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Here I would like to talk about is social identity as discussed by Norton (2000). The theory of social identity he puts forward ‘assumes that power relations play a crucial role in social interactions between language learners and target language speakers ‘ (p. 12). I will get to the point of power relations affecting interaction, but first I would like to talk a little bit about what social identity means to me.
In Turkish, we have this saying ‘One language, one person; two languages, two persons.’ Originally it may mean something else, but to me, it always gives the meaning of adopting different personas while using different languages. The reason why I probably think that is highly related to my own sense of who I am. For instance, while using Turkish, I can never use an impolite word or expression, but can easily do so in English. I guess the culture in which I grew up in influences my behaviors in a similar way as well. While reading Pavlenko and Lantolf’s (2000) study, the comments of Mori resonated with me in that sense. She is one of the women from the study who returns to Japan after twenty years of residing in the US, and says she doesn’t have a voice in Japanese any more, and that she has lost her pragmatic competence, and finally abandoned speaking Japanese altogether as she thinks the language she speaks should define her, rejecting the cultural boundaries regarding her use of proper feminine language etc. Languages we speak reflect the culture they are used in, so in a way, it also reflects our identity in that culture as well, and being able to stand against its limitations is a brave move but also a reclaim of agency and it deserves respect. In a similar fashion, again for me, in English, it is easier to convey certain concepts or criticize in school context the government or talk about politics because it represents ‘freedom of speech’, but I found it difficult to do so in Turkish while teaching English. The surrounding factors made it challenging to make negative comments on certain issues, and so, at least in academic context, I avoided talking about ‘delicate’ topics in Turkish. I think, this is also related to my using language to distance myself from certain factors. For instance, when doing personal writing in Turkey, I was using English so that the audience is only me; I didn’t want anyone to read and understand what I was writing because it was personal, and here, I switched to Turkish with the same idea. And as for the content of my writing, I realized that when they are in Turkish, they seem more real and near, so if I am writing about some painful or difficult experiences for me to speak about out loud, I can do so more easily in English both in writing and in speaking because it feels like this problem is not mine and this is not me talking about it. So, I am distancing myself through language from the negative emotions and feelings, but I also want to express all the positive feelings in Turkish so that it becomes and feels more real and more like mine. I don’t know what it tells about my identity exactly, but that is something I have realized only recently; that language can be used as a form of distancing oneself or getting closer to deeper feelings about oneself.
This whole distancing idea also reminded me of the method Desuggestopedia developed in the 1970s. I remember one of the techniques used in the classroom was giving students foreign names so that don’t feel weird when they make mistakes. I always thought that was a- forgive my language but- a stupid idea, but now I came to realize when writing this that I am actually doing the same with myself. I may not be changing my name, but I am changing my personality, my identity in speaking different languages to distance myself from the situation. So, maybe it wasn’t a bad idea at all. But on the other hand, I also remember the story of Ewa becoming Eva (Pavlenko and Lantolf, 2000) and how it affected her idea of self and how she saw it as an undesired change in her identity because in a way she was changing who she was to fit in this new environment of English speaking people. Then, my criticism for Desuggestopedia returns: while giving students English names, aren’t we jeopardizing their formation of self which should be within their own agency? But I guess, when it is English, the language of power in many contexts especially in the academia, it doesn’t matter neither for children nor for adults because they need to ‘fit in’.

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As for the evolution of my teacher identity over the years, I finally feel liberated. There is no single truth to one’s identity, and I refuse to fit to one definition. I am just me, as a teacher. I am thankful to all the theories I have learned and continue to learn because they are the earth I come out of. I am thankful to all the professors I have had as they give me water every day, and I am thankful to all my students as they make me reframe everything I know about growing in this tiny place, showing me all the possibilities on earth- which is impossible to see if they don’t tell me through their stories. Everything and everyone I cross paths with in this journey have fed me well and made me who I am today. I am not from one place, nor am one race, nor speak one language, nor have only one experience, or tell one single story. And I want my students to feel the same way and know that they are appreciated for everything they are and have. This is a new and exciting journey for me because every tiny experience I am having here is helping me deconstruct all the boundaries I for so long deemed necessary and considered familiar and easy to handle. I am not just crossing them but re-shaping them at every step.
