lan-
guage. Such a boundary space would defy cultural authority and would challenge
power hierarchies among diverse speakers. This is where true understanding of
one’s cultural values originates.
Bakhtin’s philosophy of the self is active and dynamic. This chapter demon-
strated how it could help us interpret second language learners’ “lived worlds”
in their relational intricacies. His liberal conception of the self can also help us
understand how relational subjects become active, speaking subjects, who can
claim their space on the discursive territory of the text and also in positing and
re-positioning themselves in actual lived realities. The next chapter illuminates
the complex notion of agency in Bakhtin’s philosophy and its application to the
lives of the eight participants.
chapter 6
Acts of agency in a new language
The theme of the authoring self or how one becomes a speaking subject is one of
the most significant in Bakhtin’s work. In the dynamic framework of subjectivity
and authorship that he outlines, human beings are always located on a “thresh-
old” (1984, p. 147). They always face some kind of testing in which their every-
day acts entail a sense of moral answerability and, in a complex way, reveal both
their unique individuality and an awareness of the particularities of social cir-
cumstances at a specific point of time and physical location (the chronotope).
When Bakhtin discussed his concept of authoring and the nature of the acts in
which humans engaged, he was not overtly concerned with immigrants. In this
final chapter, which presents the narratives of the eight immigrants, I turn to the
insights that Bakhtin affords us in our understanding of adult second language
learners, who themselves are on a linguistic and cultural threshold, and whose
sense of selfhood is being tested by their new socio-linguistic landscapes. The
chapter will illustrate the interconnected concepts of the Bakhtinian act and cre-
ativity, along with responsive understanding, as these can be found in the lived
histories of the East European immigrants. In focusing on the everyday acts of
answerability and how these are embedded in second-language discourse, it also
traces an alternative, dialogical framework of agency.
6.1 Authoring selves, acts, and discourses in a dialogical world
As Chapter Two noted earlier, the nature of Bakhtin’s work has remained some-
what difficult to define. Although his model of subjectivity shares features with
both postmodernists and humanists, it also charts its own, fairly distinctive space
among discourses on the self and the self-in-language. Although it is true that
Bakhtin himself doesn’t explicitly use the term “agency” – a term with a relatively
short history and a problematic definition in different disciplines – his language-
embedded framework of selfhood contains its own, fairly complex blueprint of
what some theorists have termed human agency.
Citing Ortner, anthropologist Ahearn (2001) refers to the recent agentive turn
in social theories and acknowledges that agency is often defined too simplistically
or too obscurely. She also offers a review of the different approaches to agency
across disciplines. The first, traditional approach views agency synonymously
with free will. One of the most serious shortcomings of this approach is that it
views agency as something located inside the mental processes of individuals and,
thus, fails to recognize the intricate connections between selves and societal fac-
tors. Ahearn similarly critiques the approach that equates agency with resistance,
as has sometimes been done in feminist theories (for instance, to exhibit agency,
a person must resist the traditional, patriarchal structures). She claims that while
oppositional agency is an important component of it, it remains only one part
of agency as a social construct. Yet another approach, reviewed and criticized by
Ahearn, is the very lack of agency that she finds in some poststructuralist writings
(e.g., Foucault, 1978, as cited in Ahearn), which seems to separate the notion of
power completely from individual subjects. In terms of his position on power and
human agency, Foucault has been criticized by others as well (Bartky, 1995), who
have had a problem with how the poststructuralist movement doesn’t explain how
power is embodied, for example, or how personal resistance remains opaque.
Other approaches that Ahearn considers are Giddens’s practice theory,
which draws on some of the work of interactionist sociologists and ethno-
methodological research and Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus. Ahearn finds that
while Bourdieu may define the habitus as the capacity to engender products, his
theory does not account for the creation of novel, infinite thoughts or meanings,
because individuals in the habitus are predisposed to act in a way that replicates
the already existing social practices and social inequalities. Ahearn concludes
that scholars should approach the construct of agency with caution, as she lists
some difficult questions that remain to be answered, for instance, to what extent
agency is individual or to what extent it is a social phenomenon. It is interesting,
however, that although she urges us to consider language as a dialogic construct
and agency as socio-culturally mediated, Ahearn does not mention Bakhtin in
her otherwise comprehensive and critical review of scholarship of agency, lan-
guage, and the subject.
In another critical overview of the concepts of the self and agency, feminist
and poststructuralist researcher Davies (2000) compares two dominant schools
of thought – humanism and poststructuralism. In humanistic discourses, it is
accepted without much challenge that each individual naturally possesses the
capacity for personal agency, just by being a “sane, adult human being” (p. 55).
Davies offers a useful and concise juxtaposition between the concept of person-
hood in both approaches in terms of identity, choices, and what she calls “sto-
ries” (p. 57). In humanism, any adult has unified and rational identity, which is
also continuous and coherent. Linguistic and, again, rational mental processes
are used to control irrational emotional aspects of one’s identity. Emotions, in
this humanistic sense, may appear to be a threat to the coherence of the self, and,
thus, should be dominated by language. Poststructuralism, in contrast, eschews
Chapter 6. Acts of agency in a new language 131
the term identity altogether precisely because of its long-standing association with
positivist discourses on individualistic and fixed identity. Instead of positing an
essentialist human being, poststructuralists prefer to speak of subjectivity, where
different subjects are being socially positioned through different discourses. These
discourses are not always harmonious and may even contradict each other.
Choices, to Davies, are a very important aspect in which humanist and post-
structuralist theories differ. In traditional humanist thought, it is expected that
humans make rationally-informed choices; moreover, it is their individual re-
sponsibility to make the right ones and their own fault if they failed to do so.
Choices are not so rational in poststructuralism. They still may be supported by
rational analysis, but the poststructuralist view on choice is significantly shifted
to the discourses that allow individuals to take up a certain position. One posi-
tion, for instance, may be more available to certain members of society, but not
so available to other members of the same group. In this sense, social positions
are restricted by the available discourses, and the whole notion of choice itself has
become problematic. If, in humanism, the focus is on the individualistic aspects
of a fixed identity, in poststructuralism the focus is on external power structures,
and some have argued that agency and the individual itself have been lost in this
emphasis on the collective. A good description of humanist agency comes from
Taylor (1985), who portrays the modern selves as characterized by their self-
defining nature, something that Holland et al. (1998) have called “a freewheeling
agent” (p. 170). The modernist idea of selves, in other words, equates agency with
self-autonomy and requires a relative separation from the free, autonomous self
and her and his environment, both physical and social. This, as Taylor summa-
rizes, is a self who is “rational to the extent he has fully distinguished himself from
the natural and social worlds” (p. 7).
In contrast, poststructuralist thought has portrayed the subject as fragment-
ed and decentered. Agency itself is not exactly central in this approach, where
choices, in Davies’s words, are more like “forced choices” (p. 60). The relative lack
of agency and authorship appear fairly strongly in some poststructuralist move-
ments that have called for the death of the author in the realm of texts (Barthes,
1977; Derrida, 1976). Giddens is particularly critical of Derrida idea of significa-
tion, which, to him, deprives the person from agency in their use of language,
and, instead, privileges the activity of language in use (as cited in Varela, 2009).
In other poststructuralists’ work, human beings are both constituted and
constrained by relations of power. Foucault (1972), for instance, writes about
fundamental discursive rules by which humans are able to produce knowledge,
but these rules are seldom consciously understood by speakers of discourse.
Rather, it is better to describe the authors, the users of discourse, as a function
of these rules. Discourse and language are certainly essential in poststructuralist
approaches, as subjects are constituted through discourse, but some critics have
complained that language is treated fairly impersonally, and selves do not seem
to possess much personality. Such issues in describing agency by these two dom-
inant approaches are exactly what have prompted other scholars of social and
philosophical studies to look for another, alternative view of how selves con-
struct themselves and their agencies. Some (e.g., Gardiner, 1992; Holland et al.,
1998; Holquist, 1990; Sullivan & McCarthy, 2004) have turned to the alternative,
dialogic perspective that Bakhtin has developed. Instead of viewing agency as
something completely inside an autonomous individual or as the ambiguous ef-
fect of power relations external to the subject and other social forces, Bakhtin of-
fers a more balanced approach to the process by which selves author themselves
in a world of complex relationships with others, one that does not lose either the
personal nor the social components.
Language and personhood are intimately interwoven in Bakhtin’s work. In
his bestselling book, How the Mind Works, cognitive psychologist and linguist
Stephen Pinker (1997) asks what he believes to be the most important questions
about the human mind: (a) What makes intelligence possible? and (b) What
makes consciousness possible? To Bakhtin, the answer to the second question
would be fairly unequivocal. Consciousness can only be embodied through lan-
guage. Bakhtin, of course, is not the only one who has stressed the importance
of language and discourses in the development of subjectivity. Poststructuralists
have also found the site of identity formation to be firmly embedded in language,
and Chapter One in this book has already outlined some of the parallels between
Bakhtin’s thought and poststructuralism (parallels that have made Bakhtin very
interesting to feminist postructuralists and anyone who is interested in the inter-
connections between language and agency). There are, however, also some no-
table differences. Although poststructuralists postulate a fragmented, decentered,
and fairly discontinued subject, Bakhtin is interested in the continuum of human
expression. While poststructuralism, as particularly illustrated in Foucault’s work,
is centered on larger social organizations and institutional forces, which func-
tion almost externally in relation to the self, Bakhtin is looking at the uniqueness
of each person and his or her unrepeatable social and historical location, which
is marked by a very personal and emotional-volitional tone. Another important
distinction between poststructuralist approaches and Bakhtin’s framework is the
way the two view social positioning. In the former, discourses largely position the
individual, while in Bakhtin subjects assume a more dynamic role by actively us-
ing speech genres (or discourses) to orient themselves in relationships and social
interactions with others (Burkitt, 1998). Other approaches have also been inter-
ested in how people use language to perform action, and a prominent example is
the speech act theory. What distinguishes Bakhtin, however, is that he is not only
mindful of how things work but, most importantly to the notion of agency, of how
things change, or in other words, of the human potential for creativity and the
possibility for transformation. In this sense, Bakhtin’s framework of the self could
be called transformational.
In outlining his philosophy of the self and agency, Bakhtin was looking at the
everyday person, in an everyday context. Clark and Holquist (1984) have stressed
this existentialist philosophy that permeates Bakhtin’s writing in observing that
“Bakhtin’s distinctiveness consists in his invention of a philosophy of language
that has immediate application not only to linguistics and stylistics but also to the
most urgent concerns of everyday life” (p. 9). Perhaps it was wise, for Bakhtin,
given the oppressive communist regime in Russia, during which he created most
of his work, to circumvent loud political statements. I believe, however, that he
was genuinely interested in the so-called small persons and their everyday lived
experiences. This is where Bakhtin found the most meaningful opportunities for
creativity and the agency associated with it.
Bakhtin was deeply interested in the nature of human acts, and he devoted his
first substantial essay, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, to this specific issue. This is
the essay in which he first articulated his conception of the human subject as well.
This is also where Bakhtin addresses the topics of moral answerability, authoring,
and the dyadic self-other relationship first. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act,
Bakhtin considers the human act not only as a main unit of analysis, but also as
the very locus of human existence. He wrote:
Every thought of mine, along with its content, is an act or deed that I perform –
my own individually answerable act or deed [postupok]. It is one of all those
acts which make up my whole once-occurrent life as an uninterrupted perform-
ing of acts [postuplenie]. For my entire life as a whole can be considered as a
single complex act or deed that I perform: I act, i.e. perform acts, with my whole
life, and every particular act and lived-experience is a constituent moment of my
life… (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 3)
The human being or actor that Bakhtin postulates is unique, for he or she holds an
irreplaceable position in the world. Indeed, the theme of uniqueness runs strongly
and unambiguously through the essay, as Bakhtin asserts:
I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that is unique and never-repeatable, a
place that cannot be taken by anyone else and is impenetrable for anyone else.
In the given once-occurrent point where I am now located, no one else has ever
been located in the once-occurrent time and once-occurrent space of once-
occurrent Being…. That which can be done by me can never be done by anyone
else. (p. 40)
Bakhtin affirms individuated ways of being; however, to actualize one’s

