c Cambridge University Press 2011

Lang. Teach. (2011), 44.4, 551561 

doi:10.1017/S0261444811000279

Comparative Book Review

Identity and language learning: Multiple critical perspectives
Kimberly Meredith University of British Columbia, Canada
kjmeredith@mac.com
ADRIAN BLACKLEDGE & ANGELA CREESE, Multilingualism: A critical perspective. New York:
Continuum (2010). Pp. ix + 255. ISBN 978-0-8264-9209-8 (paperback).
CLAIRE KRAMSCH, The multilingual subject: What foreign language learners say about their experience and
why it matters. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2009). Pp. xii + 231. ISBN 978-0-19-442478-3
(paperback).
PIPPA STEIN, Multimodal pedagogies in diverse classrooms: Representations, rights and resources. Pp. xii
+170. ISBN: 978-0-415-40165-4 (hardback).
HILARY JANKS. Literacy and power, New York: Routledge (2010). Pp. xxi + 245. ISBN: 978-0415-99963-2 (paperback).

1. Introduction
In the decade since the publication of Bonny Nortons (2000) often-cited work Identity and
Language Learning, globalization and technological development have continued to alter the
meaning-making resources available to language learners, and new power relations, language
practices and identity possibilities continue to emerge. As adolescents and young adults
are developing identities in a world where monolingualism and printed text alone do not
dominate the semiotic landscape, many researchers and educators are shifting their focus onto
the new realities in all their complexity and their critical implications for the language learning
classroom. This comparative review looks at four recent publications on language and identity
that turn a critical pedagogical eye on the relationship between power, identity and language
learning and use in its multiple forms: multilingualism, multiliteracies and multimodality. All
take a social practice approach and examine how identities are constructed and negotiated by
young people through multimodal and/or multilingual practice. In the tradition of Nortons
work connecting identity to second language acquisition (SLA), these authors understand
learner identities to be multiple and non-unitary, the sites of struggle, and changing over time.
Similarly, power is understood to be socially constructed and negotiated through the way
that both material and symbolic resources are distributed and validated in a society. Whereas
Norton developed these concepts in response to her work with adult immigrant English
language learners in Canada, the recent texts reviewed here show how these ideas of language,
identity and power have been further developed in other language learning contexts. They
focus on heritage language learners in the UK, foreign language learners in America, English

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language learners in South Africa, and critical literacy learners in South Africa and America.
Significant points of contrast include the theoretical treatment of the key concepts of identity
and ideology, the role of multimodality in identity negotiation, methodological issues around
reflexivity and researcher identity, and practical recommendations for how teachers should
respond to the multiple worlds of identification now open to our students.
In Multilingualism: A critical perspective, Adrian Blackledge & Angela Creese report on findings
from eight complementary (or heritage language) schools focusing on four languages in four
cities across the UK. This scope was made possible through a multilingual research team that
collected data from the eight sites simultaneously. The aim of their study is to investigate
the linguistic practices and performances of multilingual and multicultural identities in
these complementary language schools and to show that the multilingualism found at the
micro level of their ethnographic examination contrasts with the monolingualism reflected in
mainstream educational policy. Blackledge & Creese argue for a flexible bilingualism that
accounts for and encourages the way multilingual students and teachers draw on their full
range of linguistic resources in the language learning process. Although students and teachers
use dominant linguistic discourse connecting language, nation and identity in simplified ways
to argue for a separation of languages (such as allowing only Mandarin to be spoken in the
classroom), the authors provide ample evidence that teachers and students across all the sites
in fact engage in identity negotiations that use all the linguistic resources available to negotiate
hybrid identities.
Blackledge & Creeses volume, intended for advanced students and researchers in
sociolinguistics and multilingualism, is remarkable both in breadth and depth. The first third
of the text contributes to our understanding of multilingualism and research methodology.
This includes conceptualizing multilingualism as the appropriation and incorporation
for meaning-making of any and all linguistic resources which come to hand (p. 17)
and introducing the ethnography of multilingualism and a reflexive approach to team
ethnography. The next third of the text is devoted to the findings of their research, presenting
evidence of linguistic practices in both the formal and informal discourse in language learning
classrooms and showing how these relate to notions of heritage and nationalism. Finally,
the authors turn to the pedagogic possibilities and future understandings of a flexible bilingual
approach.
Claire Kramschs (2009) eloquent text, The multilingual subject: What foreign language learners
say about their experience and why it matters, examines how identity and language learning function
for a different group of multilingual learners: foreign language learners. Kramsch writes for
foreign/second language teachers and researchers as well as college students interested in
conceptualizing their experience of learning and using a foreign language (p. 22). She argues
that the realm of foreign language instruction is still dominated by psycholinguistic and
sociocultural SLA research that views language use as the successful exchange of information
and fulfillment of communicative tasks while ignoring the development of new identities
and subjectivities that may have profound effects on the language learners lives. Just as
Norton (2000) problematized notions of the good language learner in an immigrant ESL
context, Kramschs work questions the image of foreign language learners as monolingual,
privileged and secure in their identities and cultural capital. She also works against the
common assumption that foreign language learning has little effect on identity. Kramsch