In a nutshell, I guess, I am in a stage of transition, the name of which I have not been able to find yet. And it is not just personal but also professional. I don’t have to find exact explanations at this second and I should just experience it as I believe the act of defining limits the expectations and the true essence of experience.
‘Happy is the one who says: I am me!’

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Pavlenko and Lantolf (2000) mentions the stages of loss and phases of recovery (p.162-163). One of the phases of loss is related to the inner voice. For Vygotsky, inner speech carries semantic meanings- a semantic black hole, and for Bakhtin, it is a private dialogue where the self is both the speaker and the listener (Pavlenko and Lantolf, p.165). For me I think it has been both.
During my undergrad, I watched a lot of US TV series and during that time, I was really getting used to ‘thinking in English’, too, which affected the language of my inner voice. I was reacting to outer world in English, often imitating what I had heard in a show but mostly not being aware of from which one, and at some point, I noticed that my Turkish was getting worse in that sense. Maybe worse is not a good word here, but I was having difficulty recalling certain Turkish words or expressions and preferring the English versions of them as it was easier to retreat from my memory. But that was mostly with people who knew English, mainly my friends from the university. In fact, such usage of English has been such a tradition in the university that people have come up with the name ‘Bogazici tarzancası’ for the way we spoke- mostly mixing two languages or using English words with the suffixation of Turkish or using them in Turkish structure. We have created a community there with a language of our own, mostly un-understandable to people outside of the circle, and often regarded as snobbish. However, that, too influenced the language of my inner dialogues.
The second phase of my inner voice, or inner language is related to my experiences in Spain. I had been studying Spanish for three years when I went to Spain to work as a language assistant. However, it wasn’t long before that I realized the regional language spoken there was not at all similar to what I had learned. Due to political reasons and many more social issues, the Valencian region claims they have a different language (Valenciano) than Standard Spanish (spoken around Madrid- Castellano). That was when I started to make more careful decisions before I opened my mouth. They would understand my Spanish, of course, but there were people who would refuse to respond just because it was not their Spanish. So, during that time, my inner world and my languages got confused. Even though it was very little, I had some Turkish thoughts, but it was mostly English because in any instance when people wouldn’t understand what I was saying or when I didn’t know how to express something in Spanish, I would turn to my English to make myself clear, and most of the time, that would solve the issue as the two language have certain lexical items in similar orthography or phonology, making it easier for the speakers of one to guess the meaning of a word in the other. Turkish had almost no place there as there was not a single person who would know the language; a situation which in a way forced me to think in two other languages. I was happy to notice at some point during my stay there that I was actually speaking to myself even in Spanish, which meant that I was internalizing the language and that I was getting more and more comfortable in this new linguistic environment, which meant a lot to me because I always considered the Spanish language a happy language or the language of the happy people (mostly because the cultural experiences I have had with the people who speak it). So, from this perspective, I was also happy when I was speaking Spanish (and not just in my head). My Spanish-speaking self was not worried about losing touch with my L1 at all because I had a back-up language (English). That is why when I returned to Turkey and started teaching English, not using Spanish in any way made me really upset.