uniqueness one has to act answerably and relationally. Uniqueness is never possi-
ble in isolation, and in this essay Bakhtin brings up his early version of the model
of dialogism that he would later develop by speaking of relations. Our uniqueness
is only possible in relation to “everything that is not I” (p. 43). In other words,
subjects may hold a unique location in time and space, but they realize their po-
tential for agency by engaging in responsible acts in relation to others. They have
responsibility to everything that is “Other” to them, and to abdicate this respon-
sibility, this relation to the “Other” (which may be another human being, but may
be something more abstract than that), means to live with an alibi or to be a
pretender. Moreover, acts function on complex planes. For example, Bakhtin de-
scribes the act as a two-faced Janus: the subject of “I” is irreplaceable and unique,
but his or her action itself is taking place in an objective culture. Some Bakhtinian
scholars, like Coates (1998), have suggested that the self ’s obligation for respon-
sibility is an obligation to a higher Being and have pointed to Christian motifs in
Bakhtin’s work. Whether humans have a responsibility to a God or to a general
Other, Bakhtin emphasizes that their acts are both creative and answerable. Based
on Bakhtin’s theory of action, as he articulated it in Toward a Philosophy of the
Act, some researchers have compared Bakhtin’s framework to phenomenological
theory and have found similarities between his work and the work of Habermas
or Gadamer. What distinguishes Bakhtin’s notion of the act, however, from other
phenomenological approaches is his emphasis not only on the cognitive solu-
tions to a problem, but on ethical concerns as well. “For Bakhtin,” argues Nielsen
(2002), quite convincingly:
The act is more than a response to a situation of circumstance that calls on intel-
ligent solutions to solve problems that arise. The act is also a unique response in
which the self-other relation is aesthetically formed from fragmentary cognitive
and ethical elements into consummated wholes. (p. 17)
Answerability itself, the awareness of it, and the type of response, in which the
Bakhtinian subject engages, is rooted in experience and is driven by another
powerful element in Bakhtin’s philosophy action – the emotional-volitional tone
(or intonation, which embodies the evaluative attitude toward an object). It is
exactly the emotional-volitional tone that determines what type of action the self
will set in motion:
Everything that is actually experienced is experienced as something given and as
something-yet-to-be-determined, is intonated, has an emotional-volitional tone,
and enters into an effective relationship to me within the unity of the ongoing
event encompassing us. As emotional-volitional is an inalienable moment of the
actually performed act, even of the most abstract thought, insofar as I am actually
thinking it, i.e., insofar as it is really actualized in Being, becomes a participant in
an ongoing event. (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 33)
The previous chapters in this book already touched on the notion of the emo-
tional-volitional tone along with its importance in the everyday lives and dis-
courses of the participants in this project. What is important to emphasize is that
emotional-volitional tone serves to orient future action, it invokes the necessity
of answerability (and later, in Bakhtin’s more mature terminology, dialogue), and
is very far from being a mere passive expression or “passive psychic reaction”
(p. 36). It is, indeed, the compelling force of active answerability and, if the situa-
tion requires it, resistance. Therefore, emotions are a central part of agency. Later,
Bakhtin would further develop these ideas through his model of dialogism, which
could be viewed as the creative process that actively anticipates others’ positions
and their responses (acts or utterances).
Bakhtin’s concept of an authoring subject would further mature in his analysis
of Dostoevsky’s creative writing, where the self is not deprived of a voice by exter-
nal forces, as Bakhtin would accentuate, but also where the idea of participatory
thinking, introduced in Toward a Philosophy of the Act, would become “a plurality
of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony
of fully valid voices” (1984, p. 6). In his work on Dostoevsky’s novels, Bakhtin
continues to elaborate his idea of a creative and languaged subject, emphasizing
the potentiality for agency and transformation. He claims, “As long as a person
is alive he lives by the fact that he is not yet finalized, that he has not yet uttered
his ultimate word” (p. 59). This claim clearly illustrates that existence and words,
life and language are impossible to separate in this framework. The subject is a
speaking subject here, and most importantly, the subject is conceived as a creative
author of his or her own utterances. That anyone who speaks is an author, that the
speaker’s relation to his words is what the author’s is to her or his text is perhaps
one of Bakhtin’s most liberating ideas. Similar to the self portrayed in Toward a
Philosophy of the Act, who is unique and unrepeatable, the speaking subject in
his later works is an author creating a non-repeatable discourse and event: “In a
human being there is always something that he himself can reveal, in a free act of
consciousness and discourse, something that does not submit to an externalizing
secondhand definition” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 58).
At the same time, individuated ways of authoring the self are not synonymous
with individualism. The creative Bakhtinian subject cannot author his or her exis-
tence in a social vacuum. To be a conscious self means to be so through someone
else, and the complex dialogic relationships postulated by Bakhtin are realized
through language, discourse, and, more specifically utterances, which in his more
mature work become the major unit of analysis:
Dialogic relationships are reducible neither to logical relationships nor to rela-

tionships oriented semantically toward their referential object, relationships in
and of themselves devoid of any dialogic element. They must clothe themselves
in discourse, become utterances, become the positions of various subjects ex-
pressed in discourse, in order that dialogic relationships might arise among
them. (1984, p. 183)
The creative act is a free act, but while Bakhtin grants the self an almost lim-
itless potential for creativity and transformation, he locates the very possibility
for human agency within discursive dialogic relationships. In this view, speaking
subjects are also inevitably co-authors of their utterances, as they share not only
events, but also discourse. Very much like the utterances or any other signs that
human beings use, agency itself is not something that is internal or belongs en-
tirely to the individual. It is transindividual. Live language itself, which Bakhtin
separates from the abstract formal linguistic system, is a creative, dialogic activity,
as a person selects from different speech genres to orient herself or himself amidst
a multitude of value-positing consciousnesses.
Comparing Bakhtin’s agency with other socio-cultural approaches to this con-
struct (e.g., Bruner (1991) or Lave and Wenger (1991)), Sullivan and McCarthy
(2004) argue that Bakhtin’s account of agency stands out exactly because of his
focus “on the emotions, values and feelings that particular actors bring to the en-
counter with concrete others” (p. 295). While other socio-cultural theorists have
stressed the role of cultural systems, Bakhtin is interested in lived experiences for
particular people who are relating to others. Agency is a border, not an individu-
alistic phenomenon, and its dual nature, along with the concept of responsibility,
has been reflected throughout the participants’ narratives about their immigrant
journey. Boris, in one salient example, noted:
(translation):
And so we came here. We knew a little of what awaited us, but, nevertheless, real-
ity surpassed our expectations. In the good and the bad sense. America is a very
diverse country. It is not black or white. It contains the whole color spectrum.
You should [it is your responsibility to] understand life [in this country]. Without
knowing the language, you don’t know anything, you cannot understand how
people communicate with each other, their relations.
6.2 Reflexive awareness and responsive understanding
One of the many reasons Bakhtin was drawn to Dostoevsky’s novels was that
their complex, multilayered plots placed ordinary people in extraordinary situ-
ations: “It [the plot] places a person in extraordinary positions that expose and
provoke him, it connects him and makes him collide with other people under
unusual and unexpected conditions precisely for the purpose of testing the idea
and the man of the idea, that is, for testing ‘the man in the man” (Bakhtin, 1984,
p. 105). It is very interesting that Peter, one of the participants in this project,
used exactly the term “trying” in the sense Bakhtin uses “testing.” Peter spoke
of a Russian saying that one has to “try” a person in different ways, by money,
power, and fame. “We are being tried,” Peter said about their experience in the
new country. He did not see himself or his family being tried by power or fame,
but he used it as a metaphor to capture the sense of trial the participants were
feeling by new socio-cultural realities, a new language, and even what he saw as
new values. The previous chapters revealed how acutely the participants experi-
enced the loss of language and the associated with it loss of social status. Vera
compared herself with a helpless child, who cannot function well in English.
Sylvia invoked emotions like guilt and shame, and Peter’s words of being tried
referred to a state resembling a cultural crisis to the individual. Moreover, Lydia
and Peter’s narratives indicated that they did not perceive the struggle for voice
as an immigrant to be a personal crisis or a personal struggle as they located it
within larger socio-ideological contexts and made specific references to other
immigrants and other immigrants’ voices. In Bakhtin’s framework, a personal
or cultural crisis would require a responsible action, actions that may orient or
re-orient the person to new positions and new discourses.
Sullivan and McCarthy (2004) indicate that a significant feature of agency in
the context of lived experience is the reflexive awareness (the “I-for-myself ” com-
ponent of the triadic model, outlined earlier in Chapter Two). Moreover, these
Bakhtinian scholars specify that it is “this reflexivity that brings with it a sense
of morals in our dialogues with the other. That is, we have some choice in how
we author the value of another” (p. 307). Bakhtin himself claimed that the better
people understand the external forces that determine their positions, the better
they can exercise their potential for action and, ultimately, freedom (1986b). As
the previous chapters illustrated through a series of narrative examples, the par-
ticipants reflected critically on their experiences in their new, immigrant country.
They reflected analytically on their everyday discursive practices, on how they
were being positioned socially, on specific socio-cultural phenomena, and on
their relationships with others. I argue that this reflexive, critical awareness was
a prerequisite to their transformation from a fairly voiceless being to a speaking,
authoring subject. Critical reflexivity is important in other approaches, for in-
stance, in feminist theory. Bakhtin viewed the concept of awareness as active and
responsive. He distinguished between passive understanding, which is “no under-
standing at all” (1981, p. 281) and responsive understanding. Bakhtin described
the latter as a type of active understanding that “establishes a series of complex
relationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it new
elements” (p. 282). In other words, responsive understanding is both creative and
dialogic. The processes through which the participants struggled to assert their
second language voices and to transform themselves from voiceless positions to
speaking subjects and, thus, authors of their own signifying existence (Holquist,
1986) were not linear or unproblematic. In the re-authoring of their subjectivities,
they had to make many choices, accept some discourses and reject others, and in
the processes of navigating (or orienting themselves) through different social dis-
courses, they had to assess and analyze the different values, in which discourses
are drenched.
Analyzing the notion of discourse from a Bakhtinian perspective, Hicks
(1996a) writes that “language used socially, or discourse, is also laden with the
values, beliefs, and intentions of its users” (p. 5). At the same time, the dialogic
principle of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language insists that we live in a world of
other people’s words or others’ discourses. Words do not belong solely to one par-
ticular user; they are always half-someone else’s. When Bakhtin writes that con-
sciousness finds itself having to choose a language, he describes an active process
of having to choose a position, a set of values, an orientation, which are personal
but also ideological:
Concrete socio-ideological language consciousness, as it becomes creative – that
is, as it becomes creative as literature – discovers itself already surrounded by
heteroglossia and not at all a single, unitary language, inviolable and indisput-
able. The actively literary linguistic consciousness at all times and everywhere…
comes upon “languages” and not language. Consciousness finds itself inevitably
facing the necessity of having to choose a language. With each literary-verbal per-
formance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must
move and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘lan-
guage.’ (1981, p. 295)
The act of choosing a “language,” a discourse, or an ideological position is itself an

