Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants’ Accounts of Language Learning and | Work

Agency in the Making: Adult Immigrants’ Accounts of Language Learning and Work ELIZABETH R MILLER University of North Carolina at Charlotte Charlotte, North Carolina, United States This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act Drawing on a corpus of 18 interviews with adult immigrant small business owners in the United States, this study uses both quantitative and qualitative discourse analytic approaches in considering (a) recurrent linguistic constructs used across interviews to position interviewees as (in)agentive characters in the story worlds of their autobiographical accounts; (b) how these constructs are mobilized in the co-constructed positioning work of interviewer and interviewees; and (c) so-called common sense ideological discourses by which the interviewees are constituted as agents who rationally and responsibly make self-generated choices and act on them This multilayered positioning work constrained interviewees to speaking from positions of language learner or immigrant or small business owner, but at the same time such positioning mobilized recognizable subjectivities for them, enabling them to act in interpretable and meaningful ways doi: 10.5054/tq.2010.226854 he interrelationship of language, identity, and learning has been investigated extensively by second language acquisition (SLA) researchers in the past decade and a half, resulting in what Block (2007) labeled as a ‘‘boom in publications linking identity and SLA’’ (p 864) And, as Block notes, much of this research has adopted a poststructuralist perspective to identity construction Rather than treating identity as a manifestation of one’s essential self, this research emphasizes the dynamism, fragmentation, and contested nature of identities Relatedly, learner agency has increasingly come to be regarded as a necessary construct in understanding language learning as well (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000; Swain & T TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 44, No 3, September 2010 465 Deters, 2007; van Lier, 2008), and much of the poststructurally informed research on identity has viewed learners as able to exercise their agency in making identity choices and in positioning themselves within and in response to local and larger social constraints (DaSilva Iddings & Katz, 2007; McKay & Wong, 1996; Norton, 2000; Ros i Soli, 2007; Vitanova, 2005) Understanding these mediating enablements and constraints becomes particularly consequential when considering adult immigrant language learners, individuals who frequently are marginalized in the dominant society (Norton, 2000; Vitanova, 2005) In this study, I adopt Ahearn’s (2001) ‘‘provisional definition’’ of agency, which is the ‘‘socioculturally mediated capacity to act’’ (p 112), and I draw from van Lier’s (2008) work in second language (L2) research van Lier (2008) notes that language learners’ agentive capacity to act runs contrary to any notion of linguistic competence as something one can possess; agency is instead ‘‘action potential, mediated by social, interactional, cultural, institutional and other contextual factors’’ (p 171) He also cautions against treating apparent action, such as active participation in a language classroom, as an indication of learner agency at work; one can, after all, express one’s agency by deliberately not acting Relatedly, Lantolf and Pavlenko (2001) contends that agency encompasses ‘‘more than performance, or doing’’ (p 145, cited in Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p 349) It is also linked to how individuals ‘‘assign relevance and significance to things and events’’ (Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, p 143) Aligning with a number of studies that have drawn on interview research in exploring the construction of identity and agency (de Fina, 2003; McKendy, 2006; O’Connor, 1994; Ros i Soli, 2007; Vitanova, 2005), I examine here the autobiographical accounts coconstructed in interviews with 18 adult immigrants to the United States, as they positioned themselves and were positioned as variously agentive I advance the notion that the socioculturally mediated capacity to act and ability to assign relevance and significance to such acts emerge as individuals are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces This positioning occurs, in part, as individuals ‘‘speak themselves into being’’ through discursive ‘‘regularities’’ (Poynton & Lee, 2000, p 5), the interactional and linguistically recurring ways of speaking that allow us to make sense of our selves, to (re)enact those selves, and to respond to being positioned by our interlocutors Furthermore, I consider how such positioning can reconstitute or resist ideological views of how individuals operate in the social world (Bamberg, 2004) Here I use the term ideology not as the obfuscation of unequal power relations but as the discursive construction of so-called common sense discourses or ways of understanding and reconstituting social reality (Miller, 2009; Pennycook, 2001) Ultimately, I propose the need for us to rethink 466 TESOL QUARTERLY how we understand and research agency among language learners, when adopting a poststructuralist approach Learner agency, I argue, must be understood as inherently unstable and as inevitably enabled and constrained in the ongoing co-constitution of identity and social reality And it is this understanding that I explore as I consider how the participants in my study come to be constituted as agents of language learning and work-related actions FEMINIST POSTSTRUCTURALIST APPROACHES TO AGENCY Poststructural research focusing on identity and language learning, and including considerations of agency, can be traced to Norton’s (1995, 2000) formative work among adult immigrant women learning English in Canada More recent scholarship has continued to advance the notion of learner agency as constructed in the interrelationships of individuals and social discourses Ros i Soli (2007), for example, sees L2 users as ‘‘dynamic agents who take the initiative and take charge of their own learning’’ while also noting that agency is ‘‘co-constructed, both by the sociocultural environment and by those around the L2 user’’ (p 205) Vitanova (2005) regards the adult immigrant language learners in her study as ‘‘active, responsible and languaged sel[ves]’’ (p 153), who, through ‘‘everyday acts of creativity’’ (p 166) are able to reestablish voices for themselves in the target language and culture These researchers and others work to address the challenge posed by Pennycook (2001) to find a way to theorize human agency within structures of power and to theorize ways in which we think, act and behave that on the one hand acknowledge our locations within social, cultural, economic, ideological, discursive frameworks but on the other hand allow us at least some possibility of freedom of action and change (p 120) More compellingly, Pennycook adds that agency never works ‘‘outside some domain of power’’ and neither is it ‘‘merely a dialectical relation between macro structure and micro agency’’ but it is rather ‘‘a constant recycling of different forms of power through our everyday words and actions’’ (p 120) Adopting such a poststructuralist approach to agency presents an interesting theoretical