Then, after a year, I decided to pursue an MA in one of the Turkish-medium universities studying Turkish as a foreign language to re-connect with my language and look at it from the perspective of a foreigner, and maybe unearthing the joyful features of it, but soon enough I realized that I did not like the sound of Turkish in academic contexts as it is heavily influenced by academic English and therefore sounded strange in use. Many of the academic texts I encountered were as if they were translated directly from an English text and did not really reflect the beauty of the Turkish language. So, I was becoming more foreign to my own language and decided to leave the ‘phony-ness’ of it. Now looking back, I am better able to define what it was that made me feel so weird about it. There was something about seeing Turkish like that that I could not quite articulate, but now I think I can. I was deeply disturbed by the power of English in the academic discourse. Even the Turkish language and literature scholars, who read and rely on English texts to get ahead in the field, produce texts heavily influenced by English and so moving further and further away from their own language. So, then, my inner language was neither totally Turkish nor English; it was a mixture of the two, at times vaguely Spanish when feeling nostalgic. So, I was feeling rather confused as to my own linguistic identity as well, having learned Turkish and even supported the ‘proper’ use of Turkish until the university, and spending five years studying academic English and seeing the value in it for a better future in the academia.

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he concept of investment as a complement to motivation (Norton, 2000) is the other connection I have made with my linguistic experiences as a language learner. Choosing when, where and with whom to speak, so having more agency as an adult language learner is highly consistent with my HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) personality trait, something I discovered very recently about myself. As an HSP, I can easily get overstimulated and it is not about being introvert or socially awkward. I am able to notice more subtle things around me, which causes me to have too much information to process and do so very quickly- it is not very quickly for a regular social interaction, but by the time I take in all the new and abundant stimuli, the social situation may require me to respond to the very overt one more quickly because that is the one available to many non-HSPs. And I have come to realize that it is also the same when I am conversing in another language- or my native language for that matter. I am usually a listener in a group of people, observing the others who are speaking and having a different conversation in my head and not caring if it gets out or not, and I usually choose to speak up only when I feel comfortable, which usually is when I am with only one person; more than one person can easily direct me to my inner conversation. So, my highly sensitive personality is the most important factor influencing the amount of investment I have for speaking up- in any language I speak. It is not the motivation per se, it is not the power relations involved, and it is not the social anxiety. So, with the many SLA theories we talked about, reducing the reason for not participating in interactions in different social discourses only to acquisition or the lack of motivation is clearly a mistake, and we were also able to see that with the women in the study Norton (2000) presented. Taking on different social roles helps us act in many different ways including the language we use and how we use it and for what purpose. If I think that speaking my mind in a group conversation with people who are highly-closed minded is useless, I may choose to keep it as a topic of conversation in my inner self or for people with whom I can have a better interaction with regarding the topic at hand. So, as a language learner, I am using my agency to use the language to convey my messages or not, as an adult, both because my highly sensitive self feels more comfortable that way or my lived-experiences tell me to use my antecedent knowledge on similar occasions that it is not going to lead anywhere, so why bother? I have acknowledged the fact that my choosing not to speak is related to my investment in the social situation at hand, and definitely not due to my lack of knowledge or acquisition of a specific language (because it is the same in my first language) and I would be happy to discuss the same matter with my students so that they can also build their confidence around chosen-participation rather than outside and wrong assumption of their lack of knowledge and experience in the target language. My discovery of my own personality, and the idea of investment and claiming one’s right to speak by using their agency is also shaping my attitude towards how to approach adult language learners.

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And now, in the US for six months, studying TESOL, and improving and expanding my knowledge and experiences day by day, what does my inner voice tell me? Which language does she speak exactly? Even this six months has had its ups and downs in that regard. During the first weeks, switching to Turkish with Turkish speakers on campus was quite difficult and I was also feeling inadequate in my English for some reason. I felt like I lost my fluency when compared to my English-speaking- self back in Turkey. On the other side of it, I found myself speaking Turkish words with certain people (who don’t even know a Turkish word) or occasional Turkish words in between the sentences for no apparent reason. These were the times when I stopped for a second and thought about what it might be saying about my changing self. After talking about the theories this week, now I am asking myself if this was a phase of loss or reconstruction because through more exposure to the English language both in academic contexts and in daily life and with diverse interactions I have had over the months have changed the process. Now, more than ever, I am thinking in English, I am even talking in English to myself when I am alone or when I am talking to babies or pets even. If there is no external factor (or social reasons) to influence my speaking or the way I use a language, what does the language I speak tell me about who I am?