act of agency in Bakhtin’s later model of the self.
6.3 Responsive understanding and discourses of education and values
The participants in this project found themselves in situations that required them
to choose daily among options and discourses. For instance, the two older couples
decided to take English language classes upon arrival in the United States. Even
Charlotta, Sylvia’s elderly mother, who could leave the house only to see a doctor,
had her own set of English language textbooks and was studying the grammar
of the language of her new country. Vera, who mentioned that she had abhorred
computers in Russia and that she had gladly let her “younger” colleagues take
care of this particular aspect of her work, enrolled in a computer course at a lo-
cal college. Vera shared that sometimes she found it difficult to believe that she
was studying about concepts such as payroll, a world so vastly different from her
previous occupation. Sylvia, on the other hand, when presented with the offer to
work as a babysitter for a wealthy couple, refused to take it, even though she had
to wait for something else to emerge. She made a decision that she wanted a job
that would help her improve her English skills so she could eventually obtain a
better job. Thus, she waited until the opportunity to work at a discount store with
English speakers presented itself. The pay itself was not high; the job was me-
nial, and the long hours standing made her feet hurt, but it suited Sylvia’s goal to
have opportunities to use English at her work setting. Sylvia and Vera both real-
ized that they would never achieve a level of English proficiency that would allow
them to work in the fields of engineering and journalism, respectively, in their
new environment. At the same time, they approached the available choices in
their socio-cultural milieu reflectively, with an eye on the future, and their deci-
sions were hardly random. Both women equated English and education with the
types of discourses that would allow them to establish a stronger voice and a more
desirable social position. Theirs were the active responses to a changing reality
and an illustration of the creativity of everyday, responsive understanding.
The two younger couples also found education to be an internally persuasive
discourse for them. With the exception of Peter, all of the younger participants
(Natalia, Dmitri, and Lydia) enrolled in college so they could obtain American
degrees. Dmitri, Natalia, and Lydia all worked either part- or full-time to support
themselves and their families while studying. It was apparent that all participants
highly valued education when I discussed their attitudes to literacy in earlier
chapters. They saw the development of professional skill as a key to success in the
new setting. For instance, 80-year-old Charlotta would speak proudly of the “two
university degrees” that she had earned in Ukraine, one degree in economics and
another in music. Even long after I had stopped being Natalia’s English instructor,
Charlotta would ask me her carefully-phrased in English question, “And how is
Natalia doing at school?” Sylvia and Boris often spoke of their children’s social
status in the United States, and they indicated an awareness of a strong nexus be-
tween education and social positioning. In the excerpt below, the two are openly
linking the critical skills in the English language with education and the discourse
of success itself:
Sylvia: First / in the university / second / in the job / if looking for a job / and /
for example / they’ll need to have interview… And how mmm what
their image / how they can explain about their self is very important. If
they cannot understand interviewer / interviewer […] it would be very
bad. And // and / even mm for example / they will want to have some
friends / American friends. With their / mm / rather not bad enough /
but not very well English / is very difficult / to communicate. If they
can / if they want to talk / different / different questions / different
aspects / so they will not be able.
Gergana: So you said that their image would be better if they spoke English
better?
Sylvia: Image / image. The higher / their English level / the easier to / for them
to have / to have the mm sredu kak skazat’ (how do you say social
environment)?
Sylvia echoed statements produced in Natalia’s, Lydia’s, and Boris’s narratives that
English plays an essential and, indeed, a most important role in the establishing of
dialogic relationship and in the acquisition of a desirable social status, acknowl-
edged by others.
The discourses of education and professionalism were prominent when other
participants were discussing how they perceived immigrants’ success in general.
Lydia and Peter spoke of a person whom they considered respected by their larger
community:
Peter: And you are usually looking at these Russian people who are doing
something, who get an education who get a new job. You look to these
people with a great respect especially if they are at about 40. We had
our neighbor hmm Jana. Then she==
Lydia: She is not working; she is like 50.
Peter: Yeah I am talking about under 40. She is 50. She / she earned a great
respect. She she went to college==
Gergana: Here?
Peter: Yeah here. She went to college==
Lydia: She used to work like==
Peter: Janitor / help person. In the day / she is working like janitor person==
Lydia: For two years.
Peters: For two years in a hotel / and then college at night / and was like a
babysitter or / and she got / she got her English / at their good level==
Lydia: And finally she got a job==
Peter: Yeah as build build as construction estimator. So she did this before
and she like / put a name in front of her / that she wanted to be
construction estimator here and she got this job in two year==in a year
and a half / actually.
They admired Lydia’s aunt (and Sylvia’s sister), who had immigrated years be-
fore Sylvia’s family did, and who, in addition to her already earned education
in Ukraine, had pursued an additional degree in the States. They compared her
success with the stories of other Ukrainian immigrants, who had not made that
choice. In their words, the immigrants who did not take courses after their arriv-
al in the United States were not able to progress much and were still holding the
same jobs they obtained originally when they arrived in the country. Lydia and
Peter’s discourses of immigrants’ success entailed values of education and hard
work. Peter referred to other immigrants whom he admired, “All the guys from
the Russia, from India, Chinese guys are very very very very nastoichivyi [persis-
tent]” in trying to establish professional voices for themselves. Professional dis-
courses dominated both Peter’s and Dmitri’s narratives of authoring selves, and
English was an important factor, underlying all possibilities for success. Natalia
expressed a similar belief about the value of education in immigrants’ lives:
Natalia: Different immigrants think that / to be successful / how to say that? Do
you think that / even if you go to / to work I don’t know / not qualified
job / you are successful. It’s / different type of people. Some people
think that even if at 40 or 50 they have to go to got some / some degree.
And some people / don’t feel that way. Just it depends on people.
Gergana: But to you, personally, to you, education is very==
Natalia: ==important.
I should clarify that although the participants, particularly the young ones, found
the values of education and hard work internally persuasive in authoring their
professional selves in the immigrant country, it does not mean that their under-
standing of a successful human being was someone who cared only about a ca-
reer. In fact, both Lydia and Peter strongly rejected values of consumerism in
both their country and in the United States. Peter, for instance, did not approve
of Russian immigrants who quickly became obsessed only with making money
and accumulating material possessions. This is what he called “trial by money.”
The two spoke, quite explicitly, against the consumerism they had encountered
both in Ukraine and in the United States. Peter, for instance, quoted a line from
an article that had been circulating on the Internet, “The Paradox of Our Time”:
“We flew to the moon but we never come to our neighbor across the road.” The
article was asserting that some of the most important human values are not to be
found in objects and technology, but within ethical relationships among human
beings. To Peter and Lydia, as illustrated earlier, one of most significant values was
relating to others in an ethical, responsible way. Lydia expressed her main value
concisely, but powerfully, using a Russian phrase: “ostavatsa chelovek” (to remain
a human being), no matter what life brought to them:
Peter: I think / the main main value is to remain / good person.
Lydia: Remain humor. Remain / it’s a Russian saying, “Ostavastya cheloveka”
[to remain a human being].
When prompted to elaborate the meaning of what it means to be a good person,

Lydia responded that it meant someone who was willing to help another even
though it was not in his or her best interest. In one more specific case, Lydia and
Peter referred to a recently-arrived family from Ukraine which they helped in
numerous ways, including sometimes driving them to different places.
Without knowing, Lydia has captured Bakhtin’s view of the ultimate human
and moral act, an act in which you sacrifice something for the sake of another,
but, which, ultimately, as Coates (1998) points out, leads to self-fulfillment.
6.4 Creativity in answerability
Creativity underlines Bakhtin’s understanding of human agency, but creativity

