Narrative Approaches to Second

Language Acquisition
ANNE POMERANTZ

Theoretical Premises

Narrative approaches to second language acquisition (SLA) research begin from the premise
that human beings are storytellers (Polkinghorn, 1988). People make sense of their lived
experiences and even themselves by constructing, continually revising, and sharing
narratives. Indeed, psychologists like Bruner (1987, 1990) have posited that narrative is a
specific mode of thinking common to all human beings. It serves, at least in part, as a way
to manage novel or troubling situations by configuring disparate, contradictory, or unex-
pected events into a coherent, logical whole. Moreover, storytelling allows narrators to
take a certain evaluative stance relative to the events chronicled in the tale, thus function-
ing to express and perpetuate particular moral understandings (Ochs & Capps, 2001). It
is both within stories and through the act of storytelling that distinctions between what is
right and wrong, what is expected and unexpected are articulated, questioned, and
reworked. Yet narratives, in both their telling and their form, do not exist in isolation.
They are always told in response to and in anticipation of other stories. As Bakhtin (1986)
argued, narratives are fundamentally dialogic in two senses. They are always addressed
to someone and populated by the voices of others.
This emphasis on human beings as creators and interpreters of meaning sets narrative
approaches to SLA off from other, more positivist research traditions within the field that
see meaning as located in an objective or readily perceptible reality (Pavlenko & Lantolf,
2000). It is precisely this acknowledgment of narrative as a shared sense-making process
that attracts some SLA researchers to its study and analysis. These researchers seek an
emic or insider’s account of the cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of SLA, one
that is not necessarily open to etic or outside observation. A focus on narrative allows for
rigorous examination of learners’ perspectives, stances, moral frameworks, and social
positions or relationships as situated in particular sociocultural contexts.

Insider Accounts of SLA: Narrative as a Sense-Making Process

In keeping with this viewpoint, the majority of narrative research in SLA has focused on
issues of representation and interpretation in learners’ autobiographical stories. That is, it
has attended to narratives as evidence of the learner’s sense-making process, examining
how the language-learning events within them are ordered, explained, and evaluated. As
Casanave (2005) explains, “narrative connects and configures parts of human experience
into meaningful larger chunks, weaving them together in a storylike way such that episodes
are seen as related to each other in time” (p. 18). As these chains of experience are formed,
narrators work to rationalize and justify emergent relationships. Narrative thus imposes
cohesion among otherwise disparate events, resulting in a particular interpretation of what
happened.
Studies of language learners’ diaries, for example, have yielded important insights with
regard to how people engaged in domestic language courses or short sojourns abroad
understand and interpret their motivations, emotions, and activities. Such work has shed
light on psychological and social dimensions of language learning that are often invisible.
Moreover, it has offered detailed descriptions of why learners choose to pursue particular

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courses of action or language-learning strategies. In one of the earliest diary studies in

the field of SLA, F. Schumann depicted the physical discomfort she felt during her stay
in Morocco and how this negatively affected her desire to study Arabic (Schumann &
Schumann, 1977). Likewise, Campbell’s (1996) introspective account of how she, as an
experienced second-language learner enrolled in a short-term immersion program, set out
to befriend her teachers and become part of their social group, described not only the
manner in which she pursued this goal, but why she felt it was essential to her linguistic
development. Taken together, these studies exemplify many common threads across early
diary studies in SLA, in that they offer a first-person account of a short-term, formal,
language-learning experience, written in the diarist’s native tongue. The experiences are
recorded as they happen and then subjected to further reflection and analysis by the author.
Key themes and patterns are identified, resulting in a detailed account of the factors the
diarist highlights as central to the language-learning experience.

