Identity, Investment, and Faces of English Internationally

This article has been developed from a keynote address given at the June 2015 Faces of English conference held at the University of Hong Kong. The article examines the trajectory of Bonny Norton’s research on identity and language learning, highlighting her construct of investment, developed as a sociological complement to the psychological construct of motivation (Norton, 2013). An important focus of the paper is the expanded 2015 model of investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015), which responds to the changing communicative landscape of an increasingly digital world, and locates investment at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. Norton exemplifies her theories with data drawn from her collaborative research on English language learning in Canada, Pakistan, Uganda, and Iran. With reference to digital storytelling as a promising classroom practice, she argues that the challenge for English language teachers internationally is to promote learner investment in the language and literacy practices of classrooms by increasing the range of identities available to English language learners.