to him is not an activity, reserved for artists’ imaginations or for the writers of
novels. Bakhtin is interested in human creativity as it is born out of some kind
of necessity and is always a response to a specific problem in a specific life situa-
tion. For the younger participants, such as Natalia and Dmitri, or Lydia, respond-
ing to their immigrant realities entailed continuing their formal educations in
American universities and obtaining college degrees. In other words, for their
acts of authoring, they adopted discourses of education and professionalism. Pe-
ter and Dmitri, for instance, positioned themselves as professionals in the field
of computers. Dmitri, who was working as a computer programmer, expressed
an interest in becoming a manager. Peter referred to himself and his wife, Lydia,
as professionals several times in his narratives. The act of authoring oneself as a
professional and even intellectual was inevitably interwoven with and even de-
termined by another discourse: the skill in English as a second language. All of
the participants made direct connections between professional success and the
use of English. Peter, for instance, said, “If you cannot learn a language, what’s
your professional skills? You cannot learn even the language, but you have ambi-
tions to learn mm some profession. So it’s like a bad sign.” Peter is using here the
double-voicing strategy discussed earlier in the book: He has “seen” himself as an
immigrant through a potential employer eyes, heard his own imperfect English
through someone else’s perception of him, and has incorporated this Other’s view
in his own speech.
The older immigrants also took courses. Vera and Sylvia (and more rarely,
Aleksei and Boris) attended English-language courses. The two women studied
grammar by themselves, actively used dictionaries, and tried to read in English.
One of their ways of authoring was through a more formal acquisition of Eng-
lish. Vera and Sylvia also took beginning computer courses at a local college, and,
later, toward the end of the project, Sylvia, who was so afraid to speak with others
because she might make a mistake, took a job at as a clerk at a bank institution,
where she, after several months, was given a promotion. In other words, the older
immigrants’ practices of authoring themselves in a new culture also entailed the
discourses of education and learning. At the same time, they were not naïve, and
they realized that, because of lack of fluency in English, they would not be able
to obtain the occupations they had once held. Sylvia knew she could not work
as an engineer in the United States, and Vera arrived in her immigrant country
fully aware that she would never work as a journalist again or would never again
host a television show. Thus, Sylvia’s and Vera’s experiences provide captivating
examples of Bakhtin’s notion of everyday, answerable creativity.
Their new positions required the appropriation of new professional discours-
es. Sylvia, for instance, very much like Peter, realized that English would be at the
core of any professional skills she would acquire in her immigrant country. She
shared with me that she was not so much worried about the acquisition of basic
skills in English but was more concerned about the language skills that would al-
low her to hold a job. Sylvia, who had never studied anything related to computers
in Ukraine, found herself in an English-speaking classroom taking basic computer
literacy courses, which required her to not only to learn new software programs,
but also technical vocabulary that was new to her. In one example, when she was
describing her experience in the computer courses, Sylvia mentioned that she
did not find the content particularly challenging. It was not even the computer
terminology that she found difficult. Rather, it was the discourse of the American
classroom. Words like “syllabus” were new to her, and she had never encountered
the multiple-choice tests that are common in American universities. Sylvia shared
that she felt “ashamed” when she did not understand her American instructor
in class, but she stayed after class and asked questions. Several weeks into her
computer course, a smiling Sylvia was beaming at me. She had just gotten an “81
score” on her test. “I did it!” exclaimed Sylvia.
Ironically, Sylvia also discovered that if she were to get a job in the United
States, she would have to abandon the discourse and identity of an engineer she
had acquired in her home country. Instead, through conversations with other
Russians in the area and, based on her own reflections, she told me that she had
decided that she would not list the title of “Engineer” on her resume. She would
present herself as a technician. In her narrative and analysis of the situation, Sylvia
was engaged in a dialogue with the voices of at least three others. On one hand,
she was describing her decision in a short narrative to me, an intermediate inter-
locutor, who was trying to help her in creating the best resume. However, there
were also two other invisible audiences whose voices she had incorporated her
reflective narrative. She had invoked the voices and the experiences of other Rus-
sian immigrants and had found them internally persuasive. Ultimately, although
I didn’t agree with her at the time, her own voice appropriated the words of these
others as her own. On the other hand, Sylvia actively anticipated the evaluative
positions of her potential American employers and, thus, she oriented her own
position toward them, including tailoring her real professional title. In answer-
ing the socio-linguistic demands of her new environment, as an act of everyday
creativity, Sylvia found that she had to abandon one type of discourse so that she
could gain access to another one. It was not a decision that was made entirely
within her; rather it was a co-created and even co-authored act that took place on
the border between herself and several different others.
Vera’s experience is another striking example of everyday, creative responsive
understanding and of an active engagement with available discourses. In one of
our earliest conversations, Vera shared that she had never thought that she could
work as a “kitchen manager” – someone who was literally responsible of the
nitty-gritty details going on in a kitchen (the purchase of products, recipe deci-
sions, etc.) “Eto nemnozhko smeshno [this is a little funny],” she even said without
a trace of humor in her intonation. Like Sylvia, Vera immersed herself in English
grammar and vocabulary the first months of her arrival in the United States. Like
Sylvia, though, she discovered that the acquisition of English was important, as
it underlay all her experiences and relations with others in her immigrant en-
vironment, but the acquisition of new, professional discourses allowed her to
establish a true voice in the second-language milieu. Vera never abandoned her
desire to acquire as much English as possible so she could communicate. Over
time, her goal became not so much to acquire the precise grammar of the lan-
guage, the type of grammar she had been used to in her native tongue, but to
author a viable space for herself. Thus, instead of grammar books, Vera started
subscribing to American magazines such as Cooking Light and started reading
cookbooks in English. Her goal was to become proficient in the language so she
could communicate with her potential customers. Toward the end of this proj-
ect, Vera, together with one of her friends, opened their new catering business.
Because Vera herself was never involved in any business in Russia, she decided
to take a course at the local college. Like Sylvia, as she was acquiring English,
Vera was also learning a new discourse of business and business terminology.
For instance, about the term “payroll,” which they had recently discussed in class,
Vera said, “The payroll for me is… new. I never do payroll in Russia. I never do
payroll in my life.” It was interesting that while Vera was describing to me what
she was learning, she was also trying to practice the pronunciation of the word
– an illustration of how in Vera’s case the acquisition of English coincided with
the acquisition of brand new professional discourses. In authoring and re-creat-
ing her lived experiences in a new culture and a language, Vera maintained a fo-
cus on what was most important to her: the ability to communicate with others.
Toward the end of the study, as she shared her newly-found satisfaction from her
job, she emphasized that the most fulfilling aspect of her work was exactly the
opportunity to interact with others and to feel needed. It was through her work
(and the demand for her work, when others called for her professional services),
when she said, “I don’t feel like a foreigner.” Her grammar might not have been
precise, as Vera put it, but she was able to understand others and to make herself
understood. She said of work experience:
Now I receive satisfaction from my job and I will not change it. It’s nice and many
people call for me and they say “Oh we’ll do the wedding or graduation” and we
do it and we create our new meals and it’s interesting! Do you know it’s like…
protses sozidaniya (a process of creation).
The last statement, which Vera shared toward the end of the study, is in sharp
contrast with her initial frustration, feeling that her job was a little “funny.” I do
not think that her use of the word “creation,” sharing a root with “creativity,” is
accidental, either. Through meaningful relations with others, through being rec-
ognized and validated as an expert in a new professional field, Vera was able to
author her own signifying experiences.
6.5 Resistance as an act of agency
As an earlier chapter observed, Bakhtin uses the term dialogue in at least two
different ways. In one larger meaning, dialogue is ubiquitous, it is a “descrip-
tion of all language” (Morson, 1986, p. 83), and pure monologue is not possible.
However, in another, more narrow meaning of the term, dialogue assumes the
existence of monologue as its antithesis. In this second meaning, dialogue in-
dicates the stances of two discursive or evaluative positions, sometimes clash-
ing with each other. In the novels Bakhtin analyzes, monologic discourses are
often authoritarian voices, imposing themselves on others, and objectifying
these others. The speaking subject may try to reject objectification in another’s
discourse and refuse to accept the authoritative discourse by not making it his
or her own, and sometimes resisting actively through discourse. Writing of the
novel, Bakhtin asserts the possibility of agency within this literary metaphor for
human relationships: “Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his
creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse, but also subjects of their
own directly signifying discourse” (1984, p. 7). Resistance, of course, is a sig-
nificant topic in postmodernism. Poststructuralists Henriques, Hollway, Urwin,
Venn and Walkerdine (1998), for instance, in discussing resistance, claim that
even when we speak of dominance and inequality in power relations, resistance
is always present. In the field of second language studies, Canagarajah (1999)

explicitly addresses resistance as he weaves complex connections between dis-
course, ideology, and the post-colonial context. He outlines the role of resistance
theories in different approaches (Enlightenment, structuralism, and poststruc-
turalism) and concludes that resistance thinking not only recognizes the role
of discourses in the construction of subjectivity but also “enables negotiation
with the dominant discourses as an important step in resisting power structures”
(p. 31). In his work, Canagarajah provides examples of how students and teach-
ers negotiate linguistic codes, roles and relationships through the use of English
in the classroom in a Tamil-speaking community.
Narrative spaces, in Bakhtin’s work, allow the self a special and powerful op-
portunity for resistance. The author in Bakhtin’s understanding of the text is also
a creator. In this view, whenever we speak, we impart something new to the text.
When we introduce another voice (through the strategy called double-voicing),
we always accentuate it with our own meanings, and, thus, create and transform.
The immigrants in this project sometimes had to use their voices to answer in
ways that challenged authorial and objectifying discourses by others. For in-
stance, when, in Chapter Four, Vera was describing some American women’s atti-
tude toward her and her Russian-speaking co-workers, this was not merely an act
of complaint. Even as she was describing the offending event, Vera’s emotional-
volitional tone took on a defiant note:
(translation):
If you had only seen this arrogance! I couldn’t say this about everybody; it
wouldn’t be true. But it happens! You can sense it, and you immediately feel, you
know, at this moment, you feel confronted. You want to do something about it!
Here, Vera’s emotions already contain the kernel of resistance. She has rejected
not just the immediate actions of the American women she described in her nar-
rative, but, ultimately, the authorial discourse against foreigners who don’t know
English, work in kitchens, and are not worthy of respect. In another narrative,
Vera explained how she had worked long hours to organize a successful birthday
party for an American co-worker. After the party, when she no longer needed
Vera’s services, the co-worker’s attitude abruptly changed, and she started to ig-
nore Vera, without even returning her greetings in the hallway. Vera told me that
for weeks she had tried to understand in vain what exactly happened, and how
she had offended this person. Vera felt frustrated, but she also felt angry. In the
end, she directly confronted her co-worker, and at a party, in front of all their col-
leagues, she claimed her voice:
And every year we go in December / in Irish pub / and we stay together… And
/ last year / on this party / they are sitting in front of each other. And she [her
co-worker] said, “Oh, Vera, hi!” I say, “I am sorry Judy. I won’t say ‘hi.” She said,
“What’s the matter?” I say, “What’s the matter? It’s very strange that you will say
me “hi.” I don’t know why. You think you are more intelligent? I don’t think it.”
And all the people / they are quiet / and look on me…
Vera made a point to specify that she was the only Russian speaker there. One
unique Bakhtinian aspect of language is the internal dialogization of the word he
proposes, which can become a crucial force in creating and authoring, through
double-voicing, in narratives. In Vera’s excerpt above, double-voicing is active as
Vera is engaging in a direct polemic with the discourse of another person. She is
resisting being silenced on two planes: One was the actual physical space in which
she confronted the representative of an authorial discourse at a very specific loca-
tion, the party. The other was the space of narrative discourse. As Vera reflected on
her stance of resistance, her voice sounded strong:
You know what? Before I was shy and didn’t speak. Now, I speak up about every-
thing. About everything! Otherwise, everyone takes advantage of you. And they
think if you are foreigners, then not people. I think not. This is not going to be!
In this passage, Vera has found the perfect lexical items, the perfect sentence
structures to author her emotions, her intentions, and her resistance in her sec-
ond language.
Vera’s husband, Aleksei, who typically did not speak a lot of English and did
not speak a lot with his co-workers, also took an opposing stance in one of his
narratives. He told me, in his halting English, about an accident at work. One
of his colleagues blamed a young Russian man for an incident resulting in a fire,
while Aleksei was convinced that there was a hardware problem. No one was hurt,
but Aleksei resisted the position in which his younger Russian co-worker was
placed, and the narrative below reflects his resistance:
After [the accident] maybe mm one minute / was nothing. Maybe after 20 or 25
minutes / was break nothing. Mm / too much pepel’ [ashes] go outside / and is
this one / American guy, “Wa! Is Russian boy! Is your fault in the fire!” I listen…
I listen listen. After [that] I said, “You work here too / here. Your fault too.” “No!”
[was the other person’s reply]. “Why not? You work here? Yes? Your fault?” May-
be four five / workers / help me. [The other man stopped talking.] Only smoke
and smoke and smoke. Why? Is this Russian young boy? [It was] not his fault. Is
this very very old / vacuum axis.
Similar to Vera’s excerpt above, Aleksei used active double-voicing in his narrative
to resist and directly engage the Other’s discourse, to imbue it with his own mean-
ing and values, with his own evaluative stance. Again, the resistance took place
on two distinct, but inter-related in this case, planes: the actual physical location
of the accident, where Aleksei, always hesitant to use English, spoke up and con-
fronted his American co-worker in the Other’s own native language.
Narratives themselves become the contesting spaces, the battle grounds of

agency and transformation in Bakhtin’s concept of the dialogic text. In a previous
chapter, Natalia mentioned that she perceived hers and Dmitri’s positions as serv-
ers as vulnerable because they were foreigners and not native speakers of English.
While it was normal for their American co-workers to revise the schedule, their
manager seemed to refuse their requests when they needed such a change. When
Natalia shared her narrative with me, this had already been a source of frustration
for her for some time:
Natalia: Just again / with our manager… If I want to have a day off / they
don’t give me it / and if somebody else want / to have a day off / [the
manager] give. I was mad / and I don’t know why why it happens.
Gergana: Did you approach him? Did you talk with him?
Natalia: I asked him / “Why don’t you put this person this day? You ask them /
but you don’t ask me. Why?
Gergana: What did he say?
Natalia: He said, “Okay just find me another person / that’s all. I didn’t continue
this conversation. But / I was very disappointed / you know… It’s not
right (sighs).
Gergana: Did you try to explain to him?
Natalia: I think / I don’t have to explain to him / everything. Anybody else
don’t explain / they just request it. And he give them.
Resistance doesn’t always have to be loud, nor does it imply that voices have to
clash. Here, Natalia exercised her resistance by refusing to take up a discourse
which she did not perceive as fair or valid. At the same time, her defiant emo-
tional-volitional tone is actively engaging with the discursive position of the
Other’s authorial position – her manager’s – and functions as the source of her
narrative agency.
In his book and Rabelais and his World (1968), Bakhtin develops the concept
of the carnival as a metaphor for renewal and as a force that could shift social
positions and disturb inequalities. Recognizing the social power of laughter, Gar-
diner summarizes its potential for resistance: “A critical aspect of carnival is its
critical function, the refusal to acquiesce in the legitimacy of the present social
system” (1993, p. 35). To Bakhtin, laughter can have a profound social signifi-
cance as it is oriented toward a shift of authorities and discourses, even estab-
lished truths. Averintsev (1992) points out in his analysis of the significance of
laughter in Bakhtin that while laughter itself is not freedom, it symbolizes the
process of freeing oneself. Speaking exactly of this liberating and transformative
power of laughter, Bakhtin argues that it “embraces both poles of change, it deals
with the very process of change, with crisis itself ” (1984, p. 127).
As acts of resistance, the participants employed carnivalesque discourses of

