A DISCURSIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH FOR SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION RESEARCH

This chapter provides an overview of discursive psychology, an increasingly influential approach to the study of psychology and meaning in talk and text across a range of disciplines. What distinguishes discursive psychology from other forms of discourse and interaction analysis-and from cognitive psychology-is its central concern with psychological topics (e.g., cognition, emotion, memory, perception, attribution) and how they are locally produced and oriented to as publicly available rather than internal phenomena. The chapter begins with an outline of the origins of discursive psychology, highlighting its aims, analytic features, and unique contributions to social psychological research. It then examines how discursive psychology, specifically its analytic orientation, constructionist perspective, and project of respecification, offers powerful tools to redefine and recontextualize our topics of inquiry. The chapter concludes with a discussion of potential applications of discursive psychology for second language research and suggestions for further reading.