Reconceptualizing the Learner in SLA:

Narrative as a Site for Identity Construction

In recent years, small-scale diary studies have given way to larger, more theoretically
motivated studies of language-learner narratives. For example, in an effort to understand
the relationship between the language learner and the language-learning context, Norton
(2000) analyzed the diaries of five female learners. She found that both the women’s desires
to use English outside the classroom and their opportunities to interact with other speakers
of the target language were shaped by the ways in which they positioned themselves and
were positioned by others in particular social encounters. Whereas previous accounts of
SLA had cast factors such as motivation and anxiety as stable traits residing within indi-
vidual learners, Norton argued for more attention to how one’s desire to learn and use
a particular language changes over space and time and is tied to specific, and generally
inequitable, relations of power. Drawing heavily on feminist, poststructuralist theories
of identity to understand the women’s stories, but not on narrative theory itself, Norton
grounded her examination of the focal texts in the idea that learners’ identities are
multiple, dynamic, negotiated, and often, but not always, negotiable. That is, as learners
participate in and reflect upon various activities, their sense of who they are, or subjectiv-
ity, undergoes continuous, though not unlimited, change. Thus for Norton, narrative, in
the form of autobiographical texts, became an important resource for illuminating how
learners conceptualized their various identities and how these identities related to both
their motivations to learn and their opportunities to use the target language in specific
situations. In recognizing the relationship between the “complex social history and
multiple desires” of language learners (Norton, 2000, p. 10) and their patterns of language
use, Norton paved the way for more focused examinations of the role of identity in SLA.
Although narrative theory did not figure prominently in Norton’s analysis of her
participants’ stories, much subsequent work in this vein has begun from the premise that
autobiographical narrative is both reflective and constitutive of identity. As Ricœur put it,
“To answer the question ‘Who?’ . . . is to tell a story of a life” (1988, p. 246, as cited in
Pavlenko & Blackledge, 2004, p. 19). Indeed, Bruner has argued that we eventually “become
the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (1987, p. 15). Many
contemporary studies of identity within SLA, therefore, consider how people’s understand-
ing of who they are changes as they acquire and use new linguistic resources. Such work
asks (a) how access to a new language shapes the ways in which people understand
themselves narratively, and (b) how these narrative self-understandings shape the ways
in which people come to use language.

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Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000), for example, examined the memoirs of 10 bilingual writers,
noting how the authors engaged in a process of “self-translation” as they moved through
a series of stages that included the loss and subsequent (re)construction of their identities.
According to Pavlenko and Lantolf, the focal narratives spoke of both material and subjec-
tive border crossings, as the writers moved not only from one physical space to another,
but from one sense of being to a new, and in some cases radically different, set of possi-
bilities for selfhood. The writers had no choice but to renegotiate their identities as they
struggled to make sense of themselves and to be recognized as certain kinds of people in
their new linguistic environments. Like Norton, Pavlenko and Lantolf called for an approach
to SLA research that would extend to include more emphasis on identity and learners’
participation in new linguistic communities, but with an eye toward what narrative theory
could contribute to this endeavor.

Theorizing Narrative within SLA: Multidisciplinary Insights

As narrative research within SLA has matured, researchers have increasingly turned to
insights from a multidisciplinary array of narrative theorists to guide their work. For
example, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and literary critics have long argued
that, although the human propensity to apprehend experience within and through narrative
is universal, the organization and structure of specific narratives varies historically and
cross-culturally. Autobiographical narratives too, they contend, are shaped by the discourses
and ideologies circulating in particular contexts. That is, the stories people tell about their
lives are not original creations; rather, they inform and are informed by more widely held
notions about what specific constellations of events could mean. In an extension of her
collaboration with Lantolf, Pavlenko (2002) examined the published autobiographies of
language learners in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. She found that the
focal stories were infused with widely circulating and largely unchallenged ideas about
the intellectual/moral superiority of English and the importance of using English to con-
struct and defend one’s identity as an American. Her analysis of these texts traced how
these ideas came into being and eventually eclipsed other competing perspectives. Likewise,
it revealed the extent to which individuals from the late 1880s until World War I drew on
particular language ideologies to make sense of and craft their own language-learning
experiences and achievements. Consequently, Pavlenko concluded that people’s language-
learning trajectories are constrained, to a certain extent, by the identity options available
to them in particular contexts.
Taking a more social-psychological perspective, Coryell, Clark and Pomerantz (2010)
explored how heritage learners of Spanish enrolled in an online language course on the
US–Mexico border made sense of their linguistic histories as both individuals and members
of a bilingual community. Drawing on insights from symbolic convergence theory, the
researchers considered the dual role that shared “cultural fantasy narratives” played in
terms of how the learners came to represent and interpret their linguistic trajectories. In
particular, they connected specific common subthemes in the participants’ stories to their
perceptions, actions, and responses as heritage learners of Spanish within their community.
On the one hand, the authors argued that these common subthemes coalesced to form a
master cultural fantasy narrative which the participants then drew on to understand their
individual experiences with Spanish. On the other, the authors maintained that, as the
participants told their stories, they reproduced the cultural fantasy narrative, thus con-
tributing to its vitality and perseverance. Thus, Coyell et al. provided an additional lens
through which to consider the relationship between individual stories and larger, shared
narratives.