laughter, irony, and parody in opposing hostile voices in the narrative spaces they
were authoring. Vera, for instance, laughed heartily when she described an event
where she was catering for an affluent American client, who, as she and her Rus-
sian co-workers were preparing a party for his family, insisted that Russians drink
a lot of vodka. Vera found it ironic that her client was already drunk, while she
and her colleagues were working in his kitchen in the middle of the day, well
before the party had even started. When Boris was narrating how some of his
American co-workers dismissed his halting English or the other immigrants at
his workplace, he laughed as well. In the first case, he laughed at himself, and his
laughter was genuine; in the second, the laughter was tinged with sarcasm and
disapproval at the offensive language in which some of his Hispanic co-workers
were labeled behind their backs.
While they worked as servers at a restaurant, Dmitri and Natalia frequently
found themselves positioned as foreigners or the Other just on the basis of their
accents. They resisted this position as they were both laughing in their narrative:
Dmitri: Because / some people / I don’t know some people / don’t have any
education and mm they can/t / they don’t know anything about the
world / mm about different countries about different cultures. They
know about [their own] and that’s it. And they can accept just people
who are like / very similar to these people / and if you are not the same…
Gergana: So you have to be like them? They don’t like the differences?
Dmitri: Absolutely. They don’t like even / south accent / American accent!
Natalia: I think it doesn’t matter for them that I have an accent / but / if I
can’t say what I want / it’s important. It doesn’t matter if I / just say
differently.
Dmitri: People [tell us] you have charm accent.
Natalia: Yeah, “don’t lose it.”
Both: (Laughing.)
In another example, Dmitri commented on how “the people in the Midwest”

were always asking where he was from, just based on his accent, and he consid-
ered replying that he was from Mars. In some cases, Natalia and Dmitri were
offended by the lack of genuine interest in their culture and the perfunctory, trite
questions from their customers when they worked at what Natalia considered to
be a posh restaurant:
Natalia: The things that we talk about / where I am from / because people are
very interesting [interested]. Very interesting in / just country / and
usually / people ask Dmitri just… What did they ask you? (to Dmitri).
What kilometers from Moscow to Kiev…
Dmitri: Oh yeah. This is their favorite question. Favorite American question:
What is the distance between Moscow and Caspian sea (laughing).
Gergana: What do you say?
Dmitri: They try to show me their knowledge about Russia maybe. I don’t
know the distance between Moscow and Caspian sea. So my answer is
one thousand six hundred / and six kilometers.
In the excerpt above, Natalia is not challenging the discourse of the Other nor
the Other’s intentions in objectifying Dmitri and herself as foreigners. Dmitri,
on the other hand, used the word “clowns” to describe how such conversations
sometimes made him feel. In the passage above, he is inserting the voice of
someone else, in this case a particular type of customer at the restaurant, and
he is parodying the customer’s voice. Dmitri, who is the author in his narrative,
imbues the Other’s words with an intention that is directly oppositional to the
original intention of the other speaker, and he re-positions the discourse of the
customer to make it look funny. Dmitri’s parodying intonation of the customer’s
false curiosity and his laughter enact an act of resistance through the very tim-
bre of his voice (a physical property) and through his voice’s aesthetics (literally,
the way it sounds and the way it is meant to be perceived). The shift of power
through the use of irony and parody is quite apparent in the short narrative, in
which Dmitri subverts the intended meaning of another’s discourse and uses it
to sign his own values.
Bakhtin believed that if laughter did not epitomize freedom itself, at least it
opened the possibility for freedom and represented a process with liberating pow-
ers. “Laughing at another’s discourse,” Patterson wrote, “especially at authorita-
tive discourse – is a means of deflating authority, of drawing near what had been
distant, of unmasking what had been veiled and what functioned a veil” (1985,
p. 133). For the participants in this project, laughter became an act of resistance
exactly because of these discursive properties on the dialogic plane of narratives.
It challenged the status quo of the positionings between the immigrants and the
different others, with whose worldviews they came into contact. Sometimes, the
laughter was directed toward themselves, as in the case when Boris was describ-
ing his interaction with his “boss,” and when they had trouble understanding each
other. Boris laughed – not deriding his boss, but deriding himself – thus shifting
his position of inequality in terms of linguistic skills. Laughter, along with irony
and parody, was both an act of resistance and an act pregnant with transformative
powers in the narrativized world of authors.
In this chapter, I have attempted to outline an alternative, dialogic approach to
agency, as Bakhtin conceptualized it through several of his most essential books,
and as illustrated through the narrative excerpts of concrete speakers in their
everyday, felt experiences. Unlike other approaches to agency and personhood
itself, which stress the role of external cultural and power systems, Bakhtin al-
lows us a look at the individuated, humanized, and at the same time, relational
acts of authoring. I have highlighted the role of key Bakhtinian concepts such
as responsibility, creativity, and responsive understanding in his model of how
selves author their existence, and how these are inter-related through the ubiq-
uitous significance of discourse or language in Bakhtin’s work. Perhaps because
Bakhtin himself lived a significant part of his life in exile, he turned his attention
as a thinker to others in exile or in crisis situations. The immigrants in this proj-
ect, who found themselves on the threshold of a new culture and a new language,
authored their signifying discursive spaces through creative and responsible acts.
At the same time, they were acutely aware that their agency was always exercised
in relation to someone else, in the polyphonous realm of dialogue.
afterword
In this book, I have attempted to foreground the lived experiences of eight par-
ticular Eastern European immigrants in the prosaics of their narrativized worlds.
The narratives of these women and men have highlighted a Bakhtinian under-
standing of subjectivity, which is situated in the unique acts of their answerability
and, at the same time, in concrete ideological and social realities. The stories of
these couples reveal what happens when selves find themselves in a personal and
cultural crisis and have to re-invent their voices through a variety of discursive
practices with others. In each of the previous chapters, I have considered how
different aspects of Bakhtin’s unique dialogic philosophy of language and the self
enrich our understanding of the intricate nexuses among language, human con-
sciousness, culture, gender, and agency.
Through a dialogical lens, becoming a subject or a signifying author of one’s
words is not possible without language. Consciousness and the ability to have a
voice are synonymous, according to Bakhtin, but consciousness is never singular.
Bakhtinian scholar Samohvalova, for example, writes that “Otnosheniya – v ih lyu-
bom chelovecheskom variante – eto vsegda rabota soznaniya i rabota s soznaniem
[Relationships – in their every possible human version – this is always a process of
consciousness and a process with consciousness”] (1992, p. 192). Consciousness,
language, and, thus, the very essence of being a human being, are always dialogic,
always border phenomena. To Samohvalova, not unlike other, Western Bakhtinian
researchers, dialogue entails much more than an interaction between two speak-
ers, more than a communicative event in a physical space and time. To be sure,
dialogue may involve an actual conversation between two interlocutors. However,
more importantly for the purposes of this book and in its larger connotation, dia-
logue epitomizes any process or development, born within a multitude of subject
positions and values. It is exactly in this multitude of positions that the opportunity
for exchange of ideas and different types of content emerges (Samohvalova, p. 191).
Bakhtin himself wrote of the dialogic nature of human thought:
The idea begins to live, that is, to take shape, to develop, to find and renew its
verbal expression, to give birth to new ideas, only when it enters into genuine
dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the ideas of others. Human thought
becomes genuine thought, that is, an idea, only under conditions of living contact
with another and alien thought, a thought embodied in someone else’s voice, that
is, in someone else’s consciousness expressed in discourse. At that point of con-
tact between voice-consciousness the idea is born and lives. (1984, p. 88)
Dialogue, in this view, is the encounter between different consciousnesses or

