Multiple, dynamic and complex: an investigation of investment in English as a Second Language on Facebook
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Date
15/12/2022Author
Treloar, Sarah Jane Ruth
Metadata
Abstract
Social networking sites such as Facebook permeate many areas of modern
life and are being used by second language users and learners. How they
use these spaces for language use and development, and the impact that it
has on them, is an under-researched area.
This thesis expands on Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment to
investigate how target language users of English take up the right to speak,
or more accurately in the context, the right to post, in English on Facebook. It
takes a posthumanist perspective on investment, a perspective that has been
garnering increasing attention in applied linguistics and second language
acquisition, but which has not been used to investigate investment.
The research focused on thirteen individuals from a variety of walks of life
and their interaction on Facebook in English. Data were gathered through
multiple face-to-face and online interviews, as well as online participant
observation of Facebook interaction over an extended data collection period.
A thematic analysis of these data examined the extent to which participants
were invested in the use of English on Facebook. The analysis revealed that
the infrastructure, the functionality of Facebook, and the affordances that
arose from that functionality were essential to participants’ investment in
using English. Through these affordances, including visibility, persistence,
spreadability and searchability (boyd 2014), participants made use of their
social, linguistic and cultural capital. They positioned themselves not as non-native English language users, but as friend connections and experts in
certain fields, and received validation for these subject positions. They
scaffolded their English competencies through the use of spatial repertoires
such as language tools and with recourse to language processing time, thus
bolstering their language confidence and broadening opportunities to invest
in the language. Facebook played to the language and social media
competencies of some participants, and they engaged in identity production
via impression management. Participants’ audiences were culturally and
linguistically diverse, as well as belonging to different arenas of their social
worlds. Participants were strategic about how they posted themselves into
being on Facebook, sometimes making themselves less visible and at times
requiring no audience at all.
These findings suggest that Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of investment
needs to expand to encompass the importance of the sociomateriality of
Facebook. Investment needs to be viewed as arising from capacities
produced from the entanglement of intra-actions, that is, as an assemblage,
in relation to Facebook. These assemblages produced different capacities for
investment dependent on the participant and the nature and coalescence of
the intra-actions involved, and brought an added complexity and dynamism
to investment. Social capital, data-as-capital, the language functionality of the
site and its ubiquity produced Facebook as a space of legitimate English
language use.
This research contributes to knowledge about second language acquisition in
digital settings. The findings are of use not only to researchers in language
education and digital education, but to teachers and second language
learners who can use them to gain a greater understanding of how
investment in social networking sites can occur or be hindered. It contributes
to the call for new pedagogies, theories and policies to account for language
use and learning in online spaces (Darvin and Norton 2016a). By placing
investment in a sociomaterial context, this thesis brings the concept of
investment into the arena of social networking sites, and provides a
theoretical framework for further research in this area.