The Link between ESL Students’ Social Identities and Their Right to Speak in English

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the link between ESL students’ social identities and their opportunities to speak in English. Drawing on Bourdieu’s (1991) concept of the right to speak, the researcher emphasized the importance of ESL students’ opportunities to speak in the development of their communicative skills and examined how their opportunities to speak were structured according to their social positioning by using multiple sources of data, such as participants’ autobiographies, journals, participant observation, interview, and fieldnotes. The results revealed that ESL students’ social identities and their opportunities to speak were closely related because being an outsider of the mainstream prevented them from engaging in intensive social interaction with other English speakers, whereas becoming an insider of the mainstream facilitated their social interaction processes through which they could be exposed to varied interactive resources and practices.