Constructing Words, Constructing Selves

Although the act of constructing one’s identity through poetry has become commonplace, this may be counterintuitive when considering a non-native language; poetry, after all, is deviant in its language use and defies standard forms. In this regard, it would be meaningful to examine in what ways poetry writing in students' non-native languages contributes to the process of their identity construction. The objective of this study is to follow the process of identity construction through poetry by pre-service English teachers (PSTs) for whom English is a foreign language. The data were collected from 90 PSTs (four cohorts) between 2017 and 2022 and analyzed using two complementary methodological approaches: content and linguistic analyses. While the content analysis was aimed at identifying explicitly conveyed messages, the linguistic analysis helped to pinpoint more subtle thoughts and feelings. The linguistic analysis focused on the PSTs’ use of tenses, voice, pronouns, metaphoric and dichotomic language. The findings show that distinct types of writing, reflective and creative, contribute differently to identity work conducted. Both the content and linguistic analyses of the poetry written in the PSTs creative writing class show that many of the PSTs use a number of distancing techniques – metaphors, grammatical constructions (passive voice, conditionals, oscillation between tenses), and dichotomies – that are not found in their reflective prose writing. These distancing techniques, paradoxically, allow the PSTs to reveal themselves and construct identities through their writing in their second or third language. Whereas the content of the reflective writing confirms that the PSTs used the poetry to explore and open up inner worlds, it is the compact, dense form of the poem that allows this to happen. It has been found, however, that it is precisely the ability to play with language that makes space for motifs of identity construction to emerge.