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553

breaks new ground by explicitly linking affect, emotions and identity to language learners
experiences of symbolic form (p. 50). Central to her work is an understanding that symbols
both conventionally represent and subjectively construct their users realities.
The first half of this volume is devoted to the testimonies of adolescent and adult foreign
language learners (what foreign language learners say) and what these can tell us about the
signifying practice (why it matters). Here she casts the theoretical net wide, drawing not only
from sociolinguistics but also semiotic theory, cognitive linguistics and the humanities. The
second half of the text explores the implications of symbolic competence for foreign language
learners through several case studies analyzing how professional writers and undergraduates
narrate their multilingual experiences in writing and in computer-mediated environments,
and exploring the implications of symbolic competence for foreign language pedagogy.
Methodologically, the book embraces the subjective accounts and experiences of language
learners themselves. Whereas Blackledge & Creese rely primarily on researcher interpretation
of observed linguistic practice, Kramsch embraces language learners own subjective accounts
of their lived experience of language learning.
Multimodal pedagogies in diverse classrooms: Representations, rights, and resources is Pippa Steins
examination of how multimodality can be used to promote social justice and democracy in
diverse classrooms and how to use difference as a productive energy for learning. Published
just before her untimely death in 2008, this text stands as a testament to Steins work for
social justice in post-apartheid South Africa. While it relates clearly to the South African
context, it is intended to be relevant for students, educators and researchers of language and
literacy in all contexts of diversity. Stein draws on a social semiotic frame and shifts the focus
from language to mode, viewing people as active designers and interpreters of meanings
that in turn shape cultures and identities. Many of the arguments put forth by Kramsch,
Blackledge & Creese on multilingualism are expanded here to embrace the wider semiotic
lens of multimodality.
In the introduction, Stein tells the stories of three research projects that led her to her
current questions and conceptualizations of literacy and pedagogy, shifting away from an
English as a target language pedagogy to a focus on embracing the semiotic value of
her students multilingual and multimodal resources. She draws on New Literacy Studies,
multimodal social semiotics and Southern African studies to conceptualize and support the
analysis of childrens multimodal texts with an ethnographic approach to understanding how
these texts can be understood in their contexts and histories. The core of the book is formed by
the three central chapters devoted to the presentation and analysis of childrens multimodal
texts. Among the books many contributions to the field are Steins own frameworks and
processes for multimodal analysis: these arose from the need, in the field, to capture the full
semiotic value of the texts the children produced. She combines a Halliday-inspired linguistic
analysis with a Kress-inspired visual semiotic analysis and develops her own gesture-based
analysis system as well. She explicitly aims to validate the practices and identities that had
been marginalized and undervalued by the apartheid system and concludes with a return to
her call for language and literacy classrooms to be validated as sites for building democracy.
Hilary Janks Literacy and power is part of a series for educators in the field of language,
literacy and culture. However, it was selected for this review because of its wide-ranging value
to the research community. It is a practical text that will be of particular interest to those

