The participation of the individual in different discursive practices contributes to the social formation of identity which is not only constituted, but also, fractalized and emerged via discourse. Taking the concept of polyphony, proposed by Bakhtin (1981, 1986), this work intends to discuss the social formation of the self and the emergence of multiple identities through the perspective of Complexity Theory. Borrowing the concepts of attractors, bifurcation points and fractals from Chaos Theory, and relating them to identity issues, this paper shows how the acknowledgement of identity as a complex/chaotic system can be useful to a deeper understanding of the language acquisition process. Some narratives of AMFALE project are used in order to exemplify the theoretical issues proposed.
Identity; complexity; chaos; language learning