worldviews, and consciousness could only be actualized through language.
Muriel Barbery (2006) centers her novel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, on
the stories of two seemingly very incongruent characters: Renee, who is the
54-year-old concierge of a luxury apartment building in Paris, and Paloma, the
precocious 12-year-old whose affluent family occupies one of these apartments.
Both articulate profound and strong opinions about the role of language use
within their rather class-conscious society. At some point, Paloma, contemplat-
ing the nature of social hierarchy, concludes: “Humans live in a world where it’s
words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of lan-
guage” (p. 57). The participants in this project would emphatically concur with
Paloma’s observation.
Language is vital to the nature of human existence. At the same time, human
existence is also inherently social. Todorov (1984), commenting on Voloshinov’s
rejection of individualistic subjectivism, which portrays human beings as ab-
stract, self-contained biological units, points out that “if language is constitutively
intersubjective (social), and if it is also essential to human existence, then the
conclusion is inescapable: human existence is originally social” (p. 30). Being a
person is inseparable from having a voice, being heard, addressed, and responded
to by another’s consciousness. Verbal expression is essential, according to Bakhtin
and, yet, the eight participants described here, lost the ability to express them-
selves when they arrived in their immigrant country, along with the social status
they had home. Over the two years, they began to author their new experiences
by acquiring new discourses. Some of these discourses were internally persuasive
to them, for example, educational and professional discourses. Others were dis-
courses marked by practices of resistance. Whenever the participants accounted
for any changes they experienced as immigrants, they pointed to English as a main
site of this transformation. For instance, Boris located all the social transforma-
tion he had undergone in the new socio-cultural setting in language practices:
(translation):
[I feel] a big difference [from when I arrived in the U.S. until now]. And again, I
attribute it all to language because for me – not only for me, for everybody – this
is the most important. When I came here, I couldn’t even ask about anything in
the store. I couldn’t understand anything. Today I am not afraid. I go to all places
I have to. I am trying to understand. I am not saying that I understand everything
and that people always understand me, but I can explain. This is already possible
for me, and this is a lot.
A central claim in the book has been that the formation of second-language sub-
jectivity and possibility for agency itself is embedded in the everyday, seemingly
Afterword 155
prosaic language practices that are co-experienced through relations with various
others. Reflecting on her journey as an immigrant, Vera said:
Do you know / sometimes I think that my vocabulary is so small / and I can-
not explain all that I had==what I real say / or what I real.... But sometimes / it’s
enough my vocabulary to do it. And for the first days / not only days maybe year /
maybe a year and a half / I feel like mm... kak eto skazat’ / kak chujerodnoe telo /
znaesh / chujoi chelovek ya v etoi strane [like a foreign body, you know, a foreign
person in this country]. But now / I think I now some / moi prava [my rights]…
Yeah / I know some my rights / and I mm my English is a little bit / better and
I can talk with the people about / different mm kinds / and mm maybe / kak je
eto / ne hvataet slova [I don’t have enough words]…. From one side / it’s difficult
for me / from the other side / no. Because I have many friends / and some people
who come / for example to our synagogue / they are very friendly / and mm I
can talk with them about their kids / about my country / about their rights in
the country here. Sometimes we can talk about the mm politic / and sometimes
about the sports and sometimes about other kinds / and I know that mm now / I
can feel / that I am / I am like American people.
Vera’s choice of the phrase “a foreign body” (or the equally appropriate transla-
tion “foreign matter” in the context of this excerpt) is especially noteworthy in
the description of how she felt without a voice in her immigrant environment.
A foreign matter does not evoke the concept of a person; unlike a person, it does
not necessarily imply the possession of consciousness or even humanity. And,
yet, what is striking is that even as Vera was narrating her awareness of her lim-
ited vocabulary and her emerging knowledge of her rights as a participant in the
practices of a new country, the core of the selfhood that she is portraying is not
a subject defined so much by the legal rights she feels she can claim, but by her
relationships with others. She becomes a subject in her own right by being able
to partake in a dialogic movement, as Bakhtin would say, of ideas. Vera’s brief
narrative of an otherwise long immigrant journey, full of struggle, illustrates the
essence of an Other-oriented subjectivity in a rather Bakhtinian manner: It is not
an entity, but a languaged process that originates within the dialogic interaction
of ideas and positions.
The orientation toward the Other that is so prevalent in Bakhtin is, ultimately,
discursive in its nature. Some of the discourses through which the participants
authored their narrativized authoring spaces were gendered. Both the men and
the women saw their positions as related to the Other (in some cases, a concrete
Other, in other cases a more abstract presence, as a semantic position or a world-
view). Both the female and male participants found the discourses of education
and professionalism internally persuasive, and they enacted these discourses on
a very physical plane of actions through taking courses, critically analyzing their
positions, re-orienting themselves in ways that allowed them some agency. Their
voices were tinged with emotional-volitional tones, but the women’s were par-
ticularly marked with discourses of emotion that contained frustration, guilt,
and shame. Even when they were discussing their professional environments, the
women found their primary source of satisfaction and a sense of a legitimate self
within the felt connection with other human beings, a connection that was not
directly based on professional success or the discourse of rights (which were very
evident in the men’s narratives).
When Lydia, for instance, a successful programmer possessing master’s de-
grees from two countries, was reminiscing on some of the most satisfying pro-
fessional experiences she had had in the United States, she did not choose her
position as a computer expert, but an earlier one when she was working as a re-
ceptionist at an American-Russian attorney’s office and where she was able to
“chat” as a friend with another co-worker. Lydia, who was just as educated as her
spouse, elected to locate her most satisfying work experience within the dialogic
connection to another human being, even though they did not share professional
goals, per se. Lydia herself had called her spouse, Peter, a very sociable, gregarious
person. She stipulated that he would be the one to prod everybody in her family
to practice speaking English. In his descriptions of his relations with others and
practicing English, however, what dominated was the professional goal to succeed
as an expert. While Sylvia and her daughters, who were much more fluent than
she was in English, felt all or some of their rights infringed upon because of their
lack of linguistic skills, Peter and Dmitri selected the discourse of expertise, and
found their right to speak, even in their imperfect English, exactly within this
discourse of expertise.
What I have suggested here, more specifically in Chapter Four, is that the no-
tion of moral responsibility in Bakhtin’s framework adds a unique, ethical dimen-
sion to the treatment of subjectivity and the gendered self. No doubt, all the par-
ticipants in the study engaged in acts and discourses that were responsible. The
women’s discourses, however, revealed a characteristically discursive responsibil-
ity toward the Other. I believe that there is a strong connection between the dis-
cursive responsibility they displayed and the greater level of emotional discourses
they demonstrated in their narratives. The discursive, dialogic responsibility was
the source of both the emotional discourses and the women’s higher preference
for attending to linguistic details and metalinguistic discourses. It was interesting
that it occurred not only within the narrative spaces in which they were position-
ing themselves and different others, but also in the intermediate interactions with
their spouses and even me, a researcher and an interlocutor in this case.
Drawing on the notion of dialogic, discursive responsibility, I argue that
Bakhtin allows us to take an alternative look at gender and discourses. Throughout
Afterword 157
his work, Bakhtin has urged us to view individuals in their unique chronotopes
(the intersection of time and space in which humans operate), and by linking
gender and dialogism, we can build on the unique experiences humans bring
to dialogic relationships, but also on how their experiences are related to socio-
cultural and ideological factors. In the case of the participants in this project, for
instance, the women’s very personal voices of responsibility were undoubtedly
tinged by the larger, societal discourses of gender and marriage that they had
appropriated in the community in which they grew up. The gendered discourses
that the participants employed and that I have described in this book may be
gender-related, but I would not call them gender-specific. Although Bakhtin did
not address gender explicitly in his writings, his thought would dovetail with the
thought of contemporary gender scholars, who claim that gender, as an act of
identity, is always located within a particular socio-cultural milieu. Somehow, it
is difficult to imagine that Bakhtin would ask whether one is a man or a woman.
He would be rather more interested in another question: Are we ethical human
beings capable of creative, responsible acts, and who are the others, with whom
we have co-authored the stories of our lives?
A prevalent dichotomy that one can still find in the mainstream literature on
second language acquisition is between emotions, on one hand, and cognitive
factors, on the other. Even in some current texts on second language research,
the reader can see chapters explaining the “individual characteristics” (such as
anxiety, introversion, or attitudes) of the learner from a fairly positivist perspec-
tive. The narratives of the participants in this project, framed within a Bakhtin-
ian philosophy, in which the emotional-volitional tone is intrinsically connected
with humans’ acts and cognition, suggest that feelings play a key role in the active
analysis of one’s social position. They are not just a reaction to everyday experi-
ences and realities. Emotions contain a socio-cognitive component as they entail
judgments or "actual, affirmed values” (Bakhtin, 1993, p. 33) about what actions
are possible. It is precisely in the domain of the emotional-volitional tone where
active answerability originates. I believe that it is important for both second lan-
guage researchers and practitioners to recognize that emotions are discursive cre-
ations constructed between the self and the Other. As all discursive creations, they
are not simply a form of individual expression, located within a single speaker, but
a shared, intertextual territory. Emotions themselves can turn into a contested
terrain of socio-political struggle and transformative practices.
Two key features that make Bakhtin’s framework particularly valuable in ex-
ploring the intersection between subjectivity and language are its transformative
and generative powers, which render true authorship possible. Bakhtin’s frame-
work is transformative in that it is being interested in how things and human
beings change, not merely how they work. The Russian philosopher, not unlike
other scholars of discourse, situates the possibility of selves within language; how-
ever, unlike some other approaches, he allows the subject to occupy his or her
unique, unrepeatable position. Subjects are not just spoken into existence and
positioned in various social discourses. Human beings are active, and they exer-
cise their potential for creativity through responsible actions to everyday events
and utterances. The very core of Bakhtin’s conception of a person is her or his
potential for being an agent with a unique voice. He writes, “A living human be-
ing cannot be turned into the voiceless object of some secondhand, finalizing
cognitive process” as he stresses the “free act of self-consciousness and discourse”
(Bakthin, 1984, p. 58).
Dialogue, however, does not always imply harmony, and as Baxter aptly ob-
serves, “Contrary to popular stereotype, dialogue is not a sappy, ‘group hug’ sort
of affair!” (2006, p. 104). As the participants’ words entered an environment of
“alien words, value judgments and accents,” they merged with some, but recoiled
from others (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 276). When utterances and worldviews clash,
subjects can resist on at least two planes: on the plane of the narrative through
their discourses (professional, for example, or as noted earlier, even by the con-
scious refusal to engage in a specific discourse) and on the plane of acts in physi-
cal space and time. Vera, for example, chose to approach one of her American
co-workers through a direct confrontation, and, thus, to assert her position as
an educated, worth of being considered as an equal in conversational practices
speaker. What is of particular significance to qualitative researchers is that the
features of transformation and generativity are especially powerful in the realm
of the narrative. Describing an event in one’s own words is a way in which we
can generate a completely new meaning through our own utterances. Utterances,
the main unit of analysis in Bakhtin’s understanding of dialogism, are intrinsi-
cally creative, and they are always answers to someone else’s utterance. Such a
framework offers narrative researchers a powerful analytical tool in approaching
the complex and polyphonous nature of texts in various disciplines. In a way,
Bakhtin construes the very essence of human identity as a creative, ethically re-
sponsible, and dialogic act.
Ethics and moral responsibility seem important to Bakhtin on all levels of the
self-Other relations. In Toward a Philosophy of the Act, he postulates that theory
and, ultimately, research should be an answerable and ethical act. Bakthin appeals
to all theoreticians when he writes:
Afterword 159
A theory needs to be brought into communion not with theoretical constructions

and conceived life, but with the actually occurring event of moral being – with
practical reason, and this is answerably accomplished by everyone who cognizes,
insofar as he accepts answerability for every integral act of his cognition, that
is insofar as the act of cognition as my deed is included, along with all its con-
tent, in the unity of my answerability, in which and by virtue of which I actually
live – perform deeds. (p. 12)
Researchers of all socio-cultural phenomena, including the field of language learn-

ing, are particularly well positioned to act as moral agents and advocates for social
transformation in the lives of the human beings – learners or participants – with
whom they interact. When we choose whose voices we analyze and what frame-
work we use for the analysis, we engage in a multi-layered dialogic event, in which
our own beliefs intersect with the “truths” of our fields and those of the human
beings whom we study. It was not accidental that my own research focused on
the narrativized worlds of the eight immigrants, described here, nor was it acci-
dental that I chose Bakhtin’s philosophy to frame their felt experiences within the
second language and culture. Choosing to give voice to the language-embedded
experiences of other immigrants, to their very practical, prosaic concerns, I have
performed my own answerable deed of an immigrant woman and a researcher.
The areas of applied linguistics and second language acquisition have already
benefited from Bakhtin’s social philosophy, which offers not only a theoretical
framework, but also urges language researchers and teachers to promote the de-
velopment of active, creative, and responsible agents in immigrant communities
and classrooms. A Bakhtinian conception of selves would discourage both re-
searchers and practitioners from viewing learning as a monological process or
research as a monological practice. Indeed, his protean epistemology can help
us bridge various fields of research, such as applied linguistics, sociology, com-
munication science, anthropology, and philosophy, in the development of a truly
interdisciplinary dialogue.
Legend of transcription symbols
in narrative excerpts
/ indicates a pause
… indicates unfinished utterance
[…] indicates deleted text
boldface text indicates an emphasis
italicized text indicates foreign language segments
??? means that the segment is unintelligible
== indicates rapid turn-taking with overlap
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Index
A Applied linguistics 1–2, 4–8, Carnival 50–1, 148

