This state-of-the-art review is based on the fundamental idea that political economy should be adopted as a frame for research and discussion in applied linguistics as part of a general social turn which has taken hold in the field over the past three decades. It starts with Susan Gal's (1989) early call for such a move in sociolinguistics and…

This article explores how class might be brought to the fore as an identity inscription in studies of second language learning, alongside other identity inscriptions such as gender, ethnicity and national identity, which have been the focus of rather more research. It begins by clarifying what is meant by class through a brief discussion of the…

Although Firth and Wagner (1997) did not explicitly discuss the issue of identity in second language acquisition (SLA) research, their article was symptomatic of a general trend to open up SLA to social theory and sociological and sociolinguistic research, which in turn led some researchers to explore links between second language (L2) learning…