Performing Masculinity and Constructing Reader Identities: One Immigrant Adolescent Boy's Identity Negotiation and Reading Investment

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Constructing and Negotiating Identities Across Learning Contexts

Abstract

This paper reports an ethnographic case study examining one immigrant adolescent boy’s negotiation of masculine identity and his investment in reading practices in one English as Second Language (ESL) classroom at a U.S. high school. Through an analysis of field notes, classroom interactions, interviews, and artifacts informed by interactional sociolinguistics and critical discourse analysis, I systematically examined Omar’s performances of reading identities and masculine identities across time and space and in the social ecology of the ESL classroom. My analysis indicated that his masculinity negotiation and his gendered notions of reading, coupled with the teacher’s autonomous model of reading instruction and the dichotomous construction of reader identities, collectively impacted his investment in reading practices.

Author

• Kongji Qin, New York University