Abu–Lughod, L. & Lutz, C. A. 31, 159 carnivalesque 149
65 Architectonics 24 Choices 3, 61, 130–1, 137–9, 141
Acculturation 2, 114 Authoring 10, 24, 26, 129, 133, Chomsky, N. 13
acculturate 3 135, 141–4, 147, 149, 151 Chronotope 129
Actions 7, 24–6, 30, 33, 35–6, act of 35–6, 142 Clark, K. & Holquist, M. 11,
65, 78–80, 108, 129–31, 133–5, authoring selves 129, 141 24–5, 133
137–9, 141–7, 149–51, 155–9 Authorities, cultural 128 Cognition 20, 108, 157, 159
human 30, 65 Autobiographies 29, 36, 49 Community 9, 38–9, 46–7, 77,
responsible 137, 158 90–1, 101, 140, 146, 157
Acts 7, 24–6, 33, 35, 65, 78–80, B Consciousness 9, 11, 13, 15–17,
129–31, 133–5, 137–9, 141–7, Bakhtin, M. 5–33, 35–6, 50, 19, 21–5, 27, 29, 31, 33, 59, 123,
149–51, 156–9 52, 65, 77–80, 93–6, 107–10, 132, 135, 138, 153–5
dialogic 158 122–4, 128–30, 132–8, 142–3, Conversations 37, 45, 49, 52, 58,
free 135–6 145–6, 148, 150–1, 153–9 64, 67, 77, 83, 86, 96–8, 101,
human 32, 52, 133 Bakhtinian framework 6 111–12, 121, 126, 143
performed 75, 79–80, 135 Bakhtinian perspective 6, Creativity 7, 10, 22, 129, 133, 136,
unique 24, 153 8, 138 139, 142–5, 151, 158
Addressivity 27, 95 Bakhtinian philosophy 157 creative author 27, 135
addressee 27, 95 Bakhtin’s framework 5, 10, Cultural norms 25, 113
Agency 1, 5–8, 10, 12, 17, 19, 25, 31, 96, 132–4, 137, 156–7 Cultural systems 106, 109, 136
32, 61, 128–37, 139, 141, 143, Bakhtin’s philosophy 6–7, 12, Culture 4–5, 7–8, 19, 22, 24, 29,
145, 147–51, 153–4 18, 21, 27, 31, 56, 107, 113, 52, 81, 101, 103, 105–11, 113–14,
act of 58, 138, 145 123, 128, 138, 159 116–18, 123–4, 128, 149
agency, narrative 148 Bakhtin’s work 11, 13, 18–19, acquisition of 107
agents 30, 98, 159 23–4, 28, 65, 129, 132, 134, culture-as-dialogue 110
oppositional 130 146, 151 foreign 109
personal 130 Bakhtin Circle 11–14, 16, 28, new 69, 143–4, 151
Agents 30, 36, 98, 108, 159 50, 118 second-language 108
Ahearn, L. 130 Bamberg, M. 35, 44 target 3
Alterity 78 Baxter, L. 117, 158 understanding of 106, 110,
Answerability 24–5, 79, 98, Beliefs 3, 16, 22–3, 29–30, 46, 56, 123
101, 124, 127, 129, 134–5, 142, 106–7, 121–2, 138
153, 159 Bilaniuk, L. 90 D
Anthropology 3, 11, 31, 75, Bourdieu, P. 51–2, 130 Davies, B. 10, 130–1
106–7, 159 Bruner, J. 29, 136 Davies, B. & Harre, R. 49
anthropologists 10, 106–8 Buber, M. 21 Dialects 21–2, 50, 53, 123
anthropology, cultural 26, Dialogic 6, 9, 20, 96, 101, 128,
106, 123 C 130, 138, 153, 156
Apologies 98 Cameron, D. 75–7, 93 nature 14, 20–1, 24, 26, 94, 153
apologize 98–9 Canagarajah, S. 4, 146 perspective 102, 132
principle 108, 138 socio-ideological 17 interactions 55, 98, 126

property 31–2 subordinate 58 language 53
Dialogical process 71, 73 women’s 91, 156 language situations 91
Dialogical relations 5, 15, 50, Discursive 98, 101, 145, 155–6 life 7, 24, 28, 31, 50, 59, 65,
116, 118 creations 157 111, 133
Dialogical selves 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, practices 1, 6–7, 18–20, 33, 56, Existence
19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33, 124 65, 71, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 85, human 16, 21, 23–4, 133, 154
Dialogism 6–7, 13, 20, 24–6, 87, 89, 91 language-rich 7
78–9, 107–8, 127–8, 157 Double-voicing 14, 31, 142, Experience 134
Bakhtin’s 2, 23, 26, 78, 114 146–7 everyday 28, 68, 157
model of 134–5 double-voiceness 26, 32 human 15–16, 18, 79
understanding of 122, 158 lived experiences 137, 144, 153
Dialogization 14, 32, 147 E
Dialogue 5, 20–6, 36, 44, 50, 52, Eastern Europe 37, 45–6, 101 F
56, 71–2, 78–9, 95, 109, 116–17, Eastern European 36–7, 45, Factors, socio-psychological
135, 145, 153–4, 158 101, 153 2–3, 45
Discourse analyses 6–7, 11, 17 Education 26, 29, 37, 46–7, 53, Figured worlds 33, 107–8, 110
narrative 5, 28, 31 60, 63, 66, 100, 139–42, 149 Firth, A. & Wagner, J. 2
Discourse analysts 8, 44 discourses of 138, 140, 143, For-the-other 25
Discourse markers 99, 101 155 Foreigners 52, 57–8, 60, 114–15,
you know 77, 99–101 level of 37, 53, 66 117, 127, 145–50
Discourses 4–5, 9–11, 17–24, Emerson, C. 11, 16, 23, 37, 79, Formalism 12, 16
32, 49–52, 67–8, 94–5, 100–2, 108–10, 123 Foucault, M. 17, 19, 130–1
107–8, 131–2, 135–6, 138–9, Emotions 21, 26, 35–6, 49, 51–2, Freed, A. 77, 100
142–8, 150–1, 153–6, 158 58, 64–5, 68–71, 73, 75, 81, 93,
adopted 142 106, 130, 135–6, 157 G
authorial 145–7 anger 58, 64 Gardiner, M. 11, 35, 78, 108, 132
authoritative 59, 145, 150 discomfort 67, 71–2 Gardner, R. 3
dominant 65, 72, 146 discourses of 64–6, 68, 71, Gender 1, 4–10, 17, 19–20, 35–6,
double-voiced 32 73, 156 45, 49, 51, 58, 64–5, 75–81,
economical 28 emotional-volitional tone 83–5, 87, 93–5, 101–3, 156–7
emotional 71, 81, 156 52, 65, 72, 79–81, 132, differences 64, 101
gendered 19, 90, 103, 157 134–5, 156–7 gendering 64
humanistic 130 fear 66, 68, 73, 93, 96–7 research 76, 94
ideological 59 guilt 71–2, 93, 137, 156 researchers 75, 102–3
individualistic 99 nervousness 68, 70, 73, 96 studies 8, 65
informal 63 shame 68–70, 72, 93, 137, 156 Genre 11, 16, 21–2, 24, 28, 35
institutional 17, 50 vulnerability 58, 66, 94 Gergen, K. 29
monologic 145 Epistemology 23–4 Gilligan, C. 65, 94–5, 97
narrativized 75 Essentialism 94, 131 Gogotishvili, L. 12, 25, 27
new 137, 144, 154 Ethics 5, 25, 52, 79, 94–5, 158 Gonzalez, N. 107
novelistic 22 Bakhtin’s discursive 95 Grammar 38–9, 42, 53, 82, 84–5,
parodistic 32 situated 78 87–9, 92–3, 100, 138, 144–5
persuasive 139 Ethnicity 9–10 grammatical 14–15, 17, 21, 29,
positivist 131 Evaluation 14, 26, 114 50, 54, 76, 82–4, 86–7, 97
poststructuralist 49 social 15
powerless 69 Everyday 1, 28, 32, 44, 53, 57, 65, H
professional 141, 143–4, 154 108, 113, 133, 135, 139, 143–4, Hall, J. 5
prosaic 28 150, 154 Harris, R. & Taylor, T. 16
second-language 129 acts 108, 129 Heckman, S. 94–5
social 21–3, 36, 138, 158 discourses 35 Hedges 76–7
Index 173
Heteroglossia 5, 21–2, 26, 52, 138 J Linguistic resources 53, 55,

