The Impact of Identity Aspects on EFL Learners' Achievement in Iranian Academic Context

After the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Applied Linguistics took a social turn and made the sociocultural perspective its primary point of investigation, SLA researchers became more interested in the link between identity (class, culture, race, gender, sexuality, etc.) and language learning. Hence, the present study aimed at identifying the impact of identity aspects on the Iranian learners' English language achievements of the students of Medicine at Yasuj University of Medical Sciences (YUMS). Likewise, the study attempted to find the impact of demographic factors on language achievement and aspects of identity among Iranian EFL learners. To fulfill the objectives and find answers to the posed questions, a questionnaire representing aspects of identity and consisting of ۴۵ Likert items (personal: ۱۰ items + social: ۷ items + collective: ۸ items + relational: ۱۰ items + special: ۱۰ items) was distributed among ۷۶ language learners majoring in Medicine at YUMS. Both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were run on the data. The results demonstrated no significant relationship between language achievement and the aspects of identity. To be exact, the present paper revealed that none of the identity aspects was a predicting variable for language achievement in the Iranian academic context. Among the demographic factors, only gender could account for two aspects of identity, namely, personal and relational identities. Evidently, the results were local not universal.

Keywords:

Aspects of Identity , collective identity , Social Identity , Relational Identity , Personal Identity , Language Achievement