The aim of our article is to study written narratives as a way of expressing emerging identities as second language (L2) users. We compare narratives written by Finnish students of Swedish during their first semester (24 essays) with data collected after the third year of study (9 essays), thereby trying to figure out how the university context has affected the development of the students as L2 users. L2 learning is regarded as a complex project entailing constant identity formation as a plurilingual subject. We see identity as a process, as something flexible, hybrid and multifaceted. Identity evolves in participation and it always includes a temporal dimension. The language learning process can be seen as a construction of a new third place (Kramsch 1993) between the source language and the target language. For the purpose of this study we define this place as an abstract field containing all the ingredients that each student sees as part of his or her language learning narrative....

The paper examines communicative repertoires and cultural identity construction amomaps outng students of the National University of Lesotho in the social media space. The paper argues that culture and cultural identity on social media are a complex. Specifically, the paper maps out the manner and ways in which the students deployed communicative repertoires on social media to index their individual and collective identities. Cultural convergence and divergence together with hybridity provides a solid foundation on which the paper is anchored. The paper combines Fishman (1965, 1972) conceptualisation of domain and Halliday and Hassan's (1976) approach to discourse analysis as methods for analysing the data. The study is qualitative. In all, 40 students participated in the study. Three groups of 10 students took part in different focus group discussions while ten students were interviewed. The research also analysed screen shots of the students' posts, comments and communication on various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp to find out how they pointed to the students' individual and collective identities. The paper concludes that on social media culture and cultural identity can take many forms and that a " glocalised " linguistic community is a community where both the local and global linguistic resources available to a community are deployed for a variety of communicative purposes. These communicative repertoires employed on social media mark out the individual and collective identity of the of the students.

Identity construction is a derivation from perceptions of others and oneself. The language and actuations of people form parts of the identity that they project (self-identity) and are constructed by others (social identity). This study aimed to provide a perspective on the creation of social identity on Facebook through the language codes used and topics discussed in the respondents' Facebook newsfeeds. The researcher collected a total of 250 messages from the respondents' accounts. A thematic analysis was carried out to highlight the identities projected by the respondents. Overall, seven social identities of the respondents emerged in the analyses. These are linguistic competence in L2, ability to fit in, patriotic sense, sense of openness, expressiveness, socialness, and religiosity.

The advent of the Internet has given rise to a wealth of online environments through which the everyday construction of identities are mediated by textual and multimodal tools involving what are arguably new literacies and communicative genres. In this chapter, we explore chronologically, and in some cases also ontologically, new language and literacy practices such as Internet-mediated intercultural communication, blogging and instant messaging, and fan fiction communities that enable learners to develop language skills as they participate in socially meaningful practices. Drawing upon socioculturally informed identity research (e.g., Block, 2007; Bucholz & Hall, 2005; Gee, 1996, 2004; Pavlenko & Lantolf, 2000), we describe Internet-mediated interactions that involve indexical linkages to macro-level categories and fluid shifts in language choice, stance and style that enable participants to move forward a variety of social actions. Through these analyses, we suggest that language development in online environments is intimately linked to the capacity to construct functional selves through interaction and empirically, we assess various Internet-mediated contexts as sites for such engagements.

■ ABSTRACT: The present study deals with issues of relations between gender ideologies and language ideologies, with a view to discussing the hypothesis of the convergence between linguistic hegemonies and the hegemonic order of gender, underpinned by Western ethnocentric tradition. It has been developed using examples extracted from two feminist activist Facebook communities. These communities have been the object of a virtual ethnographic study since 2013. This research focuses on the metapragmatic function carried out by the comments of the participants in those communities. It is guided by an understanding of language as social action (BAUMAN; BRIGGS, 1990); and of the concepts of "language ideology" (WOOLARD, 1998), discursive conflict (BRIGGS, 1996) and "metapragmatic attack" (JACQUEMET, 1994). The understanding of processes of identity construction in relation to power dispute and control in the contexts of interaction and the social world (SIGNORINI, 1998; MOITA LOPES, 2010) also plays a key role. Gender/sexuality hegemonies as well as linguistic hegemonies are co-articulated in space-time, thereby fulfilling the purposes of (dis)crediting arguments, face-saving (or threatening), and (re)orientating interactions. This occurs particularly when attempting to develop a set of language-use norms, which evokes a school-related cultural model and is capable of establishing relationships between said model and the ability of individuals to understand the gender-and sexuality-related issues under discussion. ■