Hicks, D. 11, 65, 138 Jespersen, O. 76 71, 73
Hirschkop, K. 11, 26, 31 Linguistic signs 12–13, 17
Holland, D. & Skinner, D. 32, 35 L Linguistics 13, 15, 21, 26, 123, 133
Holland et al. 10–11, 32, 107–8, Labov, W. 29, 76 traditional 14–15
131–2 Lakoff, R. 76 Literacy 5, 11, 36, 46, 80, 139
Holmes, J. 98–9 Language 2–3, 7–19, 21–3, 27–33, Lived worlds 32, 35, 128
Holquist, M. 11, 24–6, 132–3, 138 49–57, 61–6, 76–80, 84–5, Lotman, Y. 16, 32, 110
Humanism 20, 130–1 89–93, 102–3, 108–10, 113–28,
humanists 17, 23, 129, 131 130–3, 135–8, 144, 153–4 M
classes 120 Meaning facilitation 95, 97–8
I correct 80–1 Medvedev, P. 11–12, 15
I-for-myself 25, 114 first 5, 37, 39, 54, 62, 77 Metalinguistics 14–15, 23, 32
I-for-the-other 25 foreign 42, 109, 119, 122 awareness 84
Identity 1, 4, 6, 8–10, 16–17, 19, living 21 discourses 75, 81, 84, 86, 88,
29–32, 45, 49, 76–7, 107, 116, native 16, 45, 52–3, 57, 87, 147 91, 156
130, 143, 157 new 115, 129, 131, 133, 135, Methodologies 2
Idiolects 21, 106 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, Monologue 23, 145
Immigrants 6, 36–7, 45–6, 149, 151 Morson, G. 23, 145
51–3, 59–61, 66, 72, 77–8, 80, practices 56, 66, 70, 72, 77, Morson, G. & Emerson, C. 23,
101–2, 105, 122, 129, 137, 141–3, 102, 124, 154 28, 109
149–51 primacy of 116, 118 Motivation 3–4
former Soviet 102 research, second language 2,
realities 36, 142 20, 84, 157 N
women 4, 65–6, 101–2 second 1–7, 42–3, 53, Narratives 6–7, 10, 20, 28–9, 33,
Individuals 14, 26, 30, 49, 103, 55–7, 61–3, 65–7, 69, 71, 45, 58, 61, 68, 75, 81, 94–5, 122,
106, 109, 118, 130–1, 157 80–2, 84–5, 93, 100–1, 108, 124, 147–8, 156–7
Interactions 4–5, 23–4, 40, 115–16, 118–22, 127–8 narrative discourse 5, 30–1,
44–6, 49, 54–5, 66–7, 69, unitary 138 111, 147
72, 75–6, 82–3, 92, 94–100, women’s 76 narrative examples 6, 10, 36,
108–9, 115–18, 122–5 Language acquisition 1–3, 110 44, 64, 137
daily 67 foreign 22 narrative identity 31–2
dialogical 50 Language learners 4, 108 narrative researchers 30, 158
imagined 114 adult second 129 personal 29, 31
interact 42, 76, 109, 115–16, Language learning 4, 20, 75, 77, Narrativity 29
125, 145, 159 79–81, 83, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, Narrativized worlds 110, 150,
intermediate 156 97, 99, 101–3, 159 153, 159
social 3, 17, 39, 132 foreign 5 Narratology 29
spoken 49 Language researchers 159 Narrators 30–2
women’s 75 foreign 5 Native speakers 7, 56, 63, 66, 148
Interlanguage 89 second 6, 157 Neo-Bakhtinian 32
Interlocutors 13, 25, 44, 49, 69, Lantolf, J. 4, 31 Norton, B. 4, 77
71, 83, 101, 109, 153, 156 Laughter 148–50 Novel 5, 11, 21–2, 28, 39, 41, 103,
Interview 11, 44–5, 55, 60, 66–7, laughs 59, 66–7, 70–1, 96, 98, 105, 130, 142, 145, 154
71, 111, 116, 120, 124, 139 111, 126–7 discourse in the 50, 59
process 44 Linguistic authority 91–3
Intonation 13–14, 26, 59, 134, 144 Linguistic competencies 51 O
intonated 65 Linguistic experts 91–3, 98, 102 Orientation 21, 54, 75, 79, 82, 95,
Irony 149–50 Linguistic expressions 12–13, 98–9, 128, 138, 155
84, 108
The Other 5, 7, 9, 24, 31, 58–9, Power 4–5, 7, 17, 19–20, 44, Self 3, 5, 9–12, 17–19, 21, 24–30,
67–9, 78–82, 95, 99, 114, 121, 49–51, 58, 65, 76, 94, 98, 51–2, 78, 80, 94–5, 103, 107–11,
123–5, 127–8, 147–50, 156–7 130–1, 137, 150, 154 113–15, 121–5, 127–36, 157–9
Otherness 5, 24–5, 56–7, 60–1, Pronunciation 53, 68, 82, 89, 92, autonomous 131
66, 72, 111 121, 144 Bakhtinian 20, 24, 75
Outsidedness 20, 109, 114 Psychology 3, 31, 75, 94, 106 Bakhtin’s dialogical 69
cultural 110
P Q dialogic 24
Parody 149–50 Qualitative inquiry 4, 6, 35–7, discursive 95
Participants 6–7, 33, 35–7, 39, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47 gendered 156
41, 43–8, 51–3, 55–6, 65, 72, Qualitative researchers 30, 36, languaged 118, 124
89–90, 110–11, 123–5, 128, 45, 158 legitimate 156
135–42, 154–9 professional 141
female 46, 69, 73, 93–5, 100, R responsible 99, 101
124, 127 Reflexivity 36, 46, 110, 113, 137 responsible moral 98
legitimate 58 Relationships 3, 13, 16, 21–3, social 1
male 18, 67, 72, 84, 91, 155 25, 27–30, 49, 63, 76–8, 94, unrepeatable 80
Participatory thinking 6–7, 33, 112–13, 116, 123–4, 126–8, Self-autonomy 131
35–7, 41, 43–8, 51–3, 55–6, 132–3, 136–8 Self-consciousness 44, 158
65, 72, 79–80, 89–90, 110–11, dialogic 13, 22–4, 32, 97, Self-in-language 20, 129
123–5, 128, 135–42, 154–9 118–19, 125, 136, 140, 157 Self-in-relation 20, 118
Pavlenko, A. 4, 31, 77 complex 135 Self-Other relations 158
Pennycook, A. 4 genuine 153 Selfhood 10, 69, 113, 129, 155
Philosophy 11–12, 20, 24–8, 35, multiple 28 Sociolects 21–2
65, 78, 112, 133–5, 158–9 discursive 136 Sociology 3, 18, 54, 75, 159
of language 5, 7, 13, 15, 21, language-gender 76, 78 Speech 13, 16, 25–6, 28, 69, 77,
27–8, 133, 138 Resistance 4, 19, 58, 130, 135, 89–90, 142
moral 78 145–9, 154 second-language 84
Positioning 18, 20, 39, 49, 61, 64, act of 150 Stories 10, 28–31, 37, 40, 58, 72,
66, 118, 156 Responsibility 20, 24, 38, 63, 69, 97, 105, 111, 130, 140, 153–4, 157
Positions 3, 7, 14, 17–18, 24–6, 75, 78–80, 93–7, 99, 102, 124, small 44
29, 31–2, 44, 49, 61–4, 79, 128, 134, 136, 151, 157 Structuralism 13, 15, 17, 20, 146
93–4, 130–2, 135–8, 149–50, dialogic 94, 97, 124, 156 Structures 6–7, 13, 18, 22, 50,
155–6 discursive 96, 101, 156 81–3, 102, 118
authorial 148 women’s 100 grammatical 83
axiological 24, 27 Riggins, S. 56 narrative 30–1
conceptual 32 Rosaldo, M. 107 verbal 26–7
discursive 23, 148 Subjectivity 3, 5–8, 17, 19, 24–5,
emotional 70 S 36–7, 49–50, 56, 103, 105,
new 18, 54, 137, 143 Samohvalova, V. 25, 153 107–10, 113, 129, 131–2, 138,
semantic 18, 32, 155 Sarbin, T. 30 153–7
social 3, 7, 27, 39, 61, 63, 91, Schumann 2–3 gendered 6
131, 139, 148, 157 Second language acquisition Subjects 3, 7, 12, 17–20, 23–4,
speaker 49 1–3, 5, 7, 31, 73, 77, 122, 157, 159 36, 50, 56, 61, 69, 78–80, 114,
unique 24, 79 Second language acquisition 130–2, 134–6, 155, 158
unrepeatable 25, 158 studies 4, 101 languaged 135
Poststructuralism 2, 17–19, 22, Second language learning positions 17–18, 25, 32,
28, 130–2, 146 2–5, 45, 77, 84, 89, 91 49–50, 153
Poststructuralists 4–5, 11, 17–19, Second language milieu 101 speaking 10, 15, 23, 56, 59,
23, 49–50, 65, 131–2 Second language studies 2, 4, 128–9, 135–6, 138, 145
feminist 17–18, 65 6, 146
Index 175
T Utterances 5, 13–15, 20, 23, 26–7, Voloshinov, V. 9, 11–16, 118

Tannen, D. 76 31–2, 35, 50–1, 54, 72, 135–6, 158 Vygotsky, L. 4–5, 11, 16
Taylor, C. 69, 131 concrete 15, 27
Todorov, T. 11, 154 live 14, 94 W
Toohey, K. 4–5 single 26 Weedon, C. 18, 49
Transformation 33, 57, 133, Weigand, E. 21, 108
135–7, 148, 154, 158 V Wolcott, H. 106–7
Values 5, 10, 12, 19, 21–2, 30–1, Woman 7, 41, 58, 60, 64–6,
U 33, 35–6, 46, 51, 53, 94, 113–14, 68–70, 73, 75–7, 81, 84, 90–1,
Understanding 2, 6–7, 9, 14–15, 116–18, 136–8, 141 93–102, 117, 120, 139, 155–7
18, 22, 30, 37, 46, 49–50, 54–5, cultural 128 Worldviews 18, 21, 32, 50, 150,
71–2, 94–6, 108–10, 118–19, Vocabulary 39, 69, 144, 155 154
128–9 Voices 3–6, 15, 17–18, 28, 30–1,
active 137 35–6, 52, 55–6, 58–62, 94–5,
cultural 110 116, 122, 137, 143–4, 146–8,
responsive 129, 136–9, 151 153–6
shared 44 authoritarian 145
Uniqueness 12, 26, 35, 52, 54, 79, loss of 54, 69, 71
103, 109, 132–4 voice-consciousness 153
voiceless 20
In the series Dialogue Studies the following titles have been published thus far or are scheduled
for publication:
8 VITANOVA, Gergana: Authoring the Dialogic Self. Gender, agency and language practices. 2010.
vi, 175 pp.
7 KOIKE, Dale April and Lidia RODRÍGUEZ-ALFANO (eds.): Dialogue in Spanish. Studies in functions
and contexts. 2010. xiii, 324 pp.
6 COOREN, François: Action and Agency in Dialogue. Passion, incarnation and ventriloquism. With a
foreword by Bruno Latour. 2010. xvi, 206 pp.
5 WEIGAND, Edda: Language as Dialogue. From rules to principles of probability. Edited by Sebastian Feller.
2009. viii, 410 pp.
4 BARALDI, Claudio (ed.): Dialogue in Intercultural Communities. From an educational point of view.
2009. viii, 277 pp.
3 WEIZMAN, Elda: Positioning in Media Dialogue. Negotiating roles in the news interview. 2008.
xiv, 208 pp.
2 WEIGAND, Edda (ed.): Dialogue and Rhetoric. 2008. xiv, 316 pp.
1 GREIN, Marion and Edda WEIGAND (eds.): Dialogue and Culture. 2007. xii, 262 pp.

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Authoring the Dialogic Self

Dialogue Studies (DS)

Editorial Advisory Board

John Benjamins Publishing Company

American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

© 2010 – John Benjamins B.V.

4.5 “Because I feel a responsibility”: Discourses of responsibility, 

Legend of transcription symbols in narrative excerpts 160

as a major causal factor in second language acquisition. In it, a learner could be

Toohey (2003), in a detailed, longitudinal ethnographic study of kindergarten

a­ ccordance with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, it also reaches to other influences

About the structure of this book

Language, consciousness, and dialogical selves

Language lives only in the dialogic interaction

1.1 Overview of Bakhtin’s framework

acquisition have implied? Bakhtin’s work has fascinated researchers in various

Yet, the introductory section of a Russian collection of essays dedicated to

with the very specific circumstances of its utterance, is essential in understand-

(Voloshinov, 1973, p. 12). At a time when rationalism prevailed in social sciences

In comparing four great Russian thinkers – Bakhtin, Lotman, Vygotsky, and

is unique and carries certain fixed traits, feminist poststructuralists propose a

Scott (1999) puts it succinctly, “Experience is a subject’s history. Language is the

Bakhtin perceives structuralism to be problematic because it is interested only

1.2 A dialogic approach to language and the self

Bakhtin introduces a concept of language not as a stable system, but as a dynamic,

this vision of language, not unlike in poststructuralism, meaning is never fixed as

The metalinguistics Bakhtin proposes differs from other conceptualizations

in the process of communicating with others, and a change of positions occurs.

1.3 Why narratives? Why Bakhtin?

double-voiced discourse (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 185), it should be the central object of

Introducing the participants

2.1 The participants

factor in their discourse and in developing second-language subjectivity. In other

2.1.1 Vera and Aleksei*

2.1.2 Sylvia and Boris

2.1.3 Natalia and Dmitri

2.1.4 Lydia and Peter

2.2 Collection of narrative examples

Defining narrative has become increasingly difficult in a postmodern world of dis-

To all four couples, I was an understanding and sympathetic listener with

of decorations. The furniture in their apartment was second-hand and worn-out;

Positionings in the second language

The notion of positions is well established in poststructuralist discourses of iden-

The carnival is a linguistic market-place, the site of linguistic exchange, where

Interestingly, Zavala’s reference to language as a market for social relations closely

3.1 “I am like in the kindergarten”: In the discourse of silence

3.2 “Sometimes people don’t like immigrants”:

The term “Other” has become increasingly popular in postmodern sociological

Vera: (translation) Do you understand? Because this means that we will

Natalia: Sometimes / you know / I was shocked. When [laughs nervously]

3.3 “He cannot do anything because he has no language”:

As we saw, language is a key constituent in the practices of otherness described

3.4 “I was afraid”: Gender and the discourse of emotion

Scholars of gender have found the notion of emotion problematic in psychologi-

It is exactly the emotional-volitional tone that orients us and confirms meanings

In this case, similar to Kostya, Dmitri took up the discourse of a professional –

i­ nterpretations of their positionings in discourse and show the women’s greater

Gergana: You felt ashamed?

Sylvia: He hasn’t any / complexes. It seems to me / I / kak skazat’ / neudobstvo

Although I have focused on selections from Boris and Sylvia’s discussions on

understand most of his co-workers. His description of his lack of understanding

Gender, language learning,

4.5 “Because I feel a responsibility”: Discourses of responsibility,

Legend of transcription symbols in narrative excerpts 160

a ccordance with Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism, it also reaches to other influences

Language lives only in the dialogic interaction

3.2 “Sometimes people don’t like immigrants”:

Vera: (translation) Do you understand? Because this means that we will

Natalia: Sometimes / you know / I was shocked. When [laughs nervously]

3.3 “He cannot do anything because he has no language”:

i nterpretations of their positionings in discourse and show the women’s greater

Sylvia: He hasn’t any / complexes. It seems to me / I / kak skazat’ / neudobstvo

All of theoretical reason in its entirety is only a moment

of language. Bakhtin claims that “An emotional-volitional tone is an inalienable

4.5 “Because I feel a responsibility”: Discourses of responsibility,

is always present. In the field of second language studies, Canagarajah (1999)