Investment
Not “Is she motivated?” but “Is she invested?”
Investment is Bonny Norton’s term for a learner’s commitment to a language, shaped by social relations and history, and made in the hope of gaining resources and identities they value.
Lan is the most diligent learner in her evening class, yet she barely speaks. A questionnaire might label her shy or unmotivated. Bonny Norton Peirce (1995) argued that SLA theory treated motivation and anxiety as fixed traits of individuals, ignoring the power relations that decide who gets to speak, and to whom. In a year-long study of five immigrant women in Canada, she found that unequal relationships at work and at home shaped their chances to use English. Identity, she argued, is multiple, changing and a site of struggle.
Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital, she proposed investment. Learners invest in a language because they expect it to bring them more symbolic and material resources, from education and friendships to money, and with them more social power. Investment is not a personal trait. It is a relationship between a particular set of practices and a learner: who she is and who she hopes to become. As Norton and Kelleen Toohey (2011) note, a highly motivated learner may still have little investment in a classroom whose practices are, for instance, racist, sexist or anti-immigrant. Norton later tied investment to imagined communities, the groups a learner hopes to belong to in future.
Ron Darvin and Norton (2015) built this into a model in which investment sits where identity, capital and ideology meet, designed for learners who move between online and offline worlds. They present investment as a sociological partner to psychological accounts of motivation, not a replacement. For teachers, the question shifts from whether a quiet student is motivated to how invested she is in this classroom’s language practices.
In actionMotivated, but not invested
- T
- Minh, you were very quiet in the café role-play.
- S
- I’ll never order coffee in London. I need English for guests at my hotel in Hội An.
- T
- Then next lesson we’ll do hotel check-ins, and you can be our expert on what guests really ask.
- S
- OK! They always ask about the night market.
Minh’s silence says little about his motivation; the task ignored his imagined community. Redesigning it, and positioning him as an expert, changes his investment.
In the classroom
- 1
Ask learners which communities they hope to join through English, such as a workplace, a university or an online fandom, then build at least one task per unit around those imagined communities.
- 2
When a learner goes quiet, examine the practice before the learner: who is positioned as the expert, and whose accents are treated as the only legitimate model?
- 3
Let learners plan and draft using their whole linguistic repertoire, so that the languages and knowledge they already have count as capital rather than deficit.
Myth and reality
Investment is just a newer word for motivation.
Motivation is usually framed as a psychological property of the learner; investment is sociological, describing a learner’s relationship to particular practices and power relations. The same learner can be motivated yet uninvested. Investment complements, not replaces, constructs such as willingness to communicate.
Reflect
Which of your quietest students might be highly motivated but uninvested in the way your classroom does English, and what in your own practices might explain it?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Bonny Norton Peirce introduced investment in this 1995 article, drawing on Bourdieu and on feminist poststructuralist accounts of identity such as Weedon’s. She has since published as Bonny Norton, and extended the idea with Ron Darvin.
Norton Peirce, B. (1995). Social identity, investment, and language learning. TESOL Quarterly, 29(1), 9–31.
Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of investment in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 35, 36–56.
The updated model: investment at the intersection of identity, capital and ideology, with case studies from rural Uganda and urban Canada.
Darvin, R., & Norton, B. (2023). Investment and motivation in language learning: What’s the difference?. Language Teaching, 56(1), 29–40.
Answers the question teachers ask most often: how investment and motivation differ, and how the two lenses can work together.
Norton, B., & Toohey, K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change. Language Teaching, 44(4), 412–446.
A state-of-the-art review of identity research in language learning, including investment and imagined communities.
Norton, B. (2013). Identity and language learning: Extending the conversation (2nd ed.). Multilingual Matters.
The full book-length study of immigrant women’s language learning in Canada that grounds the theory; this second edition adds an afterword by Claire Kramsch.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- Willingness to Communicatenot yet writtenA psychological account of why learners speak or stay silent; investment adds power and identity.
- Native-Speakerismnot yet writtenIdeologies about who owns English shape whose investment a classroom rewards.
- Communicative CompetenceInvestment asks who gets the chance to develop and use that competence.
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