Issues in Applied Linguistics

The article focuses on the relationship between languages and selves in adult bicultural bilinguals who learned their second language (L2) post puberty and became writers and scholars in this language. Their autobiographic narratives are used to identify and examine subsequent stages of second language learning (SLL) and the authors' current positioning. On the basis of this novel source of data an argument is presented for new metaphors of SLL, new approaches to SLL, and for the existence—in some cases—of two stages of SLL: a stage of losses and a stage of gains, with specific substages within.