and analytic challenge, for, as Price (1996) argues, researchers often implicitly grant a priori agency to individuals and groups, portraying learners’ agency as exercised in relationship between ‘‘pre-given’’ subject-agents and prevailing discourses (p 332) Price further argues that such an approach treats identity positioning as the outcome of ‘‘individual capacities’’ (p 332) AGENCY IN THE MAKING 467 rather than as co-constituted in local and larger social discourses, as advocated in poststructural theory A number of feminist poststructuralists have argued that subjectivity (or identity) and agency not exist prior to their production in linguistic and discursive practices (Butler, 1990, 1993, 1997; Davies, 1991; Weedon, 1999) Importantly, they contend that one cannot achieve agency without subjectivity, that is, one cannot act in ways that are deemed relevant or significant, unless one has a recognized identity position from which to act On this, Butler (1993) contends that the ‘‘paradox of subjectivation’’ (p 15) is that the constraints that are imposed in constructing a particular kind of subject at a given moment in time simultaneously enable that individual to act meaningfully in that interactional space At the core of Butler’s (1997) understanding of agency is her contention that anyone who ‘‘acts acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and hence operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset’’ (p 16) Thus discursively constituted and ideologically recognizable subject positions such as ‘‘adult immigrant’’ or ‘‘language learner’’ or ‘‘small business owner’’ can enable individuals to act meaningfully and also resist and transform such positioning Butler (1997) acknowledges that people operate with a ‘‘common sense’’ perception that we and others act and make choices independently, that we can at times resist norms and alter dominant discourses through our own power Butler (1990) has famously proposed that seemingly essential identity categories such as ‘‘woman’’ or ‘‘man’’ need to be understood as a doing, ‘‘a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a ‘natural’ kind of being’’ (p 32) Importantly, this sedimentation of acts, repeated over time, can give the appearance of a being who is acting independently in the world because he or she is a particular kind of individual, rather than someone who is positioned as such in and through a web of ideological discourses regarding personhood and responsibility (Davies, 1991) USING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS IN INTERVIEW RESEARCH An important consideration for L2 researchers is how to investigate such positioning work among language learners van Lier (2008) speaks to the difficulty of ‘‘locating agency’’ (p 164), noting that relevant mediating factors of our sociocultural–historical contexts are not ‘‘immediately visible’’ in naturally occurring talk, or are, at best, only ‘‘[ambiguously] locatable’’ (pp 175–176) My aim is to investigate how the adult immigrants in my study come to be constituted as agents, how 468 TESOL QUARTERLY they seem to perceive their own capacity to act, rather than to locate cases of agency ‘‘in action.’’ I so by examining the patterned ways the research participants talk about themselves and their past experiences, using both quantitative and qualitative discourse analytic approaches Though poststructural research frequently views discourse as ‘‘post’’ any kind of structuralist understanding of language, Poynton (1993) contends that poststructuralist research cannot overlook the linguistic means by which subjects come to be constituted (see also Pennycook, 2001) I cite Poynton (1993) at some length here, because she argues that poststructural analytic practice must include critical aspects of representation, concerned particularly with questions of the agency of grammatical participants and the relative focus (foregrounding/backgrounding) on those participants [which] involve highly specific grammatical features at the level of the individual clause Such ‘‘choices’’ are not on the whole under conscious control, so not imply conscious volition on the part of the individual Their habitual use within the ways of speaking characteristic of a particular culture carry significant meanings, however, concerning the shape of habitual and hence proper relationships within that culture (pp 6–7) In examining some of the ‘‘habitual ways of speaking’’ in my participants’ autobiographical accounts,1 I have focused on the ‘‘material phenomena’’ of language (Poynton, 1993, p 6) as it emerged in the interview interactions I reuse familiar metalinguistic labels and consider language units developed in structuralist approaches to language However, I adopt Pennycook’s (2007) view of systematicity in language as emerging from iterative social and linguistic activities, that is, as ‘‘the product of ritualized social performatives that become sedimented into temporary subsystems’’ (p 110; see Makoni & Pennycook, 2007, and Pennycook 2007, for in-depth discussion of language as performatively constituted) Further, I understand these sedimented ways of positioning self and others in interview talk to be influenced, in part, by common sense ideologies of language learners as particular kinds of subjects, as individuals who are believed to already have agency and thus have responsibility to act Relatedly, I treat interviews as occasions for assembling meanings and constructing selves, not merely eliciting reports, and understand that the knowledge generated in interviews is created from the actions taken to obtain it (Gubrium & Holstein, 2003) I thus view seemingly mundane and familiar ways of constructing versions of self and experience to be Even though the participants in this study may not have developed all of the habitual ways of using English as found among native speakers, they appear to have appropriated some of the normative ways to speak about self in relation to past and ongoing experiences AGENCY IN THE MAKING 469 co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewee, interlocutors who simultaneously reconstitute (or resist) normative understandings of the social world that render these versions ‘‘sensible’’ (Miller, 2009) In analyzing these accounts, I want to foreground Quigley’s (2001) caution that ‘‘there is no need to talk about causality’’ (p 152), that is, positioning oneself as an agentive being in autobiographical talk does not cause one to be agentive And yet, as Quigley (2000) notes, such talk provides the primary site for us to ‘‘organize all our agentive encounters in the world’’ (p 189), as we make use of conventional ways of speaking in constituting recognizable subject positions and story worlds THE STUDY This study draws on a corpus of 18 interviews with individuals who (a) immigrated to the United States after childhood, (b) learned English as adults or after early childhood, and (c) opened their own businesses The interview study was initiated to investigate how adult immigrants learn and use English outside of classroom settings and in workplace contexts These individuals’ considerable achievement in establishing their own businesses in English-dominant communities motivated my desire to focus on their linguistic strengths and the negotiation strategies they have developed in order to survive and thrive as they interact with English-speaking suppliers