Narrative, Identities, and Experiences in Discourse Practices of Migrants

Abstract

The study of narrative has fascinated scholars in different areas of the social sciences, including linguistics, psychology, history, and sociology. Narrative opens a window into identities, ways of life, moral systems, ideologies, and cultural constructs. By placing themselves and others within story-worlds, narrators choose categories related to agency and belonging, thereby affording a glimpse into their perception of social roles as well as their relations to social actions and the emotions evoked. The chapter focuses on the ways in which the use of narrative analysis in research can illuminate issues related to migrant identities and their multilingual practices. It highlights how a practice-oriented approach to narratives allows researchers to put forth contextualised and highly nuanced views of migrant identities. The authors also discuss how the use of narratives reveals close connections between second language learners’ approaches to the target language and the learning contexts in which they construct and negotiate multitudes of identities. Through the study of narratives, researchers can point to the inventories of identities that are deployed by migrants and language learners in specific communities as well as the ways in which such identities emerge and are embedded and negotiated in context, thus escaping essentialist views of migrants and language learners.