554 COMPARATIVE BOOK REVIEW

looking to link theory and practice from either side of the researcher-practitioner divide. The
book aims to give a coherent and integrated account of the authors work in the field of
critical literacy since the 1990s. With the exception of some repeated quotations that expose
the fact that each chapter was once a separate journal article, this goal of coherency is entirely
successful, and some of the frameworks and tools for analysis set out in the text are likely to
become salient tools in the field for talking about critical literacy. After examining definitions
of literacy, Janks moves into the presentation and elucidation of her interdependent model of
critical literacy. This model suggests a common vocabulary so that researchers and educators
can put into words the dilemmas faced when taking a critical view of literacy and language
education. The issues raised and named by Janks appear throughout the other three texts
reviewed but with different wording in each; Janks offers the possibility of a common lexicon
that may inspire more productive discussions across research methodologies and contexts.
The final chapter is also of particular interest to the identity researcher as it opens up the
field of critical literacy to the non-rational unconscious to embrace desire, identification,
and pleasure (p. xv). Janks text can be understood as the practical application of the theories
explored in the other texts: how to inform and inspire practicing teachers to implement an
integrated understanding of power, language and identity.
Janks introduces foundational concepts from Foucault, Freire and other critical scholars
in a way that is accessible to readers new to the field, but also insightfully concise for
any reader who includes critical literacy in their pedagogic or research agenda. Then, in
the subsequent chapters, she presents her interdependence model linking the concepts of
diversity, access, dominance and design: four key concepts that she presents in a table showing
their interrelations. Of these four, diversity is of special interest in this review as it explicitly
links diverse discourse to diverse social identities. Janks key contribution to the study of
language and identity, then, is demonstrating clearly and concisely the ways that access,
dominance and design are necessarily integral to the study of language and identity. Again,
while her explicit target audience may be practicing teachers, the interdependence model in
fact provides a much-needed common vocabulary for all those who participate in discourse
on critical literacy. For example, when discussing the concept of access, Janks builds on ideas
from Lodge (1997) and offers the idea of the access paradox: how do teachers value and
promote diverse languages and literacies while also providing access to dominant forms?
This gives a name to a common dilemma in the critical language and literacy field. Janks
reports on projects she has been involved with that work to recognize and validate diverse
students identities and knowledges and subjects them to the interdependent model of critical
literacy to show the strengths and gaps in their design. She provides useful tables throughout,
including summaries of key linguistic features for the analysis of texts (pp. 7477) and key
visual features for the analysis of images (pp. 8287). All of these charts and tables were
initially intended to guide pedagogical practices, but ultimately they will be of interest to any
researcher interested in critical multimodal discourse analysis.

2. Evaluation
This review aims to critique these texts through their own social practice framework,
commenting on coherency, insights, and limitations around three key questions in the study

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555

of language and identity: How do the authors link the concepts of language and identity
both theoretically and methodologically? What sense do they make of meaning-making and
identity beyond the printed or spoken word? And what sense do they make of their own
identities in the research process?

2.1 Linguistic identity: contradictions in identity research

Blackledge & Creese identify and deal productively with a common dilemma in language
and identity research. While they recognize that language is a social construct and
that linguistic resources need not be understood as bounded, discrete languages, their
ethnographic approach reveals that for many people, language and identity are inexorably
linked and languages are salient dimensions of their selves. There is a tension between
the conceptualizations of language and identity held by the researchers and those held
by the participants. However, the authors reconcile this tension through an understanding
that language ideology (beliefs, values and attitudes) is both shaped by, as well as shaping of
language practice (access and use) (p. 17). For this reason Blackledge & Creese are particularly
interested in the language ideologies espoused by their participants as demonstrated
both explicitly in interviews and implicitly in language practice at home and at their
complementary schools. In addition, the authors take a critical and nuanced view that
recognizes not only how heritage language students may embrace their heritage multilingual
talents as valued components of their identities, but also how they may resist the imposition
of a language and heritage with which they do not claim to identify. Just like the identities
associated with learning a dominant language, the identities associated with learning heritage
languages are variously imposed, negotiated, resisted and transformed. Where there are
contradictions between language ideologies and language practice between what people
say and what people do Blackledge & Creese take a productive approach and look at
the interrelationship between the two data sources. While this approach is insightful, the
comparison of data draws attention to the fact that its treatment often differs, depending
on its source. Whereas utterances transcribed from recorded observations are language
practice and are understood to be socially constructed negotiation of the various subject
positions available, utterances transcribed from interviews are presented as reflections of the
participants language ideology. Identity negotiations and language practices observed in
interviews are not as thoroughly examined as those that occur outside the formal interview
setting. In addition, whereas the data from classroom observation is given in the form of
detailed transcription that allows the reader to examine the interactional construction of
the utterances and the shifts between languages (including those of teachers, students and
researchers), data from interviews is more often offered in decontextualized quotes that
remove them from their interactional context, including the researchers/interviewers voice.
Applying a social practice lens (Talmy 2010) to the interview data may provide further insights
consistent with their theoretical approach.
In contrast, by providing at least partial transcripts of the interaction between researcher
and participant, Kramsch is able to extend the theoretical framework she applies to classroom
observation and narrative accounts to the interview data. As is clear in her subtitle, Kramsch
focuses on what foreign language learners say about their experiences and then provides an