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 4 narrative approaches to second language acquisition

Language learners, however, are not without agency in crafting their autobiographical
stories. The act of storytelling itself is an intentional form of identity construction. Ochs
and Capps (2001) note that narrators often take a particular stance relative to the events
and characters in their stories, presenting themselves and the activities in which they
engage in a certain light. “Everyday narratives of personal experience,” they argue, “elab-
orately encode and perpetuate moral worldviews” (pp. 45–6). Thus, autobiographical stories
are neither decontextualized nor disinterested. Narrators appropriate, resist, and at times
even transform various ideologies in making sense of their language-learning histories
and trajectories. For example, Menard-Warwick (2004) examined how particular ideologies
of gender, education, and migration shaped and were shaped by the stories immigrant
language learners to the US told about learning English in and out of school. Through
close examination of the focal learners’ autobiographical stories, she identified and analyzed
the ways in which these narrators represented and responded to the opportunities, chal-
lenges, and contradictions they faced in their day-to-day lives. Although the learners often
positioned themselves as constrained by various ideologies and economic circumstances,
she also observed moments of great creativity and resilience within these texts. Thus,
Menard-Warwick highlighted the importance of considering how individual language-
learning trajectories are grounded in and interact with the larger social, historical, and
economic context, while simultaneously emphasizing their idiosyncrasies. Her work, like
that of other SLA researchers interested in the relationship between identity and additional
language learning, views autobiographical narrative as the place where learners reconcile
and enact their multiple, and at times even competing, subjectivities, as they make sense
of who they are as complex, socially situated, emergent bilinguals or multilinguals. It is
this emphasis on learner narratives as both constitutive of identity and embedded within
particular social, historical, and ideological contexts that distinguishes such work from
earlier examinations of individual learner diaries in SLA research.
Although most narratively oriented work in SLA has focused on identifying themes
within and across learners’ stories, a nascent body of research looks specifically at the focal
narratives themselves as texts. Echoing an earlier call for a more literary approach to the
analysis of diary data (Bailey & Ochsner, 1983), Pavlenko (2001) argued that language
learners’ autobiographies constitute a particular genre and should be examined as such.
In keeping with this perspective, Vitanova (2005) drew on Bakhtin’s concepts of conscious-
ness, voice, and answerability to understand the autobiographical stories of highly educated
Eastern European immigrants to the United States. She looked closely at the ways in which
the narrator’s voice in the story interacted with the voices of the other characters to appro-
priate, resist, or transform the subordinate social locations to which they were often assigned
in the unfolding tale. Likewise, Ros i Solé (2007) referenced the notion of positioning
to examine the roles indexical pronouns, reported speech, sequential ordering, and plot
development played in situating the narrator textually in stories about interactions with
members of the target-language community. As SLA researchers continue to adopt narra-
tive approaches, such fine-grained textual analyses hold considerable promise, particularly
when they are combined with attention to the sociohistorical contexts in which the focal
stories are embedded.

Exploring the Intersection of Identity and Language Learning:

A Focus on Narrative

In an effort to understand how identity formation accords with linguistic development,

SLA researchers have begun to meld detailed examinations of learners’ autobiographical
narratives with focused observations and assessments of particular linguistic performances

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 narrative approaches to second language acquisition 5

