Investigating processes underlying identity formation of two L2 master’s students’ in UK HE: insiders or outsiders?

In this chapter I deploy the outsider/insider concept as a heuristic for investigating the processes underlying the identity formation of two second language master’s (MA) students on different courses in anglophone academia. To this end, I adopt Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical ‘frontstage, backstage’ metaphor as an analytical lens. Viewing each course as a ‘community of practice’ (Lave & Wenger, 1991), in which practices, underpinned by discourses, reflect values and interests of participants, I present data extracted from a 13-month ethnographic study which focused on the experience of second language students in their social learning spaces both ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’. In line with Pavlenko and Blackledge’s (2004) poststructuralist view of identities, I apply a socio-historical perspective to examine how the participants’ experiences contribute to the formation of both insider and outsider identities during the course of their master’s programmes