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Guangxiang Leon Liu

Southeast University, China

 

Yue Zhang

The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

 

Mark Feng Teng

Macao Polytechnic University, Macau SAR, China

 

When Bonny Norton (1995) first introduced the notion of investment in TESOL Quarterly, she shifted the field’s understanding of why learners engage in language and literacy practices. Rejecting the narrow psychological framing of motivation, Norton proposed investment to capture how language learners, as social beings with complex and historically situated identities, participate in language and literacy practices when they perceive such engagement with the target language as a pathway to expanding their symbolic and material resources. Through investment, learners seek to accumulate forms of capital and claim legitimacy as a language learner or speaker, yet their degree of investment depends on how power operates within particular contexts and on whether they are granted or denied the right to speak (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Norton, 2013).

Two decades later, Darvin and Norton (2015) revisited this notion in light of globalization and digitalization. Observing how time–space compression, technological connectivity, and privatized forms of isolation were reshaping people’s lives, they extended the theory by locating investment at the intersection of identity, capital, and ideology. From a poststructuralist perspective that contests fixed identity binaries such as male/female or motivated/unmotivated, identity was understood as multiple, fluid, and continually negotiated (Norton, 2013). Drawing on Bourdieu (1991), Darvin and Norton emphasized capital as power manifesting in economic (“what one has”), cultural (“what one knows”), and social (“who one knows”) forms, or resources that learners mobilize to assert legitimacy across social spaces. The third construct, ideology, highlights how power operates invisibly through dominant beliefs and norms that shape access, inclusion, and exclusion in language learning (Darvin & Norton, 2016, 2023). In an era of intensified global mobility and digital mediation, individuals must constantly negotiate competing ideologies that influence the perceived value of their linguistic and semiotic capital. To be invested in language and literacy practices, learners exercise agency by assembling their linguistic, cultural, and digital resources while claiming legitimate speakership within these ideologically charged spaces (Darvin, 2025b).

During the past decade, the model of investment has inspired a rich body of scholarship across continents, demonstrating its theoretical versatility and empirical depth. In African contexts, researchers have applied the framework to examine how teachers and learners navigate postcolonial language hierarchies, ranging from the African Storybook digital literacy project in rural Uganda (StrangerJohannessen & Norton, 2019) to the revitalization of indigenous languages in post-apartheid South Africa (James, 2022). Across Asia, the model has proven equally productive. It has been applied to unpack critical digital literacies of learners in the context of emerging technologies (Liu, 2023; Liu et al., 2025), heritage-language teacher identity and agency in Bangladesh (Afreen & Norton, 2022), the empowerment of English learners from rural China (Liu, 2025; Liu & Darvin, 2024), and Englishteacher identity formation (Zhang, 2024; Zhang & Huang, 2024; Zhang & Darvin, 2025). Other studies from Hong Kong illustrate how learners and educators engage in decolonial practices through YouTube production and critical pedagogy (Darvin & Zhang, 2023; Zhang & Gonzales, 2024). In Europe, the model has guided research on immigrant learners’ investments in both majority and heritage language maintenance (Iikkanen, 2022), while studies in North America (Crowther, 2020) and Australia (Gilanyi, 2019) have shown how transnational students draw on multilingual repertoires to negotiate belonging in everyday literacy practices.

This worldwide engagement affirms the model’s strength as a heuristic for understanding how language learning is always situated within relations of power, identity, and ideology. It has encouraged educators to move beyond psychological explanations of effort or motivation toward more critical inquiries into how structural inequalities and symbolic hierarchies condition learners’ access to resources and decision to participate in learning as social practice. Moreover, it has provided practitioners and policymakers with insights for designing inclusive pedagogies that recognize learners’ diverse identities, validate their voices, and challenge deficit ideological discourses.

At the same time, the past decade has witnessed rapid sociotechnical and geopolitical shifts that invite renewed theorization. The proliferation of digital media and artificiciall intelligence (AI) technologies has openend up new contexts where language, literacy, and meaning intertwine with each other in a complicated manner (Soyoof et al., 2025). Such a reality invites researchers to not only examine the nexus of capital and identity in neoliberal discourses but also to disclose the emergent ideologies embedded in platforms and algorithms. Questions of intersectionality have also come to the fore: gender, class, ethnicity, and migration intersect to shape the contours of learners’ investments in different settings. Methodologically, the study of investment has diversified from ethnographic and narrative traditions to multimodal discourse analysis and longitudinal case studies, capturing how agency and identity evolve across time and space (Darvin, 2025a).

These developments showcase that the model of investment is not a static theoretical artifact but a living framework that continues to adapt to the changing conditions of language learning and teaching as well as professional communication. It enables us to see learners not merely as recipients of instruction but as socially positioned agents navigating unequal worlds of power and possibility. As we mark its tenth anniversary, we celebrate how Darvin and Norton’s model has expanded the conceptual boundaries of language, power, and identity, while offering enduring guidance for those committed to equity and transformation in TESOL and beyond.

This special issue features nine articles that mark a vibrant decade of theoretical expansion and empirical innovation inspired by the model of investment. The contributions span a wide spectrum of contexts and concerns, reflecting the dynamic ways in which identity, capital, and ideology continue to shape language learning and teaching in the third decade of the twenty-first century. Several articles explore how generative AI and digital technologies reshape teachers’ and learners’ professional practices, while others examine how social class, gender, and ideology intersect to influence learners’ right to speak and be heard as legitimate English speakers. The issue also foregrounds translanguaging and decolonial practices as powerful means of fostering agency and equity in multilingual classrooms, alongside studies that highlight professional development, informal digital learning, and researchers’ autoethnographical reflections within diverse TESOL communities. Together, these works attest to the enduring relevance of the model of investment while envisioning new possibilities for theorizing identity and power in an increasingly complex and ever-changing world.