and trajectories. Kinginger (2008) reported a case study of six US college students enrolled
in a study-abroad program in France. Specifically, she drew on narratives told during the
process of life-history interviews, anecdotes related in journal entries, and periodic quan-
titative measurements of linguistic competence (e.g., appropriate use of academic language,
forms of address, colloquial expressions, and speech acts) to understand the relationship
between the focal participants’ interpretive accounts of their sojourns in France and their
linguistic development. Kinginger found that, while the participants varied with respect
to their overall linguistic gains, a focus on the specifics of their experiences could not fully
account for these differences. She then argued, like Norton, that the participants’ life his-
tories, linguistic aspirations, and imagined identities played a strong role in shaping their
learning trajectories. Moreover, she added that “in the contemporary globalized world of
study abroad in which linguistic immersion is increasingly a matter of choice and even of
struggle” (p. 108), learners often require support in articulating and achieving particular
language-learning goals, as just being physically present in a particular linguistic community
is not enough to foster bilingualism. Kinginger’s mixed-method approach offers a fruitful
avenue for future inquiry, as it links a qualitative understanding of learners’ experiences
in the form of narrative analysis with a quantitative assessment of their linguistic compe-
tencies. In so doing, Kinginger forms a bridge between interpretative and positivist research,
thus highlighting the strengths of each. Such approaches promise a more robust under-
standing of the ways in which learners’ multiple identities and changing linguistic cap-
abilities inform and interact with one another in specific instances and over long periods
of time.

Charting New Directions in Narrative Research:

Current Tensions and Limitations

As narrative research gains credence within the field, SLA researchers must nevertheless
remain mindful of “whose language learning stories are being told” and “whose stories
are still not represented in the genre” (Pavlenko, 2001, p. 233). Indeed, Pavlenko’s reference
to genre raises the additional question of what themes, characters, events, story lines,
rhetorical devices, and so forth must be included in a story for it to “count” as a language-
learning autobiography. Moreover, as Ochs and Capps (2001) have cautioned, not all
stories are deemed worthy of telling. For a story to be told, it must be relevant and of
value to both the narrator and the actual (or even potential) audience. For SLA researchers
interested in narrative, this has resulted in an emphasis on stories of monolingual indi-
viduals becoming bilinguals or multilinguals. This preference often serves to obscure the
stories of multilinguals who acquire additional languages. Furthermore, it contributes to
the dominance of discourses within the field that cast monolingualism as the normal state
of affairs and multilingualism as deviant and not worthy of study. Thus, it is important
for SLA researchers not only to consider a wide variety of learner stories, but to recognize
which stories remain unacknowledged or silenced. Moreover, they must attend in their
analyses to the nuances of both the macro-level sociohistorical context in which the focal
stories are told and the micro-level interactional context of the specific telling.
Despite increasing acknowledgment of narrative research as a valid mode of inquiry in
SLA studies, it is important to remember that it still remains largely marginal within the
field. Early on, Bailey and Ochsner (1983) observed that this marginality stems, at least in
part, from the fact that a focus on narrative data necessitates a shift in epistemology and
a different set of analytic tools, akin to those found in literary studies. To this end, narra-
tive theory now boasts a daunting array of discourse analytic approaches born out of
different scholarly traditions. Yet, despite these advances in the field of narrative inquiry

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itself, Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) contend that narrative, as a form of data in SLA, is still
frequently scorned because of the preference in the natural and social sciences for third-
person, empirical observations over first-person accounts of experience. Although the
“social turn” in academia has begun to exert its influence within SLA, narrative research
nevertheless remains an underutilized approach and language-learner narratives are still
looked upon with suspicion by some in the field.

SEE ALSO: Analysis of Narrative in Interaction; Bakhtin and Second Language Acquisition;
Kramsch, Claire; Narrative Development in Second Language Acquisition: Oral and Written;
Narrative Discourse; Pavlenko, Aneta; Rhetoric and Stylistics: Quantitative Methods

References

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Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32.
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(pp. 17–32). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Coryell, J., Clark, M., & Pomerantz, A. (2010). Cultural fantasy narratives and heritage language
learning: A case study of adult, heritage learners of Spanish. The Modern Language Journal,
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Menard-Warwick, J. (2004). “I always had the desire to progress a little”: Gendered narratives
of immigrant language learners. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 3(4), 295–311.
Norton, B. (2000). Identity and language learning. New York, NY: Longman.
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Ros i Solé, C. (2007). Language learners’ sociocultural positions in the L2: A narrative approach.
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Vitanova, G. (2005). Authoring the self in a non-native language: A dialogic approach to agency
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Suggested Readings

Bell, J. S. (2002). Narrative inquiry: More than just telling stories. TESOL Quarterly, 36(2), 207–13.
Benson, P., & Nunan, D. (2005). Learners’ stories: Difference and diversity in language learning.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Pavlenko, A. (2007). Autobiographical narratives as data in applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics,
28(2), 163–88.

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