'Sink or Swim?' The Relationship between Vietnamese Postgraduate Students' Identities and their L2 Experience in the UK

Advancing the ‘social turn’ in Second Language Acquisition research requires further research exploring the relationship between identity and L2 acquisition in different contexts and with different groups of L2 learners. Identities considered most relevant to L2 learning and communication are identified. A mixed methods approach – combining focus group interviews and self-completed diaries - is endorsed as an effective strategy for capturing and understanding the relationships.

Data was collected from fourteen postgraduate Vietnamese students in UK higher education establishments over a period of twelve weeks. Participants were required to keep daily structured diaries and attend monthly focus group interviews. This study utilises Norton’s definition of social identity, Barna’s definition of communicative competence and Giles and Byrne’s Intergroup Model to understand how ‘identity’ is implicated in shaping participants’ L2 interaction experiences and their L2 communicative competence. The findings confirm the relationship between ‘identity’ and both the patterning of social interactions and communicative competence. Each of the three main theories engaged with offers explanations for participants’ L2 experiences. However, few exceptional cases, and the ‘between-subject’ variation and ‘within subject’ routinisation are not yet fully explained by the key theories