UNC Charlotte English professor Elizabeth R. Miller interviewed 18 adult immigrant small business owners about their experiences learning and using English in their places of work, to form the foundation for her new book, The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making.
Multilingual Matters published the book as part of its “New Perspectives on Language and Education Series.”
Miller’s book focuses on the role of agency in adult immigrant language learning. Agency can be described as the ability of individuals to take action within society.
Miller’s study is informed by the work of socio-historical psychologist Lev Vygotsky and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She draws on Judith Butler’s performativity theory in arguing that language learner agency is an inherently social phenomenon rather than an individual capacity. The significance of adopting a performativity perspective, she contends, is that it leads one to focus on the social, historical, and ideological processes that constitute agency. Because of this, she adds, one can “evaluate the effects and/or effectiveness of such processes and imagine ways to intervene productively.”
In a review, Anna De Fina, from Georgetown University, writes, “In this volume, Elizabeth Miller offers an in-depth analysis of adult learners’ own accounts of their very personal paths towards proficiency in English.” She continues, “Miller’s focus on the learner as an individual with unique and complex trajectories, desires and engagements exemplifies the latest and most fruitful developments in Applied Linguistics. Miller’s book will constitute a fundamental point of reference for sociocultural linguists interested in agency and in qualitative approaches to research on learning.”
Miller is an associate professor in the Department of English, where she teaches language and linguistics courses. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Grace College, a master’s degree from Indiana-Purdue University at Fort Wayne, and two master’s degrees and her doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Her research interests focus on learning English as a second or additional language, and the issues of constructing a social identity through language learning, power dynamics, and language ideologies. She investigates how these social dynamics are constituted using fine-grained discourse analysis.
She has written journal articles including “Agency, Language Learning and Multilingual Spaces” in the journal Multilingua (2012), and “Positioning Selves, Doing Relational Work, and Constructing Identities in Interview Talk” in the Journal of Politeness Research (2013). Another co-edited book, Theorizing and Analyzing Agency in Second Language Learning: Interdisciplinary Approaches, is scheduled for release in December 2014.
Words by Bryant Carter, student intern
