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For the past 10 years, I have taught a graduate course at the University of British Columbia, called ‘Language, Discourse, and Identity’, which has given me the opportunity to remain connected to the burgeoning literature on language and identity in the field of language education. However, given the immense wealth of this literature, which includes an entire journal devoted to the topic (the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education), this chapter, like my course, is selective in orientation. To achieve some balance between depth and breadth, I include some of the classic literature in the area, while making space for new voices and emerging themes. I begin by defining key terms, and then outline what I see as some of the primary goals of this area of research. As a starting point, and with a view to defining key terms, it is useful to consider why I include the term discourse in the title of my graduate course. In order to …