or clients I recruited the research participants through several liaisons, colleagues, and community members acquainted with me and the interviewees I conducted all of the semistructured interviews at interviewees’ places of business in order to better understand the contexts in which they work One exception was Lou, whom I met at a coffee shop, given that he no longer owned his import–export business at the time of the interview As shown in Table 1, there were 10 females and eight males, hailing from nine different countries, who owned a variety of restaurants, small shops, and other businesses The interviews lasted 24 minutes, on average, with the shortest lasting only 12 minutes, and the longest 36 minutes The interviews were fully transcribed, and the analysis entailed working with sound files and the transcribed texts simultaneously DATA ANALYSIS: POSITIONING FOR AGENCY The main analytic concept used in analyzing the discourse data is that of subject positioning (Bamberg, 2004) within and through ‘‘linguistic field[s] of enabling constraints’’ (Butler, 1997, p 16) In analyzing my corpus of interview data (approximately 280 pages of transcription text), 470 TESOL QUARTERLY TABLE Interview Participants Pseudonym Gender Lan Kay Jin Tony Don Hannah Joe Keith Lois Soo Hee Donna Dorothy Paul Jenny George Ivan Lou Female Female Female Male Male Female Male Male Female Female Female Female Female Male Female Male Male Male Country of origin Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam China China China Korea Korea Korea Laos Laos Burma Brazil Greece France Italy Type of business owned Hail salon Nail salon Facial shop Vietnamese sandwich shop Restaurant supply store Chinese restaurant Chinese restaurant Chinese pastry shop Nail shop Dry cleaning pickup store Korean restaurant Lao dress-making shop Lao music and variety store Sushi supply business House cleaning business Barbecue restaurants Bakery Import/export business I used a combination of quantitative and qualitative analytic approaches As van de Mieroop (2005) demonstrated in her exploration of institutional identity, integrating both approaches enables ‘‘both an indepth view and an overview of the corpus’’ (p 108) I use quantitative analysis to examine the recurrent (or sedimented) linguistic constructs used by interviewees in positioning themselves as participants in their story worlds, the talked-about content of their autobiographical accounts (see also de Fina, 2003) I then look more closely at the turn-by-turn development of co-constructed interaction in representative excerpts of interviewee-interviewer talk And finally, I consider how these interlocutors orient to common sense ideologies regarding language learners as responsible agents of their learning success Positioning Participants in the Story World In analyzing several of the recurrent linguistic constructions used by interviewees, I examine how interviewees came to be constituted as agents of the actions expressed in clausal predicates (Scheibman, 2002) in which they are named participants (typically through using the personal pronouns I, me, or we) I selected only those utterances in which interviewees directly addressed topics regarding their experiences in their (1) early learning of English, (2) starting and running their own businesses, and (3) using and continuing to learn English at work As shown in Figure 1, the largest percentage of interviewees’ utterances, across all three topics, used constructions in which the interviewee is AGENCY IN THE MAKING 471 FIGURE Subject-predicate utterances positioned as the agent of action predicates Though influenced by Duranti’s (1994, 2006) explication of semantic role types,2 I use the label ‘‘agent’’ here to identify occasions when interviewees construct themselves as the subjects of predicates that position them as having the ‘‘capacity to act’’ (Ahearn, 2001) in some way and that position them as having some ‘‘degree of control over their own behavior,’’ suggesting that they ‘‘could have acted otherwise’’ (Duranti, 2006, pp 453–454) Clearly, these individuals come from varied cultural and national backgrounds, with different economic and educational histories, and have diverse goals for themselves in the United States, all of which impact how they perceive themselves as capable of acting in their best interests However, my intention here is not to show how such factors can explain individual choices but to understand how individuals come to be constituted as recognizable agents with incumbent responsibilities in local and ideological discourses As shown in Figure 1, 52.3% of the 130 subject–predicate utterances related to interviewees’ early learning of English constitute interviewees as agents who have some control over their learning of 472 Duranti distinguished between agent and actor roles for subjects Agents affect another entity in the sentence, as in ‘‘The boy chased the dog,’’ versus actors, who act but not on an object entity, as in ‘‘The boy went to America’’ (Duranti, 1994, p 122) TESOL QUARTERLY English (agent of action predicates) These utterance types were produced by all 18 interviewees when they spoke of themselves as individuals who ‘‘go/went’’ to class, ‘‘took’’ classes, ‘‘study’’ English, ‘‘pick’’ tutors, and so on, in 68 utterances Table offers illustrative utterances of the subject–predicate linguistic constructions according to topical category Another frequently used construction in their early learning of English accounts positioned interviewees as subjects of the verb learn (23.8%) These utterances are more ambiguous with respect to interviewees’ agentive activity, tending rather to diminish the agency of the subject as in, ‘‘so the basic I learn there’’ (Hee) or ‘‘the only I learn is uh speaking speaking a bit more fluent’’ (Tony) Though they position themselves as undergoing change, they not construct themselves as actively pursuing the study of English, and thus I interpret these constructs as mitigating the narrated character’s agency to some degree In another 5.4% of these early learning of English utterances, interviewees positioned themselves as objects of others’ actions, and thus as nonagents Considering the utterance types constructed in interviewees’ accounts, one finds variation, but it seems the preferred pattern was for interviewees to position themselves as agentive characters who actively pursued the learning of English early in their residence in the United States Three individuals, who indicated that they did not have opportunity to take English classes, still positioned themselves as agents of learning Hee, for example, reported learning English on her own by studying the Bible with a Korean–English dictionary She became a Jehovah’s Witness convert and took part in weekly Bible studies In order to understand the teachings of TABLE Examples of Interviewees’ Subject–Predicate Utterances by Linguistic Construction and Topical Category Topical category Linguistic constructions Early learning of English Participant as agent of action predicates ‘‘I go school night time like two hours Tuesday and Thursday.’’ Participant as subject ‘‘First few year um I learn of ‘‘learn’’ predicates speak in uh broken English with a lot of Americans.’’ Participant as object ‘‘I had one Brazilian girl of predicate action she teach me.’’ Participant as ‘‘So there have to be effort (potential) agent of by myself.’’ necessary or obligatory action AGENCY IN THE MAKING Starting and running a business Using and continuing to learn English at work ‘‘Then I open the business.’’ ‘‘I use mostly English with American.’’ ‘‘I learned a little bit how ‘‘While you talk you have to organize.’’ with your client you you learn a lot.’’ ‘‘People gave me clients.’’ ‘‘My customer help me a lot.’’ ‘‘If I interested in like, oh ‘‘I need to write oh I need more of these, I’m sorry I broke something like that, I have something.’’ to go.’’ 473 the church, she describes herself this way: ‘‘I dig dig in dictionary and always I reading aloud So I and slowly I understand it.’’ As already alluded to, the agent of action predicate constructs were also adopted most frequently in these individuals’ accounts of starting and running their own businesses (66.4%, see Figure 1) They spoke of themselves as agents who ‘‘open a shop’’ (Dorothy) or ‘‘build another shop’’ (Jin) or ‘‘left and took barbecue business’’ (George) and whose daily activities involve ordering, cooking, sanitizing, and so on Similarly, this construction is used in 60.6% of interviewees’ accounts regarding using and continuing to learn English at work, such as in ‘‘we write it [in English] but most of the time we order by phone’’ (Kay) To a lesser degree interviewees also spoke of themselves as ‘‘learners’’ or as the object or recipient of others’ efforts in their utterances relating to these two topic categories One way to account for the predominance of participants as agents in these accounts is the nature of the interaction itself Scheibman (2002) noted that in narrative accounts, or reporting activity, interlocutors are most likely to use constructions involving a subject with human animacy and active predicates And yet, these interviewees did not always position themselves as agentive subjects, and thus the activity of autobiographical account giving does not absolutely constrain interlocutors in whether or not they position themselves as agents In order to gain a more contextualized understanding of this grammaticized positioning, one needs to move beyond an overview of interviewees’ abstracted utterances and consider how the local coconstructed interaction contributes to mobilizing particular language choices and identity positions Due to space constraints, I examine only several excerpts in this article; however, I find they illustrate the processes of positioning self and being positioned that were true of all interview accounts Co-constructed Positioning In Excerpt below, Hannah, an owner of a Chinese restaurant who had been in the United States nearly 20 years at the time of the interview, positions herself as an agentive character who took action to go to adult school in order to learn English after her arrival in the United States As was typical, early in the conversation I ask Hannah to talk about when she first learned English (lines 1–2).3 474 Transcription conventions used: square bracket overlapping talk, question mark final rising intonation, period final falling intonation, comma falling but continuing intonation TESOL QUARTERLY Excerpt 1a INT: All right My first question I ask everyone is um when did you first start to learn English HAN: Um when is we we learning English in China [for the students INT: [Did you? HAN: Yeah INT: Yeah? HAN: But not not talk a lot INT: Yeah HAN: Yeah then and I then forgot Following my question about when she first started to ‘‘learn’’ English (1), Hannah reissues my verb choice in her response, ‘‘we we learning English in China for the students’’ (3) In the next few moments of talk (not included here), she describes her experience giving birth to her first child soon after arriving in the United States and her inability to understand the hospital staff An interpreter was supposed to help her, but, as she indicates below, she ‘‘wait for the whole day, nobody will come’’ (25) She links this experience to her recognition that she needed to learn English (‘‘that’s why’’ [28]) Excerpt 1b 25 HAN: And then we wait for the whole day nobody will come [you 26 know, 27 INT: [Oh no 28 HAN: ((laughter)) That’s why and then and then I I got to learn 29 some ti- learn English right? 30 INT: Yeah yeah Did you ever go to an English class? 31 HAN: Yeah And I going to adult school? 32 INT: Yeah 33 HAN Yeah for two hour a day, 34 INT: Oh 35 HAN: And then uh and then and then learning about four years? 36 INT: Wow 37 HAN: Uh huh 38INT: Good for you 39 HAN: Uh huh And and about ho- how many years And then I pick 40 American friend? 41 INT: Yeah 42 HAN: He’s uh speak really good English Chinese [He’s a teacher 43 INT: [Ah ah ah 44 HAN: And then he he teach me you know AGENCY IN THE MAKING 475 45 INT: Okay 46 HAN: Yeah When I ask Hannah, ‘‘Did you ever go to an English class?’’ (30) Hannah again recycles the verb from my question in her response, ‘‘Yeah And I going to adult school’’ (31), for hours a day, activity that she indicates continued for about years (I treat her use of ‘‘learning’’ and ‘‘going’’ in lines 3, 31, and 35 as main verbs of the predicates, rather than verbals, given that they are the only verb entities in these utterances.) However, Hannah does not slavishly recycle the vocabulary options introduced by my questions when she appends another example of how she learned English without my direct elicitation Though positioned as an object of someone else’s agentive action in ‘‘he teach me’’ (44), this utterance follows her highly agentive positioning as someone who ‘‘picked’’ an American friend who could speak both English and Chinese (39–40, 42) to be her English teacher It appears that Hannah’s ways of constructing her participation in the pursuit of learning English are mobilized, in part, through the verb choices made relevant in my questions, and thus one can understand how recurrent linguistic constructs are partly co-constructed by the interviewer and interviewee Reissuing these verbs also allows Hannah to position herself as participating cooperatively in coconstructing a topically cohesive conversation Perhaps more significantly, my questions constrain the possibilities for how Hannah can position herself as an interlocutor in the talk Indeed, her positioning as a one-time learner of English was made relevant before the interview ever began, when she read my introductory letter and was told about my desire to interview her through our liaison At the same time, in being positioned as such an individual, Hannah can speak from a position of experience and knowledge on the topic As Butler (1997) contends, having an interpretable subject position, though constraining, remains a necessary prerequisite for enabling one to speak, and act, at all Ideological Positioning The linguistic similarities in how Hannah and the other interviewees structured their accounts suggest that these constructs provide conventional ways to present self-in-action in the world In turn, such discursive positioning is socially recognizable, in part, because of the ideological meanings attached to persons who can act When positioned as individuals who can act, we are assigned responsibility regarding our choices to act—or not to act (McKendy, 2006; Hill & Irvine, 1993) As Quigley (2001) observed, a large portion of autobiographical talk is comprised of interlocutors producing reasons or excuses for their actions 476 TESOL QUARTERLY Though sociocultural theorists have shown that learning is a socially distributed activity, influenced by one’s history and one’s status in varying communities of practice (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991), the traditional view of language learners as contained universes of learning often functions as the default view in popular discourse as well as in much of the SLA discourse The questions and responses in Hannah’s interview seem to confirm this common sense notion of language learning as individually generated activity and thus as individual responsibility By asking Hannah, ‘‘Did you ever go to an English class?’’ I position her as someone who has the wherewithal to choose to go to English as a second language (ESL) classes and to act on that choice Davies (1991) contends that normative positioning work typically constitutes people as individuals ‘‘who ‘[speak] for themselves’, who accept responsibility for their actions and who can then be said to have agency’’ (p 343) As noted earlier, constituting self as agentive through organizing one’s utterances in particular ways does not cause agency However, as Wilkinson and Kitzinger (2003) note, ‘‘through apparently trivial incidental person references, positioning those persons in terms of their category memberships, the world of such categories, and the inferences associated with them is produced, reproduced and sometimes resisted’’ (p 160) One can see the effect of such common sense positioning in the following section where I examine how these interviewees work to avoid being cast as irresponsible, even though they discontinued formal ESL classes COMPELLED TO (NOT) ACT Positioning Participants in the Story World In considering how interviewees constructed themselves as recognizing their need and obligation to act, one can again observe their efforts to construct themselves as responsible selves Furthermore, one can begin to recognize that the process of positioning self as an agent of learning English and assuming an identity of responsible person is complex and a site of struggle Three of the interviewees indicated that they never studied English in the United States, and nine explicitly indicated that they stopped studying English or attending ESL classes at some point after they immigrated to the United States All 12 of these interviewees supply accounts for why they could not study English at all or for why they had to give it up One linguistic construction adopted by the interviewees to position themselves as responsible participants in their story worlds was the use of ‘‘agent-oriented modality,’’ constructs that ‘‘report the existence of internal and external conditions on an AGENCY IN THE MAKING 477 agent with respect to the completion of the action expressed in the main predicate’’ (Bybee, Perkins, & Pagliuca, 1994, p 177) I focus on interviewees’ use of ‘‘have to,’’ ‘‘got to,’’ or ‘‘need to,’’ what Bybee et al (1994) have labeled obligation or necessity modality (see Figure 1, [potential] agent of necessary or obligatory action) Six interviewees used these constructs to position themselves as aware of their need or obligation to study English while living in the United States Hannah, as observed, commented ‘‘and then I got to learn English right?’’ after her unfortunate experience of not having an interpreter on hand for the birth of her child Keith, who never studied English formally, noted that ‘‘but you want to living over here you got to be able to Kind of have to learn [English].’’ Interestingly, five of these same interviewees use the same modality to position themselves as compelled to stop learning because of other, more powerful obligations or factors outside of their control Most frequently, these obligations included the need to work all day, sometimes until late at night: ‘‘I have to you know overtime, like until ten o’clock’’ (Soo), or taking care of family: ‘‘No time I have three children I got to work hard for them’’ (Hannah) An example of the co-constructed positioning of self-as-obligated is seen in the following excerpt Co-constructed Positioning Kay, a Vietnamese nail shop owner and 17-year resident in the United States, displays herself as active in pursuing her education in Excerpt 2, but then gives an account for why she finally gives up on it Excerpt KAY: I learn English in our country before I came here, yeah, like I learn in my uh high school and I learn in college in our country, INT: Okay okay KAY: And after that you know we came here, and after I came here, I know I have to practice more and more, INT: Yeah KAY: And uh that why I went to CPCC school INT: Okay KAY: To learn a10 INT: And was that mostly conversational English at CPCC? 11 KAY: Uh yeah 12 INT: Okay, and probably in high school and college it was mostly 13 reading [and writing 14 Kay [Yeah 478 TESOL QUARTERLY 15 Kay: Because before I plan I back to school like uh finish college [in 16 here, 17 INT: [Yeah 18 KAY: That’s why I try get back to CPCC [learn about English 19 INT: [Yeah 20 KAY: And I I took several uh uh class you know like math [or 21 something like that? 22 INT: [Uh huh 23 KAY: But after a while I think it’s hard because I have to [work 24 daytime and 25 INT: [I understand yeah 26 KAY: night- nighttime go to school and college is too much for me 27 you know [and finally I give up? 28 INT: [I know Kay constructs herself as aware that she ‘‘has to’’ practice more English upon arriving in the United States (15–16), even though she had learned English in high school and college in Vietnam In turn, she positions herself as agentively going to CPCC, a community college, in order to learn more English In Kay’s uptake to my comment that she likely focused on reading and writing in English in her home country, she indicates that she wanted to return to college and finish it ‘‘in here’’ in the United States (109+5–16), adding that she took several kinds of classes, including math, thereby constructing herself as college student and not just an English-language learner However, in line 23, Kay uses the obligation-necessity construct in uttering ‘‘I have to work daytime and night- nighttime go to school’’ (23–26) The upshot is that she saw college as ‘‘too much’’ (26) for her, and she finally had to give up on school In this interaction, Kay is positioned as someone who not only had the wherewithal to go to school to learn English, but as someone who had the background for and aspirations to finish college in the United States and as someone responsible for engaging in the socially preferred activity for immigrants of learning the dominant language However, in attributing her inability to continue going to school to the understandable and socially recognized difficulty of juggling work and school simultaneously, Kay positions herself as someone who cannot be held responsible for not finishing college That is, if her inaction cannot be helped then she cannot be held responsible for it I coconstruct the sense of this by commenting, ‘‘I understand yeah’’ (25) and ‘‘I know’’ (28) Agent-Oriented Modality and Fulfillability An important distinction emerged in how interviewees used agentoriented modality to position themselves as responsible individuals AGENCY IN THE MAKING 479 across topic categories In their accounts of starting and running their own businesses (see Figure 1), 11 individuals used 31 such obligationnecessity constructions, comprising 22.1% of the utterances related to this topic category These agent-action utterances include comments such as George’s, ‘‘You have to to control the money, you know’’ and Kay’s ‘‘We have to go you know the professional place.’’ Though many of them admitted that running their businesses was not always easy, these interviewees speak about their obligations or need to act as business owners with a presupposition of fulfillability; that is, they construct themselves as following through, presumably competently, on the obligations that are part of running a business Jin, for example, a late-twenties Vietnamese female who has lived in the United States since her mid-teens, in the excerpt below, describes her need to travel to different states for shows and advanced classes (‘‘so I have to go’’, 8) in running her facial salon Excerpt INT: Do you have to more training for your business like for the JIN: Like we um for my job? So I’m a aesthetician so I go to like um kind of show? INT: [Uh huh JIN: [Like advanced class? INT: Uh huh JIN: So like if I I in like oh I need more of these something like that INT: Yeah JIN: So I have to go, so 10 INT: Uh huh And you like go to different states or [different cities? 11 JIN: [Yes ma’am 12 INT: Okay [yeah yeah 13 JIN: [Different state most of time Yeah I help construct her as potentially obligated to engage in additional training activities in my question regarding whether she has to it for her business (1) Jin reissues this verb construct (9) in displaying herself as someone who knows what is required of her and as capable of following through on it in running her business There were many fewer utterances using obligation-necessity modality in the interviewees’ accounts of using and continuing to learn English at work (only 13 out of 104, or 12.5%, see Figure 1) However, as in their accounts of operating their businesses, the interviewees positioned themselves as compelled to engage in fulfillable activities in 10 of these utterances Dorothy, for example, comments, ‘‘When I fax something I have to [use English],’’ and Jenny says, ‘‘I need 480 TESOL QUARTERLY to write [in English] oh I’m sorry I broke something’’ to the owners of the houses she cleans Thus although the interviewees most frequently positioned themselves as agentive participants of past experiences, across topics, their use of agent-oriented modality mediated their discursively constituted capacity to act differently In providing socially recognizable and acceptable reasons for being compelled not to act, with respect to learning English, they can maintain an identity of responsible person In positioning themselves as obligated to act in fulfilling their business responsibilities, and following through on those obligations, they too are constituted as responsible, but also as more agentive in this domain of their lives, compared to the pursuit of learning English Ideological Positioning In focusing on an individual’s coconstituted capacity to act, researchers need to consider the sociocultural contexts in which the desire to act is aroused Though many of these individuals had learned some English in their home countries, the need for and desire for additional language learning developed as they entered the ‘‘space’’ of English-dominant American cities Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck (2005) put forward the notion that space or context ‘‘does something to people’’ (p 203) by positioning them as able to act in particular ways, even as people participate in recreating, resisting, and modifying that space Blommaert et al identify three ‘‘effects’’ as individuals interactively and physically enter into particular spaces: (1) Certain acts are legitimized, others are constrained; (2) one’s multilingual repertoire is assigned differential value and function; and (3) one’s identities are both self-constituted and ascribed by others (p 203) Though the interviewees in my study all spoke at least two languages, and many spoke three or four, they came to be ascribed as and took on the identity of deficient speaker of English on immigrating to the United States and in the interview talk itself Although one can argue that such an identity is neither desirable nor fair, in being positioned as these kinds of individuals, they came to be constituted as recognizable subjects, thereby achieving the necessary subjectivity for acting in at least some social contexts in the United States (Butler, 1993) Being positioned as a deficient user of the language can motivate and enable socially preferred ways of acting, namely, learning the dominant language At the same time, it is clear that such positioning occurs in ideologically infused spaces In considering the geographical, political, and cultural spaces in much of the United States, Wiley and Lukes (1996) discuss the ideology of monolingualism that persists, despite historical evidence that the AGENCY IN THE MAKING 481 nation has always been multilingual They note that in such an ideologically conceived space, language diversity comes to be seen as a ‘‘consequence of immigration’’ (p 519), and immigrants’ own languages are perceived as a hindrance and thus should be ‘‘surrendered as a kind of payment for the right of passage to the receiving society’’ (p 520) It comes to seem only ‘‘natural’’ that such newcomers would choose to shift to the dominant language as quickly as possible (May, 2005) Further, when language learning is constituted as something that individuals have control over, something they can choose to do, the subjects of learning also are positioned as responsible for not learning the dominant language quickly or fully Evidence of this sense of personal responsibility, and failure, is seen in comments produced by the interviewees when speaking of their English expertise: ‘‘I not perfect in English’’ (Soo); ‘‘My English not very well’’ (Tony); ‘‘I have a hard time [learning English]’’ (Donna); or on the difficulty of the language itself: ‘‘It’s really difficult, it’s completely different my language’’ (Jenny) and ‘‘It is hard language’’ (Hee) However, an interesting contrast emerged when I asked them about their use of English at work Though some commented on moments when they had to deal with misunderstandings with customers, nearly all of them indicated that communicating in English to accomplish their work was not problematic Lan, for example, noted several times ‘‘I have no problem how to communicate with them and deal with them [customers].’’ Soo commented, ‘‘My customers is know I’m English not good I don’t have a problem We okay each other.’’ And Jenny indicated, ‘‘I’m accustomed to this right now’’ when speaking of communicating with her customers Importantly, many of these interviewees also indicated that the kinds of language exchanges they engaged in tended to be simple and repetitive Soo noted, ‘‘So we’d talk not much, just ‘Hi how are you’ and ‘How’s it going,’ something like that So it’s not difficult.’’ With the exception of Paul, who indicated he had to extensive email writing to conduct his sushi business, the rest commented that they did very little writing or reading, in English or any language Keith reported reading only telephone and order numbers Some said they only wrote when faxing orders An owner of a nail shop and Vietnamese, Kay adopted a confiding tone when she told me, ‘‘I tell the truth, most people nail, I don’t mean to say their English is poor, but some Vietnamese people nails, they they don’t speak English like really good.’’ She went on to say they were able to work with American clients only because of the good quality of their work I realize that this kind of self-reported information cannot be taken at face value, as evidence of their actual literacy practices And, despite their modest attestations regarding their English proficiency, these 482 TESOL QUARTERLY individuals were all able to interact with me in accomplishing the interviews However, it did appear that, for many of them, success at work was enabled because of the limited English language literacy practices that were required and the often ritualized texture of their service encounters with customers and suppliers In addition, more than half of the interviewees explicitly reported using accountants to take care of all of their paperwork, individuals often identified as bilingual members of their own immigrant community These immigrants’ capacity to take action as business owners was mediated in other ways by other members of their immigrant communities Most reported working for members of their own ethnic and linguistic communities, learning the ropes, before striking out on their own An owner of a Chinese pastry shop, Keith commented, ‘‘Yeah, I work for somebody else in a Chinese restaurant.’’ When I asked Soo how she was able to open her dry cleaning pick-up store, she noted that ‘‘Lot of Korean have dry cleaner Yeah, ask them quest- uh and then I made a little bit money And then I buy.’’ However, even as their capacity to open businesses and run them is facilitated by members of their immigrant communities, the kinds of agentive trajectories they conceive to be possible are also constrained to some degree by their positioning as members of such communities When I asked them what they might have chosen to in the United States if English had never been an issue for them, most had no ready responses Jenny, for example, first said, ‘‘I don’t know’’ but then commented that she would like to work as a ‘‘translator’’ because she likes to work with people, and added that she knew of another Brazilian woman who worked as an interpreter Keith seemed confused by the question at first but then said, ‘‘Yeah if I know English so I can maybe find a better job You know, cannot just limit looking for Chinese You know, I can go to work for a store, work for everywhere.’’ He suggests that his possibilities for getting work would not be limited to Chinese establishments, that he could ‘‘work for everywhere,’’ and yet identifies a concrete example as ‘‘I can go to work for a store.’’ Hannah indicated that she would not have chosen differently because ‘‘restaurant is my favorite.’’ It is notable that their businesses mostly belong to the service economy and, as such, are mostly ‘‘unmarked’’ with respect to their immigrant status That is, owning ethnic restaurants, nail shops, hair salons, dry cleaners, and so on, businesses that are often located in poorer neighborhoods and cater mostly to nonelite clients, indexes ‘‘immigrant business.’’ Though ‘‘marked’’ with respect to the dominant culture (‘‘unmarked’’ identity in the United States tends to be ‘‘white, Anglo, and middle-class’’ according to Urciuoli [1996, p 8]), owning such a business seems to be treated as an unmarked arena for agentive action for many of these first-generation immigrants And, as noted, AGENCY IN THE MAKING 483 these interviewees suggest that such ‘‘normal’’ immigrant businesses not require extensive use of English or can be accomplished by paying individuals who are (more) proficient in English to manage more linguistically demanding business transactions CONCLUSION We see, then, that constituting subjects, positioning individuals, and thereby enabling and constraining particular ways of acting in the world, inevitably occurs in and through ideologically informed spaces Ways of making sense of one’s place in the world are enabled, as individuals make use of ordinary, habitual, or sedimented ways of ‘‘speaking themselves into being’’ (Poynton & Lee, 2000, p 5) These habitual ways of speaking are so unmarked and so familiar (Wilkinson & Kitzinger, 2003) that we often fail to see them as locally responsive and ideologically influenced discursive constructions, rather than direct representations of social facts (Miller, 2009) In taking a poststructural approach to linguistic utterances, I examine the same material phenomena as structural researchers, but I orient to their ontological status quite differently; that is, rather than seeing language as a resource outside of self, I regard ordinary language use as the ‘‘sedimentation of acts’’ (Butler, 1990, p 32) And this sedimentation of acts has particular ‘‘language effects’’ (Pennycook, 2007, p 74), in some cases constituting subjects as individuals who can and are responsible to act (Davies, 1991) On the one hand, such positioning limited the interviewees in this study to speaking from the position of ‘‘language learner’’ or ‘‘immigrant’’ or ‘‘small business owner,’’ but at the same time this positioning mobilized recognizable subjectivities for them and enabled them ‘‘to act meaningfully in [those] culturally defined interactional space[s]’’ (Butler, 1997, p 16) I want to emphasize that the power to effect such positioning does not lie in the language itself (i.e., through using agent of action predications) nor in an already-agentive speaker (Price, 1996) who simply uses the language Rather, the habitual ways of using language (i.e., producing agent of action predicates) have particular effects, constructing recognizable subjects who are understood to be enabled to act within the constraints of those subject positions In noting that these individuals’ expressed agentive capacity seems to be constrained by what is treated as normal or recognizable action for adult immigrants in the United States—opening immigrant businesses or attending English language classes—I not want to suggest that these people had limited aspirations for themselves or their families Several of them, for example, proudly told me that their children were in or had gone to college However, one must recognize that the 484 TESOL QUARTERLY constitution of such normal or recognizable agency is not the same as other individuals’ agency, that some individuals are positioned more advantageously than others As Butler (1997) argues, ‘‘the terms that facilitate recognition are themselves conventional’’ but such ‘‘survivable subjects’’ that emerge are often constituted through processes of ‘‘exclusion and violence’’ (p 5) As such, I want to caution researchers against conflating agency and empowerment Though one can be constituted as an empowered agentive individual, being constituted as an agent does not straightforwardly lead to empowerment However, in understanding that the desire to act and the capacity to act toward learning English is not individually mobilized desire or action, and in acknowledging Butler’s (1997) contention that anyone who ‘‘acts acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor’’ (p 16), researchers, teachers, and other interested participants in language learning and teaching can begin to imagine ways that we can work to coconstitute both agency and empowerment among minority learners of dominant languages ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank