Communicating Identities (Research and Resources in Language Teaching)

Communicating Identities is a book for language teachers who wish to focus on the topic of identity in the context of their classroom teaching. The work provides an accessible introduction to research and theory on language learner and language teacher identity. It provides a set of interactive, practical activities for use in language classrooms in which students explore and communicate about aspects of their identities. The communicative activities concern the various facets of the students’ own identities and are practical resources that teachers can draw on to structure and guide their students’ exploration of their identities. All the activities include a follow-on teacher reflection in which teachers explore aspects of their own identity in relation to the learner identities explored in the activities. The book also introduces teachers to practical steps in doing exploratory action research so that they can investigate identity systematically in their own classrooms.

Gary Barkhuizen is professor of applied linguistics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of language teacher education, teacher and learner identity, study abroad, and narrative inquiry. He is editor of Reflections on Language Teacher Identity Research (Routledge, 2017) and Qualitative Research Topics in Language Teacher Education (Routledge, 2019).

Pat Strauss is associate professor at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Her teaching and research interests include academic writing, student and teacher identity, language teacher education, and English for research and publication purposes.