Negotiating learner identities and success: a linguistic ethnography with late-arrival multilingual learners in a secondary school
Creators: name: Valenzuela, Hannah
Publisher: name: College of Arts, Humanities and Education, University of Derby
Year: 2025
Subjects: multilingual, EAL, identity, linguistic ethnography

description: This thesis offers rich insights into the under-researched experiences of late arrival multilingual learners in English secondary schools. It examines how they co-construct and resist learner identities through interactions with peers and staff, and how these identities are positioned within majoritarian stories of success. 
It focuses on four recently-arrived young people in a secondary school in the West Midlands of England with data gathered through conducting a linguistic ethnography between 2019 and 2022. Analysis is based on observational fieldnotes including interactions recorded in mainstream and intervention lessons, ethnographic and more formal interviews with the four learners and teaching staff, and a learner focus group. The analysis centres on accessing a deep understanding of the experiences of each young person, using the tools of ethnography and Conversation Analysis to analyse data, including through the detailed study of their interactions.
Identity is explored by employing the lens of Positioning Theory (Davies and Harré 1990), where it is constructed at micro, meso and macro levels through the co-positioning of participants in talk in (dis)alignment with storylines about success, multilingualism and learning which circulate at these three scales. Local understandings of success are uncovered through the concepts of Model Minorities (Gillborn 2008) and Imagined Communities (Norton 2001), ideal learners (Archer and Francis 2007) and educational triage (Gillborn and Youdell 2000). 
The thesis makes three main arguments which reinterpret and extend these established concepts of success to consider the multilingual and transnational dimensions of new arrivals’ learner identities. Firstly, I argue that while multilingual new arrivals negotiate classroom positions, teaching staff hold significant power to make these (un)available, resulting in greater or fewer opportunities for learning content and English language. Secondly, over time, these momentary interactional positions sediment into meso-level identities which align more or less closely with a construct I propose of the ideal EAL learner. These alignments enable schools to triage newly-arrived learners according to their perceived potential value for formal measures of success, realised through national exams at the age of sixteen. 
Thirdly, this identity work takes place within macro-level storylines about multilingualism, success and the ‘good immigrant’, which coalesce in a racialised and meritocracy-driven construct I call the EAL Model Minority. While these majoritarian constructs drive institutional and national notions of success for multilingual learners, the learners additionally envision success in richer, more humanitarian terms through the Imagined Communities to which they (seek to) belong. I argue that recognising learners’ identities as members of Imagined Communities creates a more holistic understanding of success, providing a counter-story to the majoritarian view and a more inclusive understanding of multilingual learners in mainstream classrooms.