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innovative theoretical framework drawing on literary theory and philosophy to show why
it matters. In Kramschs words, how do we gain access to subjective aspects of language
acquisition that, by definition, elude objective observation? (p. 5). Her answer is to explore
published language memoirs in which subjective truths are accessed through alternative
modes of inquiry that embrace the metaphoric and literary nature of spoken and written data
from language learners themselves (such as learners journals, discourse completion surveys,
oral interviews and essays on what it means to be multilingual). The data is analyzed like
sociolinguistic data, taking into account the co-construction of self between writer and reader
or interviewer and interviewee. Kramsch in effect argues that language learners essentialized
stereotypes of the subjective qualities of the target language and target language speakers
while not representing any objective Truth have significant emotional functions for the
learners as they make sense of their identities in the new symbolic system. In keeping with
this social practice approach, Kramsch further suggests that the process of identification,
or the various ways that people attach themselves to the world, may be of more relevance in
todays society than identity (p. 94). This subtle insight helps us make sense of the essentialists
notions of identity that our participants themselves may variously draw upon.
For Janks, adopting a dynamic view of identity allows educators and researchers to both
acknowledge our students and participants identity investments while also avoiding the
risk of essentialization. Janks draws on Thompsons (1990) theory of ideology to show the
relationship between language, power and domination and how conflicts within the field of signification are realized in texts. These five modes of operation of ideology, including unification
and fragmentation, are provided in yet another useful chart in the text (p. 40), which outlines
for students, teachers and researchers alike the tools needed to effectively deconstruct how
power and identity are functioning in observable discourse. Her examples draw upon public
discourse, including advertisements, as well as several of her recent classroom-based research
projects. The five modes of operation of ideology, the key linguistic features of text analysis, the
key visual features of image analysis, and the interdependent model of critical literacy outlined
in the earlier chapters of the book all combine to allow Janks to analyze the data with insight.
Because her primary audience is practicing teachers, her two units of analysis are those that
matter most for pedagogy: the texts and the projects themselves. As a result, interview and
observation data are rarely included in this particular instantiation of Janks work; instead, the
links between language and identity are made through the texts as instantiations of discourse.
Just as Blackledge & Creese take a critical view of heritage, Stein deconstructs the notion
of tradition as a social construct not necessarily in opposition to modernity and not
necessarily related to the actual history of a practice. Like heritage, tradition is constructed
in relation to political and national identities. So-called traditional forms of art, such as
oral story-telling, are not simply passed down authoritatively; Steins analysis of childrens
lived performances of traditional styles convincingly demonstrates the creativity and identity
construction inherent in each telling. She links textual analysis to identity through the concept
of points of fixing, each text being part of a continuous process of meaning-making whereby
individuals and cultural groupings use what is available to them to express their interests
(p. 39). This allows for a very productive approach and validates a deep analysis of the texts
produced by the child participants. In Steins text, her emphasis on the importance of the
identity work apparent in the multimodal texts means that there is less emphasis on the

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557

identity work that may have been demonstrated in either the interviews or focus groups
mentioned in her methodology.

