As a timely response to L2 learning in the globalized and digitalized world, the book offers fresh insights into empowering young adult L2 learners to exercise agency to gain membership in different communities of practices and provides educational researchers and practitioners with implications for promoting culturally relevant pedagogies in the ecology of L2 classrooms.

Journal of Pragmatics

Min Wang’s fine-grained case study of three Chinese learners of English in the USA provides much insight into the way international students navigate complex transnational identities. A timely and important contribution to our understanding of language learning in the digital age.

- Bonny Norton, University of British Columbia, Canada,

Min Wang has conducted a careful analysis of the positioning moves and agentive actions of three Chinese students learning English in a university-based language institute in the U.S. By examining multiple dimensions of these students’ positioning work across time, through varied modalities, and in different locations—both physical and virtual, Wang provides a powerful demonstration of how identity, agency and language learning are interdependent phenomena. Applied linguists and other scholars will welcome this important contribution to the growing body of research using holistic, ecological approaches when examining agency and language learning.

- Elizabeth Miller, University of North Carolina,