Exploring Investment of Mexican Speakers of English as a Second Language

Abstract

While teaching English as a foreign language in private universities and in large corporations in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, I was always interested in why these professionals decided to enroll into these English courses and what leads them to seriously invest in learning the language. Though I only have had the opportunity to teach a small group of working professionals, I heard very similar answers to that question, and discovered something that I found interesting: when Mexican speakers of English as a second language are forced to study and use English, they often are averse to investing in the language until they find a concrete personal need to communicate in English. I wanted to explore this issue through the concepts of investment and agency and look at speakers who have taken control of their own learning and use it for their own purposes. Investment is a concept first introduced by Norton (1995) and remodeled by her and Darvin (2015) as a way of studying how and why second language speakers decide to learn and use their second language. Norton’s concept of investment demonstrates that there is more to consider as to why speakers of English as a second language become motivated and invested in learning and communicating in English. There are few studies on the investment of speakers of English as a second language in an EFL environment (Darvin & Norton, 2015). By studying Mexican speakers of English as a second language on when and why they invest in English, this research can have possible pedagogical implications in the classroom and help educators understand these types of learners better. Using semistructured interviews with the five participants in this study, I seek to understand their individual experiences while giving them a voice. Through their experiences I hope to shed light on the motivations, agency, investment of others.