The Personal Is Political: What Natasha Lvovich and Karen Ogulnick's Personal Stories Tell Us About Identity, Language Learning, and Sociocultural Positioning
✍ Scribed by Angel M.Y Lin
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2000
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 57 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0898-5898
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Finding one's place and voice in this world and negotiating one's position in relation to others is a recurrent theme in the language learning biographies of Natasha Lvovich and Karen Ogulnick. The two authors have very different life histories, but they have produced equally powerful personal narratives about their journeys into different languages and cultures, about their developing understandings of their shifting identities, about their struggles to be connected to others on an egalitarian footing, and about their desires to be at ease with their own differentness. Their personal stories offer us a rare chance to see ``how the political is already embedded in the personal'' (Ogulnick, p. 141). And their firstperson descriptions of their language learning processes force us to rethink many of our theories of second/foreign language acquisition.
IN SEARCH OF SELF IN THE FACE OF DOMINANT OTHER
Recurrent in Natasha Lvovich and Karen Ogulnick's language learning autobiographies is the theme that language learning is inseparable from one's search for one's own identity(ies) in relation to others. Being ethnic Jewish and female, Natasha Lvovich and Karen Ogulnick each had childhood experiences in which some dominant Other marginalized their identities, albeit