Sherrie Smith for her efficient and accurate transcription of the 18 interviews analyzed in this article I am grateful for a Faculty Research Grant, sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, which funded the interview study THE AUTHOR Elizabeth R Miller is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States Her recent work examines the construction of language ideologies in interactions involving adult immigrant learners of English, how learner agency is constituted in discourse, and qualitative research methodologies, particularly the co-constructed, mediated nature of interview data REFERENCES Ahearn, L M (2001) Language and agency Annual Review of Anthropology, 30, 109– 137 doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.30.1.109 Bamberg, M (2004) Narrative discourse and identities In J C Meister, T Kindt, W Schernus, & M Stein (Eds.), Narratology beyond literary criticism (pp 213–237) Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter Block, D (2007) The rise of identity in SLA research, post Firth and Wagner (1997) The Modern Language Journal, 91, 863–876 doi:10.1111/j.1540-4781.2007.00674.x Blommaert, J., Collins, J., & Slembrouck, S (2005) Spaces of multilingualism Language & Communication, 25, 197–216 doi:10.1016/j.langcom.2005.05.002 Butler, J (1990) Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity New York, NY: Routledge AGENCY IN THE MAKING 485 Butler, J (1993) Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘‘sex.’’ New York, NY: Routledge Butler, J (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative New York, NY: Routledge Bybee, J., Perkins, R., & Pagliuca, W (1994) The evolution of grammar: Tense, aspect and modality in the languages of the world Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press DaSilva Iddings, A C., & Katz, L (2007) Integrating home and school identities of recent-immigrant Hispanic English language learners through classroom practices Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 6, 299–314 Davies, B (1991) The concept of agency: A feminist poststructuralist analysis Social Analysis, 30, 42–53 de Fina, A (2003) Identity in narrative: A study in immigrant discourse Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Duranti, A (1994) From grammar to politics: Linguistic anthropology in a Western Samoan village Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Duranti, A (2006) Agency in language In A Duranti (Ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology (pp 451–473) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Gubrium, J F., & Holstein, J A (Eds.) (2003) Postmodern interviewing Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Hill, J H., & Irvine, J T (Eds.) (1993) Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press Lantolf, J P., & Thorne, S L (2006) Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development Oxford, England: Oxford University Press Lave, J., & Wenger, E (1991) Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A (2007) Disinventing and reconstituting languages Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters May, S (2005) Language rights: Moving the debate forward Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9, 319–347 doi:10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00295.x McKay, S L., & Wong, S C (1996) Multiple discourses, multiple identities: Investment and agency in second-language learning among Chinese adolescent immigrant students Harvard Educational Review, 66, 577–608 McKendy, J P (2006) ‘‘I’m very careful about that’’: Narrative and agency of men in prison Discourse & Society, 17, 473–502 doi:10.1177/0957926506063128 Miller, E (2009) Orienting to ‘‘being ordinary’’: The (re)construction of hegemonic ideologies among adult immigrant learners of English Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 6, 315–344 doi:10.1080/15427580903337446 Norton, B (1995) Social identity, investment, and language learning TESOL Quarterly, 29, 9–31 doi:10.2307/3587803 Norton, B (2000) Identity and language learning: Gender, ethnicity and educational change Harlow, England: Pearson Education O’Connor, P E (1994) ‘‘You could feel it through the skin’’: Agency and positioning in prisoners’ stabbing stories Text, 14, 45–75 Pavlenko, A., & Lantolf, J P (2000) Second language learning as participation and the (re)construction of selves In J P Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory and second language learning (pp 155–177) Oxford, England: Oxford University Press Pennycook, A (2001) Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Pennycook, A (2007) Global Englishes and transcultural flows New York, NY: Routledge Poynton, C (1993) Grammar, language and the social: Poststructuralism and systemicfunctional linguistics Social Semiotics, 3, 1–21 doi:10.1080/10350339309384407 486 TESOL QUARTERLY Poynton, C., & Lee, A (2000) Culture and text: An introduction In A Lee & C Poynton (Eds.), Culture and text: Discourse and methodology in social research and cultural studies (pp 1–18) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Price, S (1996) Comments on Bonny Norton Peirce’s ‘‘Social identity, investment, and language learning’’: A reader reacts TESOL Quarterly, 30, 331–337 doi:10.2307/3588147 Quigley, J (2000) The grammar of autobiography: A developmental account Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Quigley, J (2001) Psychology and grammar: The construction of the autobiographical self Theory & Psychology, 11, 147–170 doi:10.1177/0959354301112001 Ros i Soli, C (2007) Language learners’ sociocultural positions in the L2: A narrative approach Language and Intercultural Communication, 7, 203–216 doi:10.2167/laic203.0 Scheibman, J (2002) Point of view and grammar: Structural patterns of subjectivity in American English conversation Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Swain, M., & Deters, P (2007) ‘‘New’’ mainstream SLA theory: Expanded and enriched The Modern Language Journal, 91, 820–836 doi:10.1111/j.15404781 2007.00671.x Urciuoli, B (1996) Exposing prejudice: Puerto Rican experiences of language, race and class Boulder, CO: Westview Press van de Mieroop, D (2005) An integrated approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis in the study of identity in speeches Discourse & Society, 16, 107–130 doi:10.1177/0957926505048232 van Lier, L (2008) Agency in the classroom In J P Lantolf & M E Poehner (Eds.), Sociocultural theory and the teaching of second languages (pp 163–186) London, England: Equinox Vitanova, G (2005) Authoring the self in a non-native language: A dialogic approach to agency and subjectivity In J K Hall, G Vitanova, and L Marchenkova (Eds.), Dialogue with Bakhtin on second language learning: New perspectives (pp 149–169) Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Weedon C (1999) Feminism, theory and the politics of difference Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell Wiley, T G., & Lukes, M (1996) English-only and standard English ideologies in the U.S TESOL Quarterly,30, 511–535 doi:10.2307/3587696 Wilkinson, S., & Kitzinger, C (2003) Constructing identities: A feminist conversation analytic approach to positioning in action In R Harre´ & F Moghaddam (Eds.), The self and others: Positioning individuals and groups in personal, political and cultural contexts (pp 157–180) Westport, CT: Praeger AGENCY IN THE MAKING 487