Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Linguistics and Education 22 (2011) 10–22 Telling tales: Discursive space and narratives in ESOL classrooms James Simpson ∗ University of Leeds, School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK Available online 13 January 2011 Abstract This paper is about narrative and identity in classes of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). ESOL students, adult migrants to the English-dominant West, are positioned by policy and by their institutions primarily as potential employees and as test-takers. The paper considers ways in which ESOL students negotiate and perhaps resist the identity positions offered to them in policy and institutional discourse. I adopt a broadly constructivist approach to identity in narrative in my analysis of interaction in one ESOL lesson. The analysis advances a current theme in research into the language learning of minority language adults in migration contexts: bringing the outside in. Drawing on notions of positioning in interaction (Davies & Harré, 1990) and in narrative tellings (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008) I demonstrate how, by claiming discursive space in ongoing classroom discourse, students can introduce into the talk aspects of their life story narratives. The analysis suggests that claiming space to do so extends students’ options for the bringing in of a range of identity positions – and of opportunities for learning – as they open up, through narrative, aspects of their identities that remain under-explored when classroom talk is limited to instrumental concerns. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: ESOL; Narrative; Identity 1. Introduction Adult migrants to English-dominant countries want and need to learn English for all sorts of reasons: at the forefront may well be concerns about employment, housing, their children’s education, and simply getting by in a new country. Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) address these broad concerns in class in a range of ways: some focus on the immediate problems that students bring into class, while others prefer to avoid incorporating into lessons the challenges which migrants face in their everyday lives (Baynham, Roberts, Cooke, Simpson, & Ananiadou, 2007; see also Cooke & Simpson, 2008; Hodge, 2004). Whatever their chosen approach, ESOL teachers are working in contexts in which the policy and institutional understandings of ESOL are increasingly narrow. This branch of English language teaching and learning is largely viewed by policy makers worldwide as being in service to the economy. In contemporary ESOL in England over the past decade or so, students have also become subject to excesses of the bureaucratisation of practice, in particular to a rigid qualifications framework. In combination, ESOL students are positioned in policy and institutional discourse, if not by teachers and students themselves, in a limited, deficit way as potential employees and as test-takers. This paper considers how they might negotiate and perhaps resist the identity positions offered to them by policy and by their institutions by ‘bringing the outside in’, by claiming discursive space to introduce into classroom discourse their life story narratives. ∗ Tel.: +44 0113 343 4687; fax: +44 0113 343 4541. E-mail address: j.e.b.simpson@education.leeds.ac.uk 0898-5898/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.linged.2010.11.005