Life Stories: A Way to Explore Language Learners' Narrative Experiences and Identities in an EFL Context.

Abstract

This narrative study explores real-life experiences around language learning and around language learners’ identities that emerge considering the act of positioning within an in situ perspective. Thinking of the language learner as a subject with agency, the study presents accounts of the empowered and disempowered language learner as narrated in life stories. The study took on analytical elements of grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) to approach the life story as unit of analysis. Data collected unveiled that learners resist to positioning within the learning environment, and as a result they can exercise their agentic selves. The analysis also shed light into the importance of considering not just linguistic background but also the experiential one to get to understand learners from a very ontological but narrative perspective