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For Norton, identity signifies “how people understand their relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space, and how people understand their possibilities for the future” (Norton 1997: 410), which matches roughly Kramsch’s definition of culture as “membership in a discourse community that shares a common social space and history, and common imaginings” (Kramsch 1998: 10), but with the emphasis placed on the individual rather than on the collective. Shifting the emphasis from culture to identity in language teaching dissociates the individual learner from the collective history of the group, it gives people agency and a sense of power by placing their destiny in their own hands. For example, one of the immigrant women studied by Norton was able to draw strength from her identity as a mother to stand up to her landlord in front of her children and counter his image of her as a helpless non-native speaker of English from Czechoslovakia.

Atkinson echoes Norton as he reassesses the notion of culture in TESOL, which, he claims, has been underexamined up to now. In his post-modernist view of culture, he suggests that ‘language (learning and teaching) and culture are mutually implicated, but that ‘culture is multiple and complex’ (Atkinson 1999: 647). He further posits that ‘social group membership and identity are multiple, contradictory, and dynamic’ and that ‘all humans are individuals’, but, he adds, ‘individuality is also cultural.’ Despite some dissenting voices, Atkinson’s view of culture represents the dominant view of many teachers of English around the world, as well as TESOL’s global and multinational ideology. This view is well captured by Shirley Brice Heath:

… all those who would have social science be rid of [culture] agree that researchers can no longer see the concept as viable in a world of volatile, situated, and overlapping social identities. Apprehension about the term is evidenced by… ‘lexical avoidance behavior’ that puts in its place terms such as ‘discourse’, ‘praxis’, or ‘habitus’ (Heath 1997: 113, quoted in Atkinson 2000: 753).

Ultimately, the lesser importance given to culture in the teaching of ESL than in other foreign languages might just be part of an ideology that likes to think of English as a multinational, culture-free language, or lingua franca that speaks all cultures and none in particular, and that can be appropriated and owned by anyone to express their own local meanings. Each person is seen as the intersection of an infinite number of partially overlapping cultures (Atkinson 1999: 637). American pragmatism instinctively resists pigeonholing people according to where they come from and prefers to see alone standing individuals and cultures as “fluid, ever-changing, and nondeterministic”, i.e., unimpeded by their history. This view also reflects a concern not to stereotype individuals and essentialize their national characteristics, for fear that culture might become political. But such an ideology risks mapping onto the rest of the world a culture of geographic and social mobility and of an individual pursuit of happiness that is itself political and quintessentially American.