2.2 Embodied identity: multimodality in identity research

Blackledge & Creese occasionally mention multimodality, especially in quotes from other
theorists, but rarely expound on the topic or draw upon multimodal forms of data collection
or meaning-making because their focus is on the linguistic repertoires of their participants.
Exceptions are made when physicality is strongly indicated in the data, such as when
students are learning heritage dances or performing folk tales. Here, the authors draw
on multiliteracies to examine the range of identities performed in a given literacy event, such
as the performance of a folk tale. Again, because the purpose of the book is to examine
the language practices of these multilingual young people, the analysis of other modes
is necessarily less developed. However, where other modalities are mentioned, there are
windows into further insights that may be available beyond the linguistic mode. For example,
when the Turkish boys resist and negotiate their subject positions and participation during
a Turkish dance class, it seems that this is done through physical action as much as or
more than spoken words. The transcription simplifies these actions as [dancing], while
the field notes hint at genre by indicating the boys rap dance, make odd faces and produce
funny noises (p. 138). What a more thorough multimodal analysis could have revealed is the
movement vocabulary these boys are drawing upon in their identity negotiations.
Just as Blackledge & Creeses attention to language practices tends to draw the focus to
the spoken word, Janks attention to literacy tends to focus her analysis on printed texts.
As previously mentioned, one of the gifts of this book is its detailed and useful summary
approaches to visual and linguistic text analysis. When applied to the data presented, these
frameworks allow for deep insights into the meaning-making practices of print-text producers.
Near the end of Language and power, Janks presents a pedagogic intervention from one of her
research projects that focused on the embodied performances of students demonstrating their
knowledge of fun and games. Whereas the visual and linguistic analysis in the text cohere
well with the presented lists of key features for analysis, the embodied mode stands out as
being in need of more elaboration. Janks uses the power of description to acknowledge what
may be considered the key features of the visual text, and this may provide a foundation for
a framework of the key features of embodied text analysis.
Kramsch acknowledges that subjectivation is always mediated through symbolic systems
and includes verbal, musical, or visual (p. 16). In her chapter on the virtual self, she includes
typographic non-linguistic elements (such as emoticons) in her transcription. Finally, she
identifies multimodality as a goal of teaching the multilingual subject in order to engage
students in semiotic transpositions. She works against the SLA tradition that has separated
learners minds, bodies, and social behaviors into separate domains of inquiry (p. 2) and is
interested in investigating the affective resonances that multiple languages have for speakers
and listeners, and the subjective responses they draw from them, by examining the embodied
self. For example, she notes the physicality that many learners bring to the metaphors they
use to express their subjective experiences of learning and speaking a new language. Kramsch

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draws on neuroscientific and somatic theory that posits the self as the relation of body to
mind (p. 66) and ecological theories of self that relate the self to various ways of knowing.
Kramsch adds to this somatic and ecological view of the self the idea of the narratorial self
that is crucial to understanding how learners narrate their experiences as the voice of poetic
verisimilitude, myth, and aesthetic practice (p. 74). It is this theorizing of the self that allows
the researcher to read the significance, or the why it matters, in the words of language
learners narrated experiences.
Stein also focuses on the body, arguing that multimodality is inseparable from bodies
because the semiotic modes are related to the sensory possibilities of the body; just as
the body makes sense of its reality in a multisensory way, meaning is made multimodally
(p. 151). The brain is able to translate across senses just as designers are able to translate across
modes. Bodies are repositories of knowledge, but this knowledge is not always knowable in
and through language (p. 151). For Stein, multimodal pedagogies play with representations,
rights and resources in critical ways, as she views language and literacy classrooms as sites
of transformation. She questions the dominant and valued representational resources of
a traditional classroom. Echoing Janks access paradox, Stein emphatically maintains that
valuing diversity is not about denying access to dominant discourses of power, but rather
is about valuing and building on students complete array of representational resources.
Steins research is seen as positioning children as active transformers of culture as they assert
their identities and demonstrate their rights to be acknowledged as resourceful makers of
meaning across different languages and in different modes (p. 42). Whereas multimodal
research frequently involves examining digital texts, Steins work is a refreshing reminder
that all texts are multimodal and that a multimodal perspective is necessary and revealing
for understanding not only digital movie making but also the process through which a child
constructs a doll from a recycled pop bottle. Her work provides much-needed approaches to
analyzing multimodal texts that go beyond linguistic and visual analysis.

