By drawing on multiple examples of real-world language learning situations, this book explores the subjective aspects of the language learning experience. The author encourages readers to consider language learning from new, diverse, and unique perspectives. The book analyses data from a variety of sources, including language memoirs, online data from language learners in chat rooms, and text messaging exchanges. In the analysis of this data, the book looks at the relationship between symbolic form and the development of a multilingual subjectivity, links with memory, emotion, and the imagination, and the implications for language teaching pedagogy.

This is an attempt to redraw the boundaries of foreign language study. It focuses attention not just on cultural knowledge as a necessary aspect of communicative competence, but as an educational objective in its own right, as an end as well as a means of language learning.