Estudios de lingüística inglesa aplicada ISSUES IN LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY RESEARCH IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS David Block Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) dblock@dal.udl.cat DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/elia.2013.i13.01 Identity has become a key construct in applied linguistics over the past 30 years, as more and more researchers have heeded Norton Peirce’s (1995: 12) call for ‘a comprehensive theory of social identity that integrates the language learner and the language learning context’. In this article, my aim is to discuss what I see as issues arising in identity research in applied linguistics. I start with a brief consideration of why identity has become so central in applied linguistics, before discussing the poststructuralist model of identity which has been adopted by the vast majority of researchers. I then move to consider three more substantive issues: (1) the potential beneits of a more psychological angle when most language and identity research tends to be predominantly social; (2) the importance of clarifying the interrelationship between individual agen- cy and social structures in language and identity research; and (3) the potential beneits of including a socioeconomic stratiication and social class angle in research which tends to prime identity politics (identity inscriptions such as race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality and lan- guage), over the material conditions of life. ELIA 13, 2013, pp. 11-46