The Narrative Construction of Identities in Critical Education

The Narrative Construction of Identities in Critical Education explores the issue of identity construction in conversational and humorous narratives, as well as the exploitation of such texts in language education programs cultivating critical language skills. Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, the study first proposes a model of analysis focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identities in everyday stories told in peer groups. The data investigated comes from recorded conversations among adolescents belonging to different sociocultural groups. It involves past events of their personal and social lives and refers to their relationships with, and behavior towards, their peers, families, teachers, and other authority figures. The authors then suggest how this kind of material and analysis could be included in language teaching curricula, aiming at raising students’ critical language awareness. In this context, a model for the exploitation of conversational narratives in language teaching is proposed.