‘Language of Adult Immigrants’ subject of English professor’s new work

English professor Elizabeth Miller interviewed 18 adult immigrant small business owners about their experiences learning and using English in their places of work to form the foundation for the recently published “The Language of Adult Immigrants: Agency in the Making.”

Multilingual Matters published the book as part of its “New Perspectives on Language and Education Series.”

Miller’s book focuses on the role of agency in adult immigrant language learning. Agency can be described as the ability of individuals to take action within society.

Miller’s study is informed by the work of socio-historical psychologist Lev Vygotsky and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. She draws on Judith Butler’s performativity theory in arguing that language learner agency is an inherently social phenomenon rather than an individual capacity. The significance of adopting a performativity perspective, she contended, is that it leads one to focus on the social, historical and ideological processes that constitute agency. Because of this, she added, one can “evaluate the effects and/or effectiveness of such processes and imagine ways to intervene productively.”

Miller is an associate professor of English, and she teaches language and linguistics courses. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Grace College, a master’s degree from Indiana-Purdue University at Fort Wayne and two master’s degrees and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Her research interests focus on learning English as a second or additional language and the issues of constructing a social identity through language learning, power dynamics and language ideologies. She investigates how these social dynamics are constituted using fine-grained discourse analysis.