The applied linguistic individual - Phil Benson

Research in language acquisition has traditionally steered clear of notions of learner individuality favouring instead to search for universal acquisition processes, or emphasising the psychological/sociological group characteristics over those of individuals. More recently, however, autonomy, agency and identity have begun to emerge as important constructs through which researchers are seeking to understand relationships between individuals and the social contexts in which they learn and use languages, and case studies of individuals have become a preferred approach to applied linguistics research. The contributions in this volume of essays explore the important questions that these developments raise about the relationship between the social and individual and the philosophical and methodological issues they create. The contributors explore how individuality is conceptualised in socially-oriented approaches to applied linguistics research, including sociocultural theory, situated learning, imagined communities, complexity theory, and autonomy theory. Is there a tension between the social and the individual in these approaches, and if so, how is it manifested and resolved in empirical research?