An extension of interest in identity and investment concerns the imagined communities that language learners may aspire to join when they learn a new language. The term “imagined community”, originally coined by Benedict Anderson (1991), was introduced to the language learning community by Norton (2001), who argued that in many language classrooms, the targeted community may be, to some extent, a reconstruction of past communities and historically constituted relationships, but also a community of the imagination, a desired community that offers possibilities for an enhanced range of identity options in the future. These innovative ideas, inspired also by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), are more fully developed in Kanno and Norton (2003), and Pavlenko and Norton (2007), and have proved generative in diverse research sites.[20][21][22][23] An imagined community assumes an imagined identity, and a learner’s investment in the second language can be understood within this context.