2.3 Researcher identity: reflexivity in identity research

Because research on language and identity centers on the social constructedness of texts, a
reflexive examination of researcher identity is both relevant and potentially insightful about
the social constructedness of identity research texts. Blackledge & Creese, in particular, use
reflexivity productively. They provide a chapter on the reflexive approach to team research,
including an examination of the ways they were able to negotiate their identities as researchers
within the team and engaging explicitly with how they understand themselves as researchers
and how they understand their relationships to the people with whom they worked. Their
own language ideologies, linguistic resources, and researcher identities are acknowledged as
significant at various stages of the research process, from initial site access to ongoing data
interpretation. This demystification of the research process is rare and, as the authors argue,
makes a unique contribution to multilingualism research methods.
Stein also takes the notion of reflexivity seriously, viewing her own study as a social sign
that in turn reflects her own history and interests. She contextualizes and reflects upon her
privileged position as a white middle-class female researcher amongst mostly black students

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and teachers in the post-apartheid world. Stein acknowledges that, as an English speaker,
she was also positioned as a linguistic outsider and this affected the linguistic practices
of the participants, as multilingual translation became the norm. Stein calls into question
the research practice of making others vulnerable through their revelations while keeping
the researcher invulnerable and revealing nothing of themselves, especially with regards
to video data. Although this suggests researchers should consider recording themselves on
film along with their participants, Stein does not make this move and instead leaves it as
an unspoken, unrealized possibility for future video ethnographers to consider. In terms of
reflexive methodology, Stein acknowledges the ethical and practical limitations of reporting
on multimodal work. She deals with these dilemmas by making abundant use of still images
captured from what were once rich, live multimodal performances and adding her own
eloquent annotations, to attempt to regain in language what was lost in movement. While
these attempts can only ever be partial, Steins process represents a methodological advance
for future research.
Like Stein, Janks acknowledges how her own history and identity investments, particularly
as a white woman in South Africa and her shame in the face of racialised injustices of
apartheid (p. 206) have led to her involvement in critical literacy projects. This self-reflexivity
lends strength to her call for teachers to respond to their students identity investments and
use subjectivity their own and that of their students as a productive resource for critical
literacy. Furthermore, in a book on critical literacy, Janks frequently turns a critical eye on her
own work, including questioning how the nominalization of ACCESS, DOMINATION, DIVERSITY
and DESIGN obscures the actors and actions involved. This self-reflexive criticality is refreshing
and strengthens the validity of the overall work.
In her acknowledgement section, Kramsch briefly acknowledges that the impetus for the
book came from her own biography as well as the experiences of her sons, who have each
lived the multilingual experience to the full (p. viii). This is not expanded upon, and in a
text that focuses on the value of linguistic autobiography, her own linguistic autobiography is
notably absent. Her experiences emigrating to America and teaching German as a foreign
language would be enriching in this context. Her concern that the difficulty of writing
objectively about an experience that I had lived through myself as a foreign language learner
and the fear of being misunderstood (p. vii) would have benefitted from elaboration, as it
seems counter-intuitive to demand objectivity of herself in a text that embraces and values
subjectivity in research. This silencing of the subjectivity that lies just below the surface of
her impassioned words suggests that there is still more that can be done to fully embrace
subjectivity in language and literacy work; perhaps as future researchers read and are inspired
by her profound work, they will expand their understanding of what can be said in the research
field and will add their own subjective voice to their future works on language and identity.
In addition, though her work piques the readers interest in the affective experience of our
subjective relationship to given languages, Kramschs identity as a German speaker is not
fully explored. While Kramsch notes that her own linguistic resources and her belief in the
significance of subtle word choice lead her to select texts in the European languages she
is most familiar with, what is not acknowledged here is how her own affective responses
to these multilingual pieces are implicated in her selection, interpretation and analysis: her
theoretical frame declares that it matters. Like many researchers who seem to struggle with

