Personal identity development, practices, and access to resources in the activity of podcasting storybook writing

By using ethnography as a method, I utilized Lave and Wenger’s community of practice as a major lens and Vygotsky’s genetic law of cultural development as a complementary lens, to visualize the second-language learning (SLL) that occurred in the activity of podcasting storybook writing. I organized my analysis on three intertwining themes: personal identity development, practices, and access to resources. This activity consisted of two practices: the practice of picture-based storytelling and the practice of story-podcasting. The former practice structured an initiation-response-evaluation (IRE)/ initiation-response-follow up (IRF) setting, while the latter practice built a community-of-learners (CoL) setting. In this thesis, I show that the practices structured not only participation forms but also social relations. These structured social relations shaped personal identity development. The personal identity development affected access to learning resources. In addition, access to learning resources was also practice-dependent. I show what the learning resources were, and how the students created, accessed and made sense of them in the practice of picture-based storytelling.