Rethinking ESL Literacy Education in Multicultural Conditions: the Passage Through Cultural-Historical Psychology

Abstract

This thesis explores new possibilities in the field of ESL education to address the issue of the growing cultural-semiotic heterogeneity and polyphony in contemporary classrooms. Covering a wide range of areas including cultural-historical and sociocultural psychology, postcolonial literature, applied linguistics, studies in cultural semiotics and the New Literacy Studies, this thesis seeks to move beyond the limitations of rationalist approaches to second language and literacy learning. However, a sociocultural perspective on ESL education reveals not only the constraints and limitations of cognitivist frameworks of learning but also the compacting of identity and language politics into a closed logic of binarised categories. Therefore, an attempt is made to crack open these categories by drawing on the concepts of Thirdspace and cultural-semiotic hybridity.