Foreign Language Identity and its Relationship with Travelling and Educational Level

Abstract

This study explored the relationship between identity and learning English by designing and administering a 30-item Foreign Language Identity Scale (FLIS) to 470 female participants enrolled in English courses offered at advanced levels in private institutes in Mashhad, Iran. The application of the principal axis factoring to the responses and rotating the factors resulted in extracting six latent variables, i.e., idealized society, idealized communication, idealized means, idealized opportunities, global connection, and global self-expression, explaining forty percent of variance in the FLIS. With the exception of the last, the first five factors revealed strong interrelationships among themselves and thus showed that female Iranians in Mashhad learn English by creating an identity in an idealized society in which they can acquire the means to communicate best and find the opportunity they lack, reveal and improve the personality they possess, get better jobs and connect to the rest of the world. The foreign language identity, however, seems to disappear when the learners go abroad and study at universities.

Self and Language Anxiety

“…The developing of FL self has also appeared in the previous literature (e.g., Benson et al, 2012;Khodadady & Navari, 2012;Shin, 2010). In Shin's (2010) qualitative study on twelve adults of mixed heritage backgrounds with one English-speaking parent and one immigrant parent who speaks another ethnic language, one of the participants, Julie, is half Japanese and half White, but she claimed that she never learned to speak Japanese growing up due to her mother, who never spoke to her in Japanese.…”

“…In Khodadady and Navari's (2012) quantitative research on a mix of high-school, college, graduate-level female advanced English learners' FL identity and English learning with different disciplines in Iran, the results suggested that based on the learners' educational level, high-school, college, and the learners who plan to study abroad, their English (FL) helps them establish their idealized FL identity. In Benson et al's (2012) study, one of the participants, Selina, stated that after working in the university's International Office in UK, and then returning to Hong Kong, she finally believed that she has achieved English proficiency (i.e., self-confidence).…”

The Power of English in Pakistan: Exploring the Views of University Students

“…To further create an authenticity of views, a survey using a questionnaire was carried out as in some latest research studies (Khodadady & Navari, 2012). Both the methodologies give a true picture of how University students harbor views about English and in what ways are they controlled by it.…”