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the contingency of interpretive analysis, Kramsch seems to be placing an objective frame

over a delicate subjective process. While she draws analytic attention to the use of the I,
even finding three selves indexed by three utterances of the pronoun in the space of a short
paragraph of narration (p. 98), she does not draw reflexive attention to her own use of the
first person pronoun throughout the text. In general, the pronoun is used frequently in the
introduction and reappears at the beginning of each subsequent chapter as the authorial self
describes her intentions for each chapter. It is notably absent in the analysis portions of the
text, where it is replaced by the first person plural we, such as we can say (p. 111) and
we can clearly see (p. 121), in ways that follow conventions in the field but may not be
in complete congruence with the overall theoretical framework proposed. Finally, although
she acknowledges that the linguistic biography work that was completed as an assignment
could have been written for the instructor even though several authors insisted they had
written them primarily for themselves, with no particular addressee (p. 128), as a reader I
was curious about how language choice may have been affected by the linguistic repertoires
of Kramsch as instructor.
In following this tradition, it is important that I consider how my own identity affects
this review. As a monolingual speaker of English for the formative years of my life who over
time gained access to Japanese and French linguistic resources that I rarely use in practice,
I am one of those who benefit from the high symbolic capital of standard English in many
global discourses. I further benefit from having much of the publishing world dominated by
English monolingual texts: as I publish in my fluent native language, its symbolic capital can
be understood to strengthen both my right to speak and my power to impose reception. At
the same time, it limits my choice of comprehensible texts. In fact, though they are about
multilingualism and multimodality, and strive to change the current hegemony of English
print literacy, all of the texts selected for this review are in fact monolingual English print
texts. This is partly due to the dominance of English in the field; but it is also due to my own
linguistic limitations: one of the texts considered for this review was eventually set aside partly
because half of it was written in a language I do not know. At the same time, working with
multilingual and multimodally-competent young people has led me to devote a great deal of
attention to the field of critical multilingualism and further shapes the selection of the texts
reviewed here and my understanding of their significance. Readers of this review will need
to decide if they accept such admissions of subjectivity as an affordance or a limitation.

3. Concluding remarks
Each of these texts makes a significant contribution to our understanding of language and
identity. While they deal with dilemmas of and inquiries into the complex relationship between
what we say and who we are with varying degrees of multimodality and reflexivity, they are all
at the critical edge of research in the field. Blackledge & Creeses work is both impressive and
inspiring in the scope and depth of the study presented and the clarity of the theoretical frame.
It calls on teachers to make space in their classrooms for as many languages as possible and
to offer their students multiple identity positions. Kramschs work creates resonance through
the impassioned eloquence of its narration: it embraces subjectivity not only as an object of

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561

study, but also as a style of presentation. In both style and content, therefore, her volume
calls upon educators to embrace the power of the subjective elements of language learning to
help language learners identify deeply and symbolically with new language practices. Steins
work is concise and direct, drawing an easily-followed line from theoretical frame, through
analysis, to pedagogical implications. The book outlines the advances in identity expression
that can be achieved by taking an approach to meaning-making broader than the written
word, and implores teachers to validate all modalities in order to make their multilingual
classrooms truly democratic learning communities. Jankss text, with its focus on the practical,
is motivating and accessible. The volume is a critical call to educators to analyze and design
curricula that promote access, diversity, power and design. In the spaces not only within
but between these texts lies inspiration for a generation of researchers and educators who
continue to probe the ways we simultaneously make meaning of our selves, our worlds, and
our words.

References
Lodge, H. (1997). Providing access to academic literacy in the Art Foundation Programme at the University of the
Witwatersrand in 1996: The theory behind the practice. Unpublished Masters dissertation, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. London: Longman.
Talmy, S. (2010). Qualitative interviews in applied linguistics: From research instrument to social
practice. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 30, 128148.
Thompson, J. B. (1990). Ideology and modern culture. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
KIM MEREDITH is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the
University of British Columbia. Her research investigates the multimodal and multilingual meaningmaking processes